Chris Taylor, in the process of establishing his own new company, found it almost too hard to believe. “I remember playing it for maybe an hour one afternoon and feeling confident that they hadn’t scratched the same itch that we were trying to scratch.” remembers Taylor with a smile.īy the end of 1998, Total Annihilation had garnered countless high scores and game of the year awards. “We hadn’t realized that there were over 100 different RTS games in development at the same time as ours,” grimaces Taylor, “and I suspect if we’d known how terrible the odds were against us, we might not have bothered!” Fortunately, his vision of a game fundamentally based around real physics, in addition to the other original design implementations, ensured Total Annihilation would never be labelled as “just another RTS game.” Even Activision’s similarly-themed Dark Reign, released just a few months prior to TA, also to positive reviews, failed to dent the team’s confidence. “Jeremy composed two kinds of tracks, a set for battle and a set for building,” he continues, “and we just measured the amount of action on the screen with a simple algorithm and tried not to play the same track twice.” A seemingly simple solution, maybe, but with Soule given the creative freedom to do practically whatever he wanted, the soundtrack to Total Annihilation was destined to become an extremely popular facet of the game.ĭespite the constant patching and bugs (“there were zillions of them!”), Total Annihilation was universally well-received, especially considering the extreme levels of competition.
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When the TA designer met up with fellow Humongous employee and composer Jeremy Soule, they discussed at length how to incorporate this into an epic and exciting experience based around Taylor’s idea that the music should have a grandstanding feel to it, along the lines of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. “We came up with the idea early on of the music changing tempo whenever a battle commenced and created a complex design for how it would work.” recalls Taylor.
The next step would prove to be another ground-breaking one for the genre. He came up with some amazing solutions, buffering the graphics, anti-aliasing and incredible special effects.” Together with Jeff Petkau (shift-clicking interface) and Brian Brown (unit scripting system), and under the guidance of Taylor, the engine slowly began to take shape.
We brought Jon Mavor in as a specialist to handle the rendering as it was such a key part of the game. “Back then we didn’t have 3D hardware, so had to rasterize the 3D using the CPU. I was like, whoa, people are gonna love that!” he grins.Īn inevitable consequence of the ambitious design was that the game’s engine would have to be written from scratch. “I thought we should give the player the ability to use the radar screen to give orders and be able to gather intelligence from the way the blips moved on the screen.” And more superficially, if no less impressive, was the weapon fire rendered onto the radar screen. It gave a strategic advantage to the defender, which I wanted to reflect in TA.” And Taylor was convinced more could be made of the obligatory radar screen that had already become a RTS staple. As for the wreckage, if you watch documentaries on war, it’s a huge aspect with roads and fields littered with tanks and other vehicles, blocking the path of other units. “I was frustrated by the limits and wanted immense over-the-top battles that could enthral the player. “I wanted to create a game where controlling the high ground really mattered,” he explains, “and that if you hid in the shadow of a mountain you could protect yourself from certain kinds of projectiles.” Meantime other design ideas such as a hugely increased unit allowance and the wreckage from destroyed vehicles remaining on the battlefield were borne more from his own experiences in playing RTS games. By the time Taylor began prototyping the engine in the Autumn of 1995, he had already spent considerable effort studying weapon systems and battle tactics, specifically the key strategic element of elevation when employing heavy ordnance.
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