Chris Taylor (video game designer)


Chris Taylor is a video game designer. He developed Total Annihilation and the Dungeon Siege series and founded Gas Powered Games. In 2002, GameSpy named him the "30th most influential person in gaming."

Career

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 video game Total Annihilation and its first expansion, '. He founded Gas Powered Games in May 1998 and designed the action role-playing 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 real-time strategy game since 1997. It is described as the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, but was not able to be named as such because Atari owns the rights to the Total Annihilation name. Although Atari has shown no interest in reviving the Total Annihilation franchise, the company nonetheless held on to it until July 2013. He also helped create the game's standalone expansion '.
On January 14, 2013, Taylor funded a new project through Kickstarter called "Wildman". On February 11, 2013, 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, where Taylor was reported to be working on an unannounced project. Taylor left Wargaming in November 2016 with a forward looking statement to be part of indie gaming. On April 24, 2019, Taylor announced the formation of a new cloud-based gaming platform, Kanoogi, and a new real-time strategy game, Intergalactic Space Empire.

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