TaleWorlds Entertainment is the studio behind Mount & Blade, the series that turned medieval warfare into an open sandbox where you earn every title, soldier and castle yourself. The company was founded in Ankara, Türkiye, by Armağan Yavuz and İpek Yavuz, and it grew out of one very personal project. Early builds of the first Mount & Blade were sold directly to players from the studio's own website, so the community paid for development and gave feedback on it years before early access became a standard model on Steam. Paradox Interactive published the finished game in 2008 and brought a much wider audience to Calradia, a continent of rival kingdoms where you start as a nobody with basic gear and climb through tournaments, trade, mercenary contracts and service to a lord until you lead an army of your own. The combat is what made it stand out. The speed of your horse carries into every lance strike and sword swing, attacks and blocks are directional and controlled with the mouse, and in the big field battles you fight in the line alongside your troops instead of directing them from above. That mix of real mounted combat and freeform kingdom politics had very few rivals then, and it still has very few now.
Mount & Blade: Warband followed in 2010 as a standalone release, also published by Paradox. It added online multiplayer, deeper diplomacy, marriage and the option of founding a kingdom of your own, and it became the definitive version of the game and the foundation of one of PC gaming's most productive modding scenes. With Fire & Sword came next in 2011, made with Ukrainian developer Sich Studio. It moved the series to 17th-century Eastern Europe, drew on Henryk Sienkiewicz's novel of the same name, and gave firearms a central place on the battlefield. Outside teams built Warband's two DLCs. Flying Squirrel Entertainment's Napoleonic Wars (2012) turned the game into large multiplayer battles of line infantry, cavalry and artillery. Viking Conquest (2014) came from the team behind the Brytenwalda mod and took players to the Dark Age North Sea with sea travel, naval battles and a full story mode, and it was later reworked as the Reforged Edition. Koch Media, now PLAION, brought Warband to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. The long-awaited prequel Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, set around two centuries before the original, drew a huge audience when it entered early access on Steam in 2020 and reached its full release on PC and consoles in 2022, with the naval expansion War Sails following in 2025. Today TaleWorlds publishes its catalog on Steam itself, and the original trilogy remains the best way to see where the series' horseback combat and rise-from-nothing campaigns began.
