Chris Taylor leaves Wargaming to eventually start new studio The designer has been working behind the scenes for the last few years.

Veteran game designer Chris Taylor, the man behind such classics as Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander, has left his current position at Wargaming Seattle to strike out on his own again.

“Between Gas Powered Games and Wargaming, it was an 18-year stretch and I wore myself out and didn’t realize it,” Taylor said in an interview with GamesBeat. “I’ve decided I need to take a few months off, regroup, and recharge before I dive into my next thing.”

Taylor actually left the company three weeks ago, and has been on vacation since then. His previous company, Gas Powered Games, was purchased by Wargaming in 2013 after a failed kickstarter for a game called Caveman. Since the acquisition, Taylor's name has been out of the news. It was never officially revealed what he was working on, but some in the RTS community had hoped he would be working on an actual successor to Total Annihilation, since Wargaming picked up the IP a few months before acquiring GPG. A few months later, Wargaming said GPG was working on an unannounced game, but nothing ever materialized.

Total Annihilation was a revolutionary title that came out in 1997, and is always mentioned in the same breath with StarCraft or Command & Conquer as one of the best RTS games of all time. Taylor left developer Cavedog in 1998 to form Gas Powered Games. The company's first title was the RPG Dungeon Siege in 2002, followed by Dungeon Siege 2 in 2005, and Supreme Commander in 2007. GPG also developed Space Siege, Demigod and Supreme Commander 2. He was also working on a project called Kings and Castles at the time of the Wargaming acquisition.

The parting was apparently amicable. "We thank Chris for his passion and excitement, where he was instrumental in growing our Seattle team into a world class developer," Wargaming said in a statement.