Total Annihilation
Super Obsessive Game #4
Type of Game
A constant massacre, unlike anything the universe has ever seen. But don't worry, no one dies except robots.
Release date on our machines
October 1997, a little later than the biggest hit of the summer of 1997, Meet Her at the Love Parade by Da Hool, of course!
Developer
Cavedog Entertainment, and my favorite game designer at the time : Chris Taylor
Publisher
Humongous Entertainment, later eaten by GT Interactive, before resurrecting in 2013.
In the middle of 1998, I was pretty much obsessed with real-time strategy games. Not yet recovered from Command & Conquer, completely obsessed with Age of Empires, and about to be caught up in the Starcraft craze in cybercafés! And there's no end to this sentence, no, no. Not to mention Z, Dark Reign, War Wind... Ooooh! Just thinking about it gives me the same chills as Shenzi when she hears Mufasa's name in The Lion King. But anyway, in 1998, like almost every summer at the time, I spent a week with a guy I met in Dordogne six years earlier, who had since become a friend. Stanley Doritos, that's him. Naive as I was, I thought we would be doing lots of artistic activities or outdoor sessions, as usual. Of course, we'd still be checking out the boobs of the strippers in Duke Nukem 3D, or having semi-fascinating, semi-boring sessions on Blood & Magic. I really enjoyed all that during the summer of '97. But no. We barely set foot outside.
Programme update
No pond exploration, no climbing on haystacks, and not even making up vaguely amusing comic strip stories. No Duke 3D or Blood and Magic either. We hadn't argued or anything. On the contrary, our bond had grown even stronger. So had our obsession with RTS games. We spent almost all our time glued to our stools, our fingers clenched on the keyboard and mouse. A drop of the most concentrated sweat in the world beaded on our foreheads, under the effect of our euphoric stress. I had just had my brain hacked by Total Annihilation. And it wasn't going to let me go for a while.
Upgrade of the fight
Before discovering Total Annihilation, I used to play several games at once, but after that, I didn't touch anything else for months. I didn't even try to resist; I had simply found the formula that suited me best in this type of game. ‘Suited me’ here means ‘made me completely crazy and ecstatic’. Total Annihilation was a game of extremes! It was the first to feature true dynamic 3D everywhere: the units, the terrain, and... well, that's everything! And what units! Titanic robots, tanks as big as oil tankers, cruisers as long as a queue at the social security office, hovercrafts that could crush Florida under their weight, and planes obscuring the sky with their huge wings. Not to mention the defensive gun batteries that made the bases impregnable, perhaps a little too much so. There was everything you could imagine in there, a gargantuan choice of things to build, for epic and almost non-stop combat.
Whereas in classic strategy games you would send out squads of fifteen conscripts, Total Annihilation gave us the ability to unleash an armada of fifty mass-produced war machines on an opponent who was doing the same. We never ran out of resources, because even our smallest metal extractor brought in money continuously. We just built less quickly if production exceeded the output of our ‘mines’. And if we wanted to speed up the pace of a particular project, we could send as many construction robots, planes, vehicles or boats as we wanted to lend a hand. Physics played a role never seen before. Mountains blocked the view (and blocked missiles too), artillery never fired at the same place, unable to aim properly, and vehicles moved with real inertia.
Too many new things at once, even for our insatiable thirst for action as nearly hyperactive teenagers. My brain just overheated. Too bad the PCs of the time also overheated after three minutes of play.
The beginning of each game sets a calm but oppressive atmosphere. On an unknown planet with fabulous landscapes (and there are a bunch of different settings), our Commander—a sort of supreme unit that must not be lost (a feature invented by War Wind, but no one knows that! YES! Let's call it what it is!) – alone against the elements, the base gradually taking shape, an alien centipede made of six polygons staring at us suspiciously... We feel both intrusive and vulnerable. Then, after the first few minutes, it's a whole different story! We're treated to a festival of sound and light featuring lasers, plasma cannons, proton rockets and other gadgets capable of razing entire countries to the ground. Of course, with the graphics and computers of the nineties, finding your way through this maelstrom of fire and steel was a real feat for the player.
