Chris Taylor (game designer)

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Chris Taylor in front of a Dungeon Siege poster.

Chris Taylor is a computer 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.

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 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 is developing Supreme Commander, Chris's first RTS game since 1997. It is described as the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, but can't 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 has held on to it.

Supreme Commander has been dubbed "best RTS of E3 2006", and was released on February 16, 2007 in Europe and four days later, February 20 in the U.S, achieving high ratings from major game websites and magazines.