Cavedog Entertainment started with a smash. It's first game release, Total Annihilation, received rave reviews and numerous awards. The company seemed destined to battle the big boys of Blizzard Entertainment and Westwood Studios for leadership in the field of real-time-strategy games.

But amid delayed titles, tepid response to its online ventures and less than stellar reviews to it latest release, Cavedog's future seems uncertain, despite any company statements to the contrary.

Where did things start to go wrong? And why has Cavedog suddenly gotten the image that it has lost touch with fans after such a phenomenal early response? Or does Cavedog have another success up its sleeve?

Ron Gilbert

Cavedog began in 1995 under the watchful eye of Ron Gilbert and Shelley Day, the founders of the highly successful Humongous Entertainment, a company that made kids' software. Founded in 1992, the company became highly profitable under their leadership and was sold in late 1996 to GT Interactive for $76 million. The two stayed on and continue to run Humongous.

Gilbert and Day were veterans in the interactive entertainment industry. Gilbert worked at LucasArts Entertainment for eight years and designed such games as Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series. Both games have won numerous awards and appeared in PC Game's "Top most influential games of all time" list. Day had worked at Electronic Arts and Accolade before joining LucasArts as a producer of entertainment software in 1990. She was named "Producer of the Year" at the annual Computer Game Developers Conference in 1988.

Despite the Humongous success, Gilbert wanted to get into more sophisticated games. He created a new yet-unnamed gaming company with the idea of "exploring interactive gaming and creating new standards of fun." The company was formed as a division of Humongous, with access to the successful company's financial resources.

A hit in the making

The next step was hiring a staff. Gilbert's first hire in January 1996 was Chris Taylor, the brainchild behind the company's first game - and first mega-hit - and a man who would became synonymous with Cavedog in the early days after Total Annihilation's release.

"I was looking for a change and called Shelley Day, the president of Humongous Entertainment," