Pay attention now; you are witnessing history in the making. Some say the RTS genre began with Dune 2. Others go back to Herzog Zwei, searching for a more basic origin. But it's really a matter of refinement, each game adding something the previous one did not have, until we end up with a paradigm that defined the PC gaming platform. And few others added as much as Total Annihilation did. 3D units and terrain with elevation, line-of-sight, and ballistic artillery. Army-size unit counts. Huge maps. All-aspect, all-terrain warfare. Long range combat. Sensor denial and stealth. Advanced unit selection and order queuing. Streaming resources. A Commander avatar on the battlefield. And the final one-two punch: a stunning Audio CD soundtrack by (then up-and-coming) Jeremy Soule, the John Williams of gaming, that put his name on the map and is still one of the best he ever did. And finally, extensive mod support, with a huge community and a massive library of units, maps, patches and conversions. Chris Taylor, the designer, would go on to elaborate on these concepts in the definitive modern maximalist RTS, Supreme Commander - arguably a more mature expression of TA's original vision. But the stunning originality of TA is unlikely to be surpassed.
The finest RPG I've ever played, and one of the three best games I've played of any kind, on any platform, ever. It changed *my* nature.
