Total Annihilation came out when games, and RTS games in particular, were quickly evolving. By the mid-Nineties, PCs were capable of capturing the necessary scale of battles, and online gaming was about to become a phenomenon. And it was that world Total Annihilation creator Chris Taylor was waiting for. We caught up with Chris and asked him about the game’s origins.
Total Annihilation was such an amazing game that kind of seemed to have gotten lost between the much more popular Command & Conquer and Warcraft games of its time. Which is a shame, because it had quite a few revolutionary elements for its time.
I still play TA to this day (yesterday, in fact). It’s available on GOG.
Between it and Civ2 (which requires some hackery to keep running on Win7 64-bit), I’m a content gamer.
Planetary Annihilation: Titans is the currently available version of the game. Well at least the new creation of Chris Taylor.
I’ve played a bit of it, it’s pretty damned good, and runs natively on Linux.
Me too, I recently reinstalled it but not on Windows but on Wine. Works really well!
The OSS successor is the Spring RTS engine, with games like Balanced Annihilation (using a proprietary dataset) or something like ZeroK (using a free dataset).
I unfortunately never got into Total Annihilation, but I’ve had a lot of fun with Balanced Annihilation