Good evening. We're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney.

Joining me today, we have two members of the original Rome Total War development team,

Creative Assemblies, Kevin McDowell, and Guy Davidson.

Obviously, that means today we're going to be talking about Rome Total War in its context

within the series and its legacy in the years since, leading to Total War Rome Remastered, which comes out later this month.

Kevin, Guy, I wanted to talk about the development of Rome Total War.

It was released in early fall 2004, and medieval Total War had just been released two years earlier,

but there's a chasm between the two games

in terms of design, aesthetics, technology. For me, there have been really very few games

where I felt like they were actually at the limit of what is possible when they came out. And Rome

is one of them. Rome is one of those sort of landmark experiences for me. But I'm curious,

how did it feel from the inside of that project?

Can you tell us a bit about where you were in your careers at that moment, what track you were on, and how you approached it?

Yep.

Well, I mean, the first interesting thing to note is that Rome and medieval started a month apart. So I can't remember which one was first, actually. Medieval was first.

Was it? Yeah.

So medieval was the follow on to Shokun 1. It was the Shogun 1 team for the most part working

on that with one or two exceptions

so the Rome team was cobbled together

oh Kevin

it was hanging about

we just finished the rugby game.

...