Cavedog Entertainment

» see cavedog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

in 1997 i was thirteen and not yet online at home (we had a phone line but no modem until '98). total annihilation shipped that september and i missed it on launch. i knew it later through a copy that circulated on cd in ankara internet cafes around 2002 or 2003, by which point everyone i played with was on starcraft or red alert 2 and ta had already settled into a small-circle classic among rts diehards.

cavedog entertainment got set up in 1995 by ron gilbert and shelley day as the adult-games division of their kids-software studio humongous entertainment, up in bothell, washington. the company name was an in-joke about a dog mascot. the project that justified the division was chris taylor's pitch for a real-time strategy game that would render its units in full 3d at a time when warcraft and command & conquer were still doing 2d sprites on isometric tiles.

the resulting game (total annihilation, september 1997) was a critical hit. multiple goty nods, around 250,000 units sold in the first year, a core contingency expansion in 1998, a sequel-format spinoff (total annihilation: kingdoms) in june 1999. then the publisher collapsed underneath it.

~ the case file ~

~ what it made ~

total annihilation's design was different from warcraft on several axes that mattered. units could fire over hills, projectile physics actually mattered (a missile lobbed in a parabolic arc could miss a moving target if the unit was running), resources flowed as a continuous economy rather than a stockpile-and-spend model, and there was effectively no hard unit cap. you could mass-produce two hundred peewee robots and stream them at an enemy commander.

the engine also pushed for a modder community. cavedog shipped new units as free monthly downloads through 1998, which was an unusual move when the broadband baseline was 56k dial-up and most patches still came on cd. the rts subgenre that supreme commander and planetary annihilation eventually inherited started in this engine.

~ the day it died ~

gt interactive bought humongous (and by extension cavedog) in 1996. by 1999 gt interactive was bleeding cash. unreal had been a hit for them in 1998 but the rest of the catalog was thin and the company was carrying debt from its ipo expansion. infogrames bought a controlling stake in gt interactive in november 1999 and immediately started cutting.

cavedog was closed on february 11, 2000. three games in development (amen: the awakening, elysium, plus good & evil) were cancelled. chris taylor walked out with a few colleagues and founded gas powered games in seattle a few months later. that studio shipped dungeon siege in 2002 and supreme commander in 2007, which is the spiritual sequel to total annihilation.

~ the inheritance ~

the total annihilation engine source code was reportedly destroyed by gt interactive in the wind-down (might be apocryphal but the story shows up in old gamespy retrospectives). a community project called spring re-implemented the engine from scratch starting around 2003 and is still actively maintained as a free rts platform in 2026. planetary annihilation, a 2014 kickstarter project by chris taylor's former colleagues at gas powered games, is the most direct commercial successor.

what got buried with cavedog as a studio: the model of a stand-alone rts house funded by a publisher who actually let designers ship a 3d engine on their first big project. ensemble (also dead, age of empires) and westwood (also dead, command & conquer) ran similar setups in the late nineties but the publisher-owned stand-alone rts shop is a class that no longer exists.

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