Livestream 1/21/2022 – Total Annihilation

After coming out of some illness going around I had to jump back into a game that is a true classic. That ended up being Total Annihilation from Cavedog Entertainment. A staple of lan parties back in the 90s it did something no other RTS games had done yet at that point by providing a large scale battlefield with tons and tons of units. Much to the dismay of the processors of the time…

While most games relied on sprites and bitmapped graphics Total Annihilation (say that name 5 times fast) instead went with fully rendered, polygon based, 3d unit. This was a dramatic shift from other games in the same genre and gave us a much more reactive battlefield all while computers buckled under the weight. I can’t think of any contemporary machine that could run this game at full speed when there was a lot of on screen action. You have to look considerably later into the upper P2 and P3 era to get that smooth performance. Such is the end result of heavy 3d rendering without any acceleration.

This game is still a true classic and while there have been attempts to soft reboot it through various means the original still holds up. Check out the livestream replay below.