tl;dr

I’m looking forward to Planetary Annihilation, mainly because I loved Total Annihilation so much.







Let me take you on a journey. Through time!





The time, 1999. The place, Springfield Missouri. We lived in a marvelous time. We didn’t have to party like it was 1999 - it was 1999. How did we party? We used serial cables to connect two Gateway computers with a whopping 128MB of RAM to play Total Annihilation.





I tried to get into Starcraft. It just didn’t enchant me, and once a friend showed my Total Annihilation (TA), there was no turning back. It was ahead of its time - too far perhaps; being an unemployed 16 year-old didn’t leave a lot extra cash to use on system upgrades, or systems at all. TA was a game that would let you push the limits of your system. Got 1000 units? No problem. CTRL-A, move. The pathing engine would choke once the battlefield was littered with corpses - which you could absorb as a resource, how rad is that? But, that didn’t stop us from building needlessly large armies to smash up against one another. You could also mess with settings, normally regarded at pretty typical, is really weird ways. Want to configure your resolution to any size? Go for it! Hook it 9 monitors and see the entire map at once.





TA was also the first game my group of friends modded. Let me explain what I mean by “modded”. Modding TA was not opening a level editor or using a built in toolkit released by the developer. It was primal. Long story short, we all had to brush up on reading hexadecimal. The work was hard, but seeing the work that went into the modding compounded by the fact that we were the oddballs that didn’t play Starcraft, gave our set of friends a special counterculture.



TA, you annihilated my heart. In a good way.