Chris Taylor had been in the gaming industry for a few years before moving to CaveDog to start working on the game that would secure his name as one of the young guns of the game design scene. Total Annihilation was not a runaway best seller, but it and the two subsequent expansions sold more than a million units. The game developed a strong community with mapmakers and mods that is still thriving today. To many is is arguably the best RTS of all time.

So it is with some anticipation that fans are looking forward to his next RTS. He makes it clear that he is not making Total Annihilation 2 and makes every effort to distance himself from that name. But he is going back to his roots, to a genre he loves. So we cornered him to get more on his next futuristic wargame.



GameSpy: Take us back to the concept phase of Supreme Commander. You always wanted to do a Total Annihilation 2, but that didn't work out. What was the thought behind moving to a "spiritual successor?"
Taylor: As a game designer I have my own view of what I think an RTS is all about. When I sat down to design Supreme Commander, I tried to visualize the experience in fresh and interesting new ways. The first was my realizing that although we call this genre "Real-Time Strategy," it should have been called "Real-Time Tactics" with a dash of strategy thrown in. The goal with Supreme Commander was to really deliver the strategy, by opening up the game to an enormous theatre of war, with some incredible, never-seen-before Super Units, that absolutely require the player to think strategically before attempting to deploy them into the field.
GameSpy: Can you talk about the attempts to get the license from Atari? It must be a bit frustrating to want to do a sequel, but not be able to get the rights.
Taylor: Well, I can speculate on that a bit here, or I can say that the way things worked out were almost perfect. Leaving TA behind forced me to create a new game from scratch, and to move ahead unencumbered. This is what I should have been doing all along.
A troop transport drops some units into the heat of battle.

GameSpy: What do you know about the aborted attempt at TA 2 by Phantagram? Didn't they approach you to help with the project?
Taylor: I really don't know that much about the project that isn't already public. Early on I was contacted by the folks at Phantagram, but we didn't get too deep, we made introductions and lightly dabbled with the notion of working together … things didn't go much further than that.
GameSpy: Enough about the past. Tell us what Supreme Commander brings to the RTS genre. What does it do different or how does it expand on existing RTS fundamentals?
Taylor: As I mentioned above, we wanted to bring strategy into the genre in a big way. In order to do this, we needed to rethink the way the player visualizes the world. The ability to zoom in and out, to any level, made a lot more possible. Our units can be absolutely huge, and can have a huge number of weapon systems, and have crazy new levels of functionality. Fundamentally speaking, we aim to change the definition of RTS games.