Total Annihilation

Total Annihilation is a real-time strategy game developed by Cavedog Entertainment and published by Humongous Entertainment, released on September 27, 1997, for Windows. It was designed by Chris Taylor, and was Cavedog's first and only game series.

Cavedog Entertainment was founded in 1995 by Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day as a sister label to Humongous Entertainment, created specifically to develop more mature titles. Ron Gilbert is best known as the creator of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island — so it's a surprising but fascinating piece of gaming history that the same person who gave us Guybrush Threepwood also co-founded the studio behind one of the most ambitious RTS games ever made. After the release of Total Annihilation's first expansion, Chris Taylor left Cavedog to set up his own company, Gas Powered Games, where he would later revisit the concept with Supreme Commander in 2007.

The game is set in a distant future where two factions — the Arm and the Core — are locked in a galaxy-spanning war. The Core uploaded human consciousness into machines; the Arm refused. The result is an endless conflict fought entirely by robots and machines, which gave the designers the freedom to create hundreds of units without worrying about historical or biological constraints.

Total Annihilation arrived in a golden year for the RTS genre, sharing 1997 with Age of Empires and competing directly with Command & Conquer: Red Alert, which had come out the year before. What set it apart was its ambition. While most RTS games of the era used flat, tile-based maps with 2D sprites, Total Annihilation used true 3D terrain with elevation, slopes, and genuine line-of-sight calculations. Units fired projectiles that travelled in real arcs and were affected by gravity — a technical achievement that made battles feel more physical and convincing than anything else available at the time.

The scale of battles was also unprecedented. Where Starcraft or Warcraft II typically involved dozens of units, Total Annihilation could handle hundreds on screen simultaneously, with land, sea, and air combat all taking place at once. Resource management was streamlined compared to competitors — metal and energy were collected continuously rather than in discrete chunks, keeping the focus on combat and construction rather than micromanagement.

One of the most memorable design decisions was the Commander unit. Every player begins with a single powerful Commander — a walking factory that can build structures and fight in combat. If your Commander dies, the game is over. Chris Taylor drew inspiration from chess, wanting to give players a personal connection to the battlefield and a king-like figure for the enemy to focus on. It made matches feel more personal and tense, though it also led to the famous community exploit known as "Command Napping" — using air transporters to kidnap the enemy Commander and fly it to the edge of the map, rendering it useless.

The game received near-perfect reviews and sold almost 500,000 copies in its first four to five months. It was followed by two expansion packs: The Core Contingency, which added 75 new units, and Battle Tactics, a scenario-based expansion. You can buy Total Annihilation and both its expansion packs for just 4.99 EUR on GOG.