We were pushing the boundaries in as many areas as we could, and when we stopped, we just picked that up where we left off with Supreme Commander. “There was a lot of stuff packed into the game. So, if you follow the design logic and say that if the Commander dies, the game is over, then the Commander needs to be powerful.” Placing a metaphorical king onto the field of battle came with some unintended consequences, though. Although, one could argue that it really didn’t accomplish that, per se, but it did give the player a sense of, ‘hey, don’t mess with my Commander, or there will be trouble!’ It makes the game more personal. I imagine I wrote something like this in the design, ‘The player needs to feel like they are part of the game, and the Commander accomplishes that.’ I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. “But besides needing a king on the board for the enemy to focus on, the player needed an avatar, a place to feel like they are connected to the game experience. “I always believed that RTS was a true strategy game, and having played a bunch of chess, I felt there was a place to insert some of that,” he says. Chris remembers the inspiration for it clearly. Then there was the introduction of the Commander, a central, all-important unit to the battlefield that was a big hit at the time. Indeed, Total Annihilation was considered revolutionary in many ways, like its excellent AI, new grouping techniques and the scale of the battles. Anyhow, it’s a lot of factors that all lead up to a moment where you have an idea for a game.” And what’s kind of crazy is that I developed a lot of these while working on baseball games like Hardball II and Triple Play Baseball. I had developed many techniques for sort of ‘tricking’ the computer into making it look 3D and saving a lot of calculations.

“For example, I was always a very big proponent of doing things in true 3D, but the computers just couldn’t handle it.

“It evolved from a bunch of experiences that I had while developing games for most of my childhood, but there was a moment, while I was playing the original Command & Conquer where I saw many of the ideas coalesce,” Chris says. We caught up with Chris and asked him about the game's origins. And it was that world Total Annihilation creator Chris Taylor was waiting for. By the mid-Nineties, PCs were capable of capturing the necessary scale of battles, and online gaming was about to become a phenomenon. Total Annihilation came out when games, and RTS games in particular, were quickly evolving.

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