Forthcoming Tom Clancy strategy title EndWar may be positioning itself as the game that will revolutionise the console RTS genre, but that doesn't mean that it's a game that hasn't taken significant cues from what's gone before. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Festival, Ubisoft's Shanghai Studio content director Julien Gerighty spoke candidly about the voice-controlled strategy game's inspirations, citing some rather unexpected influences in the process.

Of these, the most striking revelation was the link drawn between the see-sawing battles of EndWar and the wacky races of Nintendo's Mario Kart, with Gerighty specifically comparing MK's famous homing red shells to EndWar's rather less cuddly nuclear bombs. To Gerighty's mind, the Mario Kart dynamic was "a huge inspiration...the WMD happens when you're starting to lose. You've got something called DefCon One, and DefCon One is the last five minutes of the game, which is the last lap of Mario Kart, when the guy who's in second place gets the red shell. The Red Shell concept here is giving the guy who's losing a WMD because of the ability to spike him up. Those two things can turn the tide of war. So you've got this tug of war at the end of the game, which is really, really fun."

Old-school Sega fans would have been pleased to hear Gerighty namechecking Herzog Zwei, describing the cult Mega Drive title as "THE game that kicked off strategy gaming in general" and stating Ubisoft's intent to make EndWar "this generation's Herzog Zwei".

Gerighty also cited the "gorgeous" Advance Wars, lauding the "simplicity of the units and combat chain" and the "complexity and depth of the gameplay situations" as major inspirations; less subtly, he pointed to Knights of the Old Republic developers Bioware as "one of our heroes", before stating that EndWar had "stolen" that game's idea of a low-slung camera for increased immersion. Not that this was the only inspiration for the camera system, however; in another left-field reference, Gerighty compared EndWar's viewpoint to that of Madden, which he claimed is "at its heart a strategy game...you have a battlefield, the pitch."

Nevertheless, one area from which EndWar seemingly won't be drawing inspiration is the current breed of console RTS games. Lamenting the current state of 360 and PS3 strategy games, Gerighty described market leaders Command & Conquer 3 and The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth as "great PC games, but fundamentally they're not suited to consoles; they weren't built with consoles in mind", stating that "if you enjoyed those, this one's gonna blow you away."

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