Shogun: Total War - Development

Development

Shogun: Total War was announced in early 1999, developed by the Creative Assembly under Electronic Arts. The Creative Assembly had previously been involved with Electronic Arts, producing games for the EA Sports brand. Development was led by Michael Simpson, a former microchip designer who had joined the company three years prior. According to Simpson, Shogun was conceived when the Creative Assembly established a secondary development team from their EA Sports designers to develop an alternate, low business risk product for the company. At the time, Command & Conquer had risen to success, inspiring the creation of a number of similar real-time strategy games. Simpson's development team therefore initially planned to create a "B-title RTS game".

As development progressed, 3dfx video cards began to proliferate amongst consumers, leading the Creative Assembly to move the game from 2D to 3D computer graphics. Initially sceptical of the results of using 3D graphics, Simpson was surprised when a 3D rendered landscape turned out to be feasible for gameplay. From this point, the game began to turn away from being a simple low risk product to something more substantial; the camera view was moved from the traditional real-time strategy top-down perspective to the position of the general on the battlefield. As this limited the extent to which the player could see across the battlefield, this fundamentally changed the nature of the gameplay. To accompany this, the game took on a more historical approach for its units and tactics.

However, the game was not considered to be substantive enough simply with the real-time battles; Simpson recalls that "the problem that the battles themselves were very short, and we needed something to tie it together and make people care about the battles". The result was the introduction of the campaign map, intended to provide the player with a broader strategic perspective and context for the battles. A feudal Japanese setting was chosen; in addition to being thought of as "cool", the Sengoku period was selected as it allowed for several different factions who could have potentially won the conflict, and due to the introduction of gunpowder to Japan, also allowed for rapid change for the game's technology tree.

To attempt to make the setting as authentic as possible, the Creative Assembly enlisted the aid of Stephen Turnbull, a military historian who specialises with samurai warfare, although the jidaigeki films by Akira Kurosawa also provided a source of inspiration - excerpts of the famous Mt. Fuji castle scene from his 1985 film Ran even feature in the opening credits to the Warlord edition of the game. Elements of Sun Tzu's The Art of War were integrated into the game's artificial intelligence to provide more authentic decisions by computer-controlled factions in the real-time aspects of the game. The game was showcased at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in both 1999 and 2000, where it garnered interest amongst the video game media. A demonstration was released in January 2000, and the game was published on 13 June 2000.