Before Total Annihilation, as Edge pointed out, every real-time strategy game drew its units as flat sprites. Cavedog built them out of polygons. Its tanks tilted as they climbed a slope, its aircraft banked into turns, and its artillery shells arced over hills or smacked into the trees on top of them. Edge thought the genre had been stuck in “a stagnant cycle of me-too Red Alert clones” and gave the game nine out of ten; Computer Gaming World called it “the best real-time game so far”. Then Cavedog Entertainment did something else new: it kept adding to the game after it was sold, posting a new unit on its website every week.
Fast facts
- Developer: Cavedog Entertainment, a division of Humongous Entertainment.
- Distributor: GT Interactive.
- Designer: Chris Taylor. Producer: Ron Gilbert.
- Music: Jeremy Soule.
- Released: September 1997, for Windows 95, in English, French and German at once.
- Price: £30 in the UK; $50 in the US.
- Sides: the Arm and the Core, each with around 80 units and buildings.
- Reviews: Edge 9/10; PC Gamer (UK) 94%.
Who made it
Cavedog was the part of Ron Gilbert’s Humongous Entertainment that made games for older players; the rest of Humongous made children’s games such as Putt-Putt. GT Interactive, which had bought Humongous in 1996, distributed its games. Gilbert produced Total Annihilation, and Chris Taylor designed it. Computer Gaming World later called Taylor the game’s “manic designer”.
The game shipped in September 1997 in 14 countries and three languages at once, English, French and German, on the strength of GT’s distribution; Italian, Spanish and Japanese versions followed. Its music was an orchestral score by Jeremy Soule. In 2001 Computer Gaming World wrote that Soule had not only composed the music but “scored it for a full orchestra of more than 100 musicians and conducted it himself”.
The Arm and the Core
The war had lasted 4,000 years, Edge explained. It began when people learned to transfer their minds into robot bodies, which split humanity between those who refused to give up their bodies and those who rushed to change. By the time the game begins both civilisations are nearly destroyed and their planets are wastelands, but the Arm and the Core fight on.
Each side starts with a Commander. Computer Gaming World described it as “your alter ego”, a powerful robot built around a matter/energy converter, which could build a base from raw materials and fight with “a powerful disintegration gun”. If the enemy destroyed it, the game was over. The economy ran on two resources, metal and energy. Players put mines on metal deposits and built solar collectors, and CGW’s tips advised building an energy storage bin early to bank the surplus: the aim was “a trickle of power and metal coming in” before the first factory went up, for walking robots called Kbots or for vehicles.
Terrain that mattered
Other games had put hills on their maps, and Dark Reign, released the same autumn, had 3D terrain and lines of sight. Edge thought Total Annihilation used the idea “in a far superior fashion”. Slopes slowed units or stopped them, cliffs blocked all but the most agile, ridges cut lines of sight, and units on high ground saw and fired further. Rivers and seas, of water or lava, slowed or blocked ground forces, and forests stopped tanks while letting smaller robots weave through. Stray rounds burst on the ground or splashed in water, and trees caught fire and burned. CGW’s reviewer Martin Cirulis found that weapons were modelled “in true 3D as well”: when an artillery shot hit a treetop instead of clearing the hill, he wrote, “you’ll know the real world is uncomfortably close”. Ships left wakes and sank, and bombers had to swing wide to line up an attack run.
Edge liked the balance of the units as much as the landscape. No small set of super-units made the rest obsolete; short-range flamethrowers and lasers dealt with fast, close enemies, while slow shells arced over obstacles and missiles tracked their targets. It was, Edge said, “the first realtime game that not only encourages combined forces, but makes them a key to success.”
A game that kept growing
Cavedog had built the game to take new units easily. In late October 1997 it announced that it would post one new unit a week on its website, starting on 14 November with an anti-aircraft gun. CGW saw this as “the departure from the static computer game”, though it warned that some new units would be “less than inspired” and might upset the balance of multiplayer games. By January 1998 PC Gamer reported that Cavedog’s site was, by Hot100’s traffic figures, the most popular computer game company site on the internet, ahead of Electronic Arts and Sierra. “We enthusiastically embrace our fans,” said John Uppendahl, Cavedog’s director of communications. Two add-on discs followed in 1998, The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics.
Reviews and sales
Edge gave the game nine out of ten in December 1997 and called it “by far the most playable, challenging… and plain enjoyable realtime game so far”. PC Gamer in the UK gave it 94% and made it its game of the month. Computer Gaming World’s January 1998 review, headlined “Cavedog Takes You Where No Real-time Game Has Gone Before”, praised the “truly useful 3D engine” and the huge battlefields, and complained about thin documentation, a few bugs, no map editor, and Cavedog’s “cheap and tawdry” attempt to sell its strategy guide to make up for the manual. Cavedog’s advertisements later quoted a PC Gamer “Strategy Game of the Year” award and a GameSpot “Game of the Year”.
Sales were another matter. Cavedog announced 250,000 copies shipped worldwide by late October 1997. But in the United States, according to the retail tracker PC Data, it sold 83,900 copies by the end of 1997, against more than 178,000 for Microsoft’s Age of Empires, which came out a month later. Ron Gilbert looked back in 2002: Total Annihilation “was a huge critical hit, but a very disappointing selling product.”
After Total Annihilation
Chris Taylor left in 1998 to start his own company, Gas Powered Games, while the Cavedog team moved the game to a fantasy world as Total Annihilation: Kingdoms (1999), which, Edge later wrote, was “rather less” lauded by critics. Cavedog then stopped work on its other games. “Cavedog was not really closed in the traditional sense,” Gilbert told Edge: Humongous “just stopped working on two games”.
Taylor’s Gas Powered Games made the role-playing game Dungeon Siege and then returned to the genre with Supreme Commander (2007), which Edge called “a return to genius” for anyone who had played Total Annihilation. In 2012 another team of the game’s veterans, Uber Entertainment, raised money on Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation, which fought its battles across whole solar systems.
Sources
- Edge issue 52, December 1997, Testscreen: Total Annihilation review, nine out of ten (the story, the 3D units and terrain, the 80 units and buildings per side, the weapons, £30, GT Interactive and Cavedog).
- Computer Gaming World issue 162, January 1998: Martin E. Cirulis, “Annihilating the Competition” (review; the Commander, the terrain and weapons, the weekly units, the manual and strategy guide, $50, system requirements).
- Computer Gaming World issue 163, February 1998: “Gamer’s Edge” strategy guide (metal and energy, energy storage, Kbots).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 53, February 1998: Cavedog advertisement (“PC Gamer. Game of the month. 94%”; created and published by Cavedog, a division of Humongous Entertainment, distributed by GT Interactive) and the magazine’s list of recommended games (“PCG 48, 94%”).
- PC Zone issue 55, October 1997: Cavedog advertisement (“true 3D terrain and run-time generated 3D units”; “Download new reinforcements from the web”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 166, May 1998: Cavedog advertisement quoting GameSpot’s “Game of the Year” and PC Gamer’s “Strategy Game of the Year”.
- Computer Gaming World issue 172, November 1998: Total Annihilation: Kingdoms preview (Chris Taylor leaving to start Gas Powered Games).
- Edge issue 63, October 1998: Trip Hawkins interview (Chris Taylor leaving Humongous).
- PC Gamer (UK) issue 63, December 1998: The Core Contingency and Battle Tactics on sale.
- Computer Gaming World issue 202, May 2001: Alex Handy on Jeremy Soule (the Total Annihilation score).
- Computer Gaming World issue 182, September 1999: Total Annihilation: Kingdoms review.
- Edge issue 118, Christmas 2002, p. 66: Ron Gilbert on Cavedog, Kingdoms and Total Annihilation’s sales.
- PC Zone issue 89, May 2000: Chris Taylor’s Gas Powered Games and Dungeon Siege.
- Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006: Supreme Commander.
- Edge issue 246, November 2012, and issue 253, May 2013: Planetary Annihilation and Uber Entertainment’s Kickstarter of September 2012.
- PC Gamer US news, “Worldwide Push for Total Annihilation”, week of 27 October 1997 (web, secondary): 250,000 copies shipped; three languages and 14 countries; one new unit a week from 14 November. https://web.archive.org/web/19980218070428/http://www.pcgamer.com/news/news-1997-10-27.html
- PC Gamer US news, 22 and 23 January 1998 (web, secondary): “Retail Strategy Games” (PC Data’s US sales to the end of 1997) and “Cavedog’s Booming Web Site” (Hot100’s ranking; John Uppendahl). https://web.archive.org/web/19980218070317/http://www.pcgamer.com/news/news-1998-01-19.html
- For Humongous Entertainment, GT Interactive’s purchase of it and Ron Gilbert’s role, see the Ron Gilbert entry and its sources.