The Creative Assembly Limited (trade name: Creative Assembly) is a British video game developer based in Horsham, founded in 1987 by Tim Ansell. In its early years, the company worked on porting games to MS-DOS from Amiga and ZX Spectrum platforms, later working with Electronic Arts to produce a variety of games under the EA Sports brand. In 1999, the company had sufficient resources to attempt a new and original project, proceeding to develop the strategy computer game Shogun: Total War which was a critical and commercial hit, and is regarded as a benchmark strategy game. Subsequent titles in the Total War series built on the success of Shogun: Total War, increasing the company's critical and commercial success.
In March 2005, Creative Assembly was acquired by Sega and became part of Sega Europe.[2] An Australian branch was operated from Fortitude Valley, Queensland as Sega Studios Australia. Under Sega, further Total War titles were developed, and Creative Assembly entered the console market with action-adventure games such as Spartan: Total Warrior, Viking: Battle for Asgard and Alien: Isolation.