The TV show based on Total War was tricking us all along: ‘It’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s television’

It’s taken a long time for TV adaptations of videogames to get, you know, actually good. Now we’ve got The Last of Us, Arcane and Fallout all showing off. Back in 2005, though, we just had Time Commanders.

BBC’s Time Commanders was an exciting prospect for any strategy nerd who could drag themselves away from their wars to watch people fighting them on TV. It used the Rome: Total War engine—back before Creative Assembly flipped the game titles—to create massive battles for contestants to conduct, not from their PCs, but by giving orders and acting like generals.

It was cheesy and slow, but at the time it was incredibly exciting to see a small corner of gaming standing in this prime-time spotlight. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, it was all a big ol’ lie.

“That was developed at a point when Rome was not finished,” Scott Pitkethly, Creative Assembly’s battle architect, tells us. “And I remember being told, ‘Oh, we’ve got this great contract to do this thing. It’s going to be really great for the company.’ Which, you know, it was. But how are we going to make this work? We’re not ready for this!”

Rather than the show taking a PvP approach, contestants fought an AI opponent, playing as Rome against Hannibal’s Carthaginians, for example. But that’s the first lie.

Pitkethly recalls: “Obviously we wanted the AI to play historically—I’m going to go behind the curtain a bit here and ruin it—but there literally were humans that had been told by the historians, ‘This is what Hannibal would have done in this situation,’ moving their troops.”

The AI opponent was actually a human opponent, effectively following a historical script. “So we literally had devs behind the curtain, multiplayer, playing against the contestants,” says game director Pawel Wojs. But that wasn’t the only assistance humans were providing.

“We had to put little cheat codes in,” Pitkethly adds, “because the contestants might make a poor strategic move, or a really good strategic move.” The show’s creators wanted the battles to have a coherent narrative, which would have been harder to do if the battle fell apart in five minutes because the contestants didn’t have a clue what they were doing. “So we had to have all of these cheat codes so we could actually make the game unfold in the way they wanted it.”

Technically, the devs were the only people actually playing the game, since the contestants just stood around arguing and telling other people, sitting in front of a PC, what to do. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” says Pitkethly. “But it’s television.”

Even knowing it was all smoke and mirrors, though, doesn’t taint my fond memories of the original run. It also returned for a three-part special in 2016 with now-cancelled MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace, using Total War: Rome 2 instead, but I think we can throw those episodes in the bin now.

Time Commanders, for all its trickery, really captured the joy of big strategy games, and at the time reinforced my love for them. A young Pawel Wojs had a similar experience.

“I’m at university, and I see Time Commanders on TV. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that looks like Total War. But that’s Rome! Rome: Total War, that’s not released yet, but I’m sure that’s what it is.’ And I remember watching the credits for the first time: ‘Oh, Creative Assembly! It is Rome!'”

The BBC isn’t allowed to advertise products, so unless you knew Creative Assembly and stuck around for the credits, you might not know you were watching something that you’d eventually be able to play yourself. But Wojs knew.

“I waited for that game. Played it to death. And I was studying game development at university, Master’s in Game Art, and I had my final year portfolio up on a website … Most people were doing character-focused stuff. I was all about the worldbuilding. And Creative Assembly reached out to me and invited me down for an interview based on my work.”

Wojs’ first project unfortunately was not Total War, as he ended up on Viking: Battle for Asgard, but then he got to work on Medieval 2. And he stuck around long enough to see that get a sequel, too.

At last night’s 25th anniversary stream, Creative Assembly and Sega announced that Total War: Medieval 3 is in pre-production. It’s “the rebirth of historical Total War,” the studio says.