Cavedog was a games studio that grew out of a company making children’s adventures. Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day had founded Humongous Entertainment in 1992 to make games such as Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish, and in 1995 they set up Cavedog alongside it for older players. Its first game, Chris Taylor’s Total Annihilation (1997), built its armies from 3D polygons on hills that changed how they moved and fought, and reviewers called it the best real-time strategy game yet. Cavedog then kept adding to it, posting a new unit on its website every week. Five years after it began, its other games had been cancelled and the studio was folded back into Humongous.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1995, by Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day, as a division of Humongous Entertainment.
- Location: Woodinville, Washington, moving to new offices in Bothell in 1998.
- Owner: GT Interactive, which bought Humongous in 1996; Infogrames bought most of GT Interactive at the end of 1999.
- Games: Total Annihilation (1997); its expansions The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics (1998); Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (1999).
- Cancelled: Amen: The Awakening, Elysium and Gilbert’s Good & Evil.
Total Annihilation
Edge, which visited in 1998 as the first European magazine to be let into the studio, traced Cavedog’s start to Chris Taylor arriving “with blueprints for the game back in 1995”. Taylor designed Total Annihilation and Gilbert produced it. GT Interactive, which had bought Humongous in 1996 for about $76 million, distributed it in September 1997, in English, French and German at once.
The game’s reviews were outstanding and its sales were not. Edge gave it nine out of ten and PC Gamer 94%, but in the United States it sold 83,900 copies by the end of 1997, against more than 178,000 for Microsoft’s Age of Empires. Gilbert later called it “a huge critical hit, but a very disappointing selling product”. Cavedog made up some of the difference with its website. It posted a new unit for the game every week from November 1997, and by early 1998 Edge reported that cavedog.com was around the thirtieth most popular site on the internet and the third most popular games site.
The first expansion, The Core Contingency, added 75 new units, “as many as most games include to start with”, in Edge’s words: hovercraft, seaplanes, spies and minelayers among them. It also raised the limit on units per side to 250, a limit players with fast PCs could remove altogether. A second add-on, Battle Tactics, followed in 1998.
Five projects at once
Gilbert did not want a large publisher. “The goal for Cavedog is not to become a massive publisher producing 50 titles a year,” he told Edge. “We’re looking to have maybe five high-quality projects in the works.” In mid-1998 those were Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, a fantasy sequel; Amen: The Awakening, a first-person game set in a near future where, Edge was told, players might make progress without killing anyone; Elysium, a role-playing game promising 200 hours of play; and Good & Evil, Gilbert’s own first game since Monkey Island 2, a real-time strategy game with adventure and role-playing elements.
The studio had already lost the designer of its one hit. Taylor left in March 1998 and founded Gas Powered Games. Kingdoms came out in 1999 without him, with magic in place of the robots and four sides instead of two, and Edge later recalled that critics praised it “rather less” than the first game.
Folded back into Humongous
In February 2000 Edge reported that Cavedog had cancelled Amen, choosing to concentrate on games “within existing brands such as Total Annihilation”. By May Computer Gaming World’s gossip column reported that Elysium had been cancelled too, that Good & Evil was on indefinite hold, and that Cavedog had been “assimilated back into Humongous”. None of the three was released. Gilbert told Edge in 2002 that Cavedog “was not really closed in the traditional sense”: it had shared people and resources with Humongous, “so when we stopped a couple of Cavedog projects it wasn’t like we ‘closed’ anything. We just stopped working on two games and went on with all the stuff we were doing with HE.”
Later history
Total Annihilation’s ideas outlived the studio. Taylor’s Gas Powered Games returned to the genre with Supreme Commander (2007), and in 2012 Uber Entertainment, another team of the game’s veterans, funded Planetary Annihilation on Kickstarter. The rights passed with GT Interactive to Infogrames, which renamed itself Atari in 2003. When Atari’s American company went through bankruptcy in 2013, the Total Annihilation rights were sold at auction to Wargaming, the company behind World of Tanks, which had already bought Gas Powered Games.
Sources
- Edge issue 59, June 1998, pp. 48–51, “In the dog house”: studio visit (Woodinville and the move to Bothell; Chris Taylor’s blueprints in 1995; the website’s ranking; The Core Contingency’s 75 units and the 250-unit limit; Taylor’s departure in March 1998; Gilbert’s “five high-quality projects”; Kingdoms, Amen, Elysium and Good & Evil).
- PC Zone issue 76, May 1999, pp. 44–45: Total Annihilation: Kingdoms preview (Cavedog formed in 1995 by Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day; release due in July).
- Edge issue 81, February 2000, p. 10: news, Amen cancelled.
- Computer Gaming World issue 190, May 2000, p. 44: gossip column (Amen and Elysium cancelled, Good & Evil on hold, Cavedog back inside Humongous).
- Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002: Ron Gilbert on Cavedog, Kingdoms and Total Annihilation’s sales.
- For the release, reviews, sales figures, the weekly units and Uber Entertainment, see the Total Annihilation entry and its sources; for Humongous, Shelley Day and GT Interactive’s purchase in 1996 (Computer Gaming World issue 146, September 1996), see the Ron Gilbert entry; for Infogrames’ purchase of GT Interactive, see the Infogrames entry.
- Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006: Supreme Commander.
- “Atari auctioning off assets to Wargaming and Stardock Entertainment”, Game Informer, 21 July 2013 (web, secondary): Total Annihilation to Wargaming in Atari’s bankruptcy sale. https://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/07/21/atari-auctioning-off-assets-to-wargaming-and-stardock-entertainment
- “Wargaming buys Total Annihilation and Master of Orion from Atari”, bit-tech, July 2013 (web, secondary): the sale and Wargaming’s earlier purchase of Gas Powered Games. https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/wargaming-buys-total-annihilation-and-maste/1/