The First Modern RTS
Pay attention now; you are witnessing history in the making.
Some say the RTS genre began with Dune 2. Others go back to Herzog Zwei, searching for a more basic origin. But it's really a matter of refinement, each game adding something the previous one did not have, until we end up with a paradigm that defined the PC gaming platform. And few others added as much as Total Annihilation did.
3D units and terrain with elevation, line-of-sight, and ballistic artillery. Army-size unit counts. Huge maps. All-aspect, all-terrain warfare. Long range combat. Sensor denial and stealth. Advanced unit selection and order queuing. Streaming resources. A Commander avatar on the battlefield. And the final one-two punch: a stunning Audio CD soundtrack by (then up-and-coming) Jeremy Soule, the John Williams of gaming, that put his name on the map and is still one of the best he ever did. And finally, extensive mod support, with a huge community and a massive library of units, maps, patches and conversions.
Chris Taylor, the designer, would go on to elaborate on these concepts in the definitive modern maximalist RTS, Supreme Commander - arguably a more mature expression of TA's original vision. But the stunning originality of TA is unlikely to be surpassed.
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