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. Cyber Monday deals: see all the best offers right now!.
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.