Gas Powered Games

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

~ the eulogy ~

Chris Taylor started Gas Powered Games in Redmond in May 1998, a few months after finishing Total Annihilation at Cavedog Entertainment. Four other people came with him out of that building. The first game took almost four years and arrived as Dungeon Siege in April 2002, an action RPG Microsoft published, built so that the entire world loaded once at the start and never stopped for a corridor again.

Supreme Commander followed in February 2007 and is the game the studio is remembered for. It gave you a mouse wheel that pulled all the way out from a single unit to the whole map rendered as a strategic display, so you could fight at two scales without ever switching screens. THQ published it. Demigod came next with Stardock in 2009 and Supreme Commander 2 under Square Enix in 2010. After that the studio did a large share of Age of Empires Online for Microsoft, which went out in 2011.

By January 2013 the publisher money had stopped. Gas Powered Games put Wildman on Kickstarter on the fourteenth asking for 1.1 million dollars, and laid off roughly forty people four days later. Taylor recorded a video saying the company's survival now depended on the campaign. It was short of half the goal when the studio pulled it on 11 February, four days before it would have closed on its own, with a note about focusing attention on other ways to keep the company running.

Wargaming was in talks three days after that and had bought the studio inside the month. The name became Wargaming Seattle. About a hundred and fifty people then worked five years on an MMO that was never announced and never shown, and on 23 May 2018 Wargaming said it was closing the office and offering severance to everyone in it. The doors shut on 22 July.

~ the dossier ~

~ the strategic zoom ~

Total Annihilation had already established what Taylor was interested in, which was strategy with many small units on a very large map. Supreme Commander pushed that far enough that the interface had to change to keep up. Zooming out did not shrink the battlefield into unreadability; it swapped the units for icons and turned the screen into a command map you could still issue orders from, then dropped you back into the fight with no loading pause between.

It was also a machine-killer. The simulation ran thousands of units and the engine wanted a second CPU core at a time when most people had one. Supreme Commander reached Turkey the way demanding PC games did in 2007, as an argument about hardware before it was an argument about strategy, and the Turkish forums where I read about components carried long threads working out what it would take to run the thing at a playable frame rate. I had TTNet broadband by then and was reading those threads for what the parts cost.

~ the kickstarter that did not finish ~

Wildman was pitched as an action RPG with a strategy layer, and the pitch arrived with the studio's finances attached to it in public. The layoffs landed four days into the campaign. Taylor then went on camera to explain that if Wildman did not fund, Gas Powered Games would probably not continue, which is a hard thing to ask strangers for money on the back of.

The campaign was canceled on 11 February 2013 at well under half of the 1.1 million dollars. Three days later Wargaming confirmed it was in discussions to buy the company. Nobody was charged, since Kickstarter only collects on a funded campaign, so the several thousand pledges were released and Wildman was never built.

~ five years of nothing shipping ~

Wargaming had World of Tanks money in that period and was buying studios with it. Seattle was handed an unannounced MMO and kept on it. Nothing about that project was ever made public, before the closure or after, which is unusual for a game that occupied a hundred and fifty people for five years.

Taylor left in November 2016, citing fatigue, and later surfaced with a mostly solo project called Intergalactic Space Empire under a new company of his own. The studio he founded outlived his departure by eighteen months. What outlived all of it is Supreme Commander: a community project called Forged Alliance Forever has kept the 2007 engine's expansion patched and hosted for over a decade, run by people who were never paid to do it.

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