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Meet Chris Taylor
At the age of 14, Chris Taylor's dad bought him his first computer, a TRS-80, which he fondly remembers to this day. The Canadian-born Taylor always had a knack for technology - in high school he won a computer science award - and especially for computer programming. Taylor realized early on that he didn't want to use the PC merely to run applications, but as a tool to create his own software. And that's exactly what he did. By the age of 17, Taylor had his first professional programming assignment: building a database manager for a taxi company, which he followed up by designing a video rental system.
But Taylor, like many programmers saddled with mundane assignments, loved to play games in his spare time. And all the time he was cranking out databases, he dreamed of the day when he'd be designing his own.
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Total Annihilation game designer and project leader Chris Taylor. |
That day was a long time in coming. First, Taylor took a major detour, signing on at a plastic sewer pipe plant, where he spent his days prepping parts and bending pipes. Thankfully, this career came to an end when the foreman of the plant took Taylor to task for overfilling a box of fittings, which had subsequently fallen over and whapped another employee. "I couldn't believe how upset the guy was," remembers Taylor. And so he quit and began scanning the local paper for ads soliciting computer programmers.
He found an ad that promised "$40,000+ for programming C and Assembly." Better yet, the position was at Vancouver's Distinctive Software (now known as Electronic Arts Canada), a respected game design firm best known for its simulations Hardball and Test Drive. As Taylor remembers, "I went in and interviewed for the job, and things went pretty smoothly. They offered me the position and said, 'Congratulations, you're on board at $24,000 a year!'" The bait and switch routine didn't phase Taylor. "Although it wasn't quite as advertised, I was just happy to get my foot in the door of the industry."
"I did three baseball games and I didn't even want to do one. I wanted to make games like Asteroids and Space Invaders - the stuff I played when I was a kid."
- Chris Taylor
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But as soon as he got his first assignment, Taylor must have felt as though he'd stubbed his toe. Among his personal goals was "to never do a sports game. And if you could pick the sport I especially didn't want to do, it was baseball." Sure enough, his first project at Distinctive was to work on Hardball 2. Over the next few years he would work on a bevy of sports games, including the first Triple Play baseball. It was difficult to stomach. "I ended up doing three baseball games and I didn't even want to do one," Taylor recalls. "I wanted to make games like Asteroids and Space Invaders - the stuff I played when I was a kid."
Taylor did eventually get to flex his creative muscle at Distinctive, when his concept for a game called V-Man was given the green light. "Virtual Man was a character who ran around a world collecting RAM chips for power and ROM chips for ability," Taylor recalls with a chuckle. Unfortunately, V-Man was canceled after ten months of development. But the experience was enough to convince Taylor that it was time to stop cranking out baseball sims and to start making games he'd actually want to play.
Next - A Plan to Conquer 
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