It's not as famous as Warcraft or Command & Conquer, but Total Annihilation is arguably better than any other real-time strategy game to date.

Heart and Soule

Though Total Annihilation didn't have much in the way of personality, it did feature one of the greatest computer game soundtracks heard to date--it's an unforgettable orchestral musical score that's superior to just about any game music out there. Composer Jeremy Soule was influenced by none other than Star Wars when crafting Total Annihilation's incredible themes, and he went on to compose music for just about every single game with an orchestral soundtrack that you can think of. Meanwhile, Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor went on to found Gas Powered Games and designed its debut game, Dungeon Siege. Those who've met Taylor consider him an eccentric, but his off-the-wall personality is nowhere to be found in the stoic and serious Total Annihilation.

Few RTS games have so much as dared to offer the sheer breadth of content and depth of gameplay that were featured in Total Annihilation. It's no wonder that the game is still played to this day.

Nearly a year before Blizzard Entertainment rocked the world of real-time strategy with Starcraft, a now-defunct company called Cavedog Entertainment released an RTS that easily deserves a snug resting place among the greatest games of all time: We're talking Total Annihilation. Ironically, the game was much more cerebral than its title, and it took place in a far-flung future in which two military organizations, composed entirely of robots, were pitched in an endless struggle. The Arm and Core factions each featured a lengthy single-player campaign of their own, but Total Annihilation's greatest quality was in its versus-computer skirmish and online multiplayer modes. In fact, in many ways, Total Annihilation remains unsurpassed within the real-time strategy genre.

What was so special about this game? Pretty much everything, actually. For starters, it featured fully 3D units, which didn't look like much in still images but animated with remarkable fluidity and detail. Better yet, the game featured literally hundreds of different types of units, whereas its closest competitors offered merely a couple of dozen, by comparison. Total Annihilation is still one of the only real-time strategy games to offer land, sea, air, and amphibious units all in a single package. Deciding which of these unit classes to concentrate on was a key consideration during gameplay. Total Annihilation also afforded players with a commander unit, an extremely powerful multipurpose character reminiscent of recent real-time strategy games' hero units. The game also contained an innovative resource model, requiring players to harvest both metal and energy in different ways, and the resource model resulted in many tense, pitched battles. Sometimes, only by erecting showstopper units like the Arm's Big Bertha cannon--which could fire devastating artillery shells all the way across the map--could players decisively end a battle.

Total Annihilation was criticized for its lack of personality, given that all its units were faceless tanks and robots, but the game featured an unprecedented degree of depth and graphical detail. It also included multiplayer support for up to 10 players, and the fully customizable multiplayer sessions allowed players to limit themselves to particular units, set different starting conditions, and much more. To top it all off, Cavedog was committed to supporting the game over the long haul and introduced new, downloadable units on a regular basis for quite some time. As a result, Total Annihilation became one of the first computer games whose online community grew to legendary levels of both dedication and sheer size. You can still find players battling away with each other in Total Annihilation to this day.

Though I still felt like I was the new guy at GameSpot back in 1997, I felt that it was my duty to argue in favor of Total Annihilation as our Game of the Year award winner for that year. Sure enough, it beat out the popular favorite, Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, for our top honors, and it also turned out to be quite the sleeper of the season--many gamers expected that Activision's Dark Reign was going to be the next big real-time strategy hit. Yet, with all due respect to Dark Reign, Total Annihilation was the clear winner that year. It's an incredible game that's unrivaled to this day.