Overclocked atmosphere
​At the dawn of the year 2000, Total Annihilation treated us to a mind-blowing vision of a distant future, where machines have eradicated humans, just celebrated Skynet's 38th secular update, and are fighting each other in an interstellar conflict that is set to last until the end of time. Why was that again? The robots themselves have forgotten, but it doesn't matter: Terminator and his dark future can go take a hike. Mission accomplished. Oh yes, each unit has its own little name, I forgot to mention that. Some are very fitting, such as the Hammer robot or the big Bulldog tank. Others make you smile, such as the Blindax (no connection with the Paris metro at rush hour), when they're not completely ridiculous. The Penetrator, for example. Yeah, the developers were daring. Even in English, I imagine the term suggests the same kind of activities as in French.
Synthetic Orchestra
Command & Conquer featured a cocky electro-rock soundtrack, so I expected to send my metal giants into battle to the beat of futuristic techno rhythms at over 180 bpm. But no, Jeremy Soule, the famous composer who has since worked on Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars and other small indie projects of the genre, chose the path of the epic symphony orchestra. Other games had introduced me to classical music soundtracks in the past. First Heroes of Might and Magic II, then Wing Commander IV, which also takes place in a future far removed from our present, with lasers and interstellar travel and everything. Why did the compositions in Total Annihilation struck me as something completely new and revolutionary? Because they fit even better than anywhere else, you bet! Robots still say ‘you bet’ in the 36th century, didn't you know? In Heroes II, the music made me laugh. It annoyed me in Wing Commander IV (sorry George), but here... Ha ha ha! Hey, when are we getting our season tickets for the Royal Opera House, guys? No, I don't just listen to Eurodance from the ice rink! I love classical music! For the last five minutes, okay! But still! A squadron of automatic laser fighters blowing up dozens of superstructures in a concert of cymbals, cellos and oboes? It goes really well together, I swear. The devastating shots from the Repressor cannon echoing a quartet of trombones? It's awesome! Oh, come on! What a great idea! The Total Annihilation soundtrack has that little extra something that changes everything: tracks that start and stop according to the action during a game. This allows us to alternate between placid chants and exhilarating flights, depending on whether we're taking it easy in our base or slaughtering the other side with a thousand nuclear bombs. As in Z before it, and as in the Oddworld games around the same time. There are also those tracks that seem gentle at first, only to dazzle us with their explosive energy later on. Now is the time to listen to one of them, because I feel like I can't speak clearly anymore.
Infinite Evolution
When I got back home after staying with Stanley Doritos, I immediately started saving up to buy the game. Okay, no, I'll tell the truth, even though I'm 45% ashamed. I took the money from the account my father had opened three years earlier to buy Total Annihilation and its two expansions! Originally, this savings account was supposed to help pay for my driving licence or my studies. But, you know, priorities and all that... Anyway, I finished that good old RTS, and its two expansions too; then I finished it again and again, until I knew every little chip inside it. I had to play through the custom scenarios three times each against seven enemies before I wanted to take a break. Except that I wasn't done with it yet. Because I learned, I don't even remember how, that a community of fans was having fun adding even more units to it!
Chaos and jubilation +9000, I had just discovered the existence of modders and their boundless imagination. The hours spent on mouldy drafts of websites searching for unit packs, on pages scarier than the darkest corners of the Dark Net, downloading them at a rate of 0.3 kilobytes per second, then struggling with tutorials on .txt files to make them work, are some of the best memories of my antisocial geek personality. My obsession was to build the most impregnable base possible, with the maximum number of defensive cannons placed around it, in the most stylish configuration I could imagine. And once I was done, I found myself blocked by the limit on the number of units that could be manufactured, a constraint imposed by the game, no doubt to prevent our poor little computers from burning out. All that 3D to calculate at the same time... even the Voodoo 2 couldn't handle it. Mind you, I played it again many years later on much faster machines, and it still overheated just the same. Total Annihilation, yeah. Annihilation right down to the equipment you spent three years working temp jobs to pay for. Ugly stuff.
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