TA-ncient History #.05: The Happy Layoff

This should have been the first post in the TA-ncient History series since these pictures predate that first TA screen by a few months. What we have here is one of those things you can chalk up to fate, coincidence, kismet, or whatever you choose to call blind stupid luck.

Before coming to work at Humongous Entertainment and hammering away on Really Cool War Game with Chris, I worked nearby at Squaresoft, Inc. in Redmond. That studio created Secret of Evermore for the SNES, but 16-bit consoles were on the way out. While our fate was being decided some of us worked on concepts for possible future titles. A small group of us started tossing around ideas for a real time strategy game. Warcraft 2 was a huge craze around the office and we were pretty thrilled about the notion of working on an RTS game.

The concept was tentatively called Alien Reign, which is ironic given how similar that is to Dark Reign, a much anticipated competitor to Total Annihilation. The concept never got past the early half-baked zygote stage, but some interesting things occurred along the way.

We were just ramping up on 3D at Squaresoft during the completion of Evermore, and I was interested in finding tools that would be simple and easy for artists to pick up and learn quickly. KPT Bryce seemed like it had possibilities. I also wanted a look that wasn't obviously made of tiles like most RTS games. I hoped our backgrounds could have larger pieces of nicely rendered terrain.

These pictures from March of 1996 are the result. I did the terrain. The buildings and robot were designed by our art director Daniel Dociu then modeled and rendered by Square's resident Alias guru Brad Clarkson.

This concept never went anywhere, but it helped get my brain in gear for what was to come. Some of the same factors would help my approach to building the art for Total Annihilation. The art crew at Square had little 3D experience -- most of the original TA crew had even less. Some had never worked in 3D at all. Accessible tools like Bryce and Lightwave helped make TA possible, and reasonably quick to produce.

This little thought experiment helped set the stage in more ways than that. Squaresoft laid us off and closed their Redmond office in the Spring of 1996. There were some very talented people looking for work, including our staff composer who had already joined the team at Humongous Entertainment. I joined as well and our presence there helped to pull in other former Squaresoft folks, like programmers Bartosz Kijanka, Rick Saenz, Jeff Petkau (inspiration for the Jeffy) and artists John Baron, Rebecca Coffman, Jarrett Holderby and Peter Fries, all of whom contributed a lot to the Total Annihilation products. So, Squaresoft's loss was definitely TA's gain.

It's a small world. I was sitting in Redmond thinking up ways to incorporate 3D art into an RTS game. It turns out there was a guy just a couple miles away working on an engine for an RTS game with 3D height maps. Once those two thing met up, very good things started to happen.

CK