Chris Taylor’s “Supreme Commander”
25 Jan 2006 
around evening time 
Matt Winckler
This is old news, but new to me. I came across it when trying to find out whether folks had had any success running Total Annihilation in Linux under WINE. Chris Taylor and company are developing a new game, and I would very much like for all the hype to be true. Supreme Commander is being tagged as the “spiritual successor” to Total Annihilation, one of the two greatest RTS games of all time. (Yes, Starcraft fanatics, put down your flamethrowers. I am one of you, and SC shares the “greatest of all time” honor with TA. Starcraft had a vastly better story, and TA had a vastly better interface.) It’s early to be making predictions or judging a game by its screenshots, but from reading the interviews, it looks like Chris Taylor (creator of TA) is onto another serious winner here. Some of the innovations mentioned in the article, such as coordinated attacks (and the “estimated time of arrival” feature), are things I’ve dreamt about seeing in an RTS for years. And the ability to zoom in and out and conduct war at a variety of levels is fabulous also.
Just looking at the screenshots, you can tell this is definitely a Chris Taylor creation. The units bear a striking resemblance to TA, as does the terrain in a way. This I consider to be a positive thing. For that matter, I’d probably consider it a positive thing even if all they did was remake TA with modern graphics.
I am very jazzed about the fact that they’re designing in - not tacking on - a cooperative mode to play through the single player campaigns. I love cooperative modes, and it’s very refreshing to see somebody thinking along the same lines.
In short, this looks like a game I’m going to buy as soon as it comes out, at full retail price. I think the last such game to earn this honor from me was Total Annihilation itself, almost nine years ago. Let’s hope this game gets out of vaporware status and actually lives up to some of the features being touted. The goal is a release sometime this year, with Taylor just saying that they’re shooting for a release before Christmas.