Quick Facts
Biography
Chris Taylor is a video game designer and entrepreneur most famous for developing Total Annihilation and the Dungeon Siege series and for founding Gas Powered Games. In 2002, GameSpy named him the "30th most influential person in gaming."
Biography
Game designer
Chris Taylor was born in British Columbia and started in the video game industry in the late 1980s at Distinctive Software in Burnaby. His first game was Hardball II released in 1989.
Taylor moved to Seattle, Washington in January 1996 when he joined Cavedog Entertainment as the designer and project leader for the real-time strategy computer game Total Annihilation and its first expansion, Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency.
He founded Gas Powered Games in May 1998 and designed the action-role-playing video game Dungeon Siege. Its sequel, Dungeon Siege II, was released in 2005.
In the August 2005 edition of PC Gamer, it was announced that Gas Powered Games was developing Supreme Commander, Chris's first RTS game since 1997. It is described as the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, but was not able to be named as such because Atari (formerly Infogrames) owns the rights to the Total Annihilation name. Although Atari has shown no interest in reviving the TA franchise, the company nonetheless held on to it until July 2013.
He also helped create the game's standalone expansion Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance.
End Of Gas Powered Games
On January 14, 2013, Chris Taylor kickstarted a new project called "Wildman". On February 11, 2013, Chris Taylor shut down the kickstarter for "Wildman" prematurely. Four days before the campaign's end the pledged amount was only $504,120 of the required $1.1 million.
Shortly thereafter in 2013, Gas Powered Games was acquired by Wargaming.net, where Taylor was reported to be working on an unannounced project.
Taylor left Wargaming.net in November 2016 with a forward looking statement to be part of indie gaming.
Awards
Supreme Commander released 2007 has been dubbed "best RTS of E3 2006", the GameCritics Best Strategy Game Award and achieving high ratings from major game websites and magazines.
Games credited
- HardBall II (1989)
- The Duel: Test Drive II (1989)
- 4-D Boxing (1991)
- Triple Play 96 (1995)
- Dungeon Siege II (2005)
- Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (2007)
- Demigod (2009)
As designer
- Total Annihilation (1997)
- Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency (1998)
- Dungeon Siege (2002)
- Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna (2003)
- Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony (2006)
- Dungeon Siege II: Broken World (2006)
- Supreme Commander (2007)
- Space Siege (2008)
- Supreme Commander 2 (2010)
- Dungeon Siege III (2011)
- Kings and Castles (Never Released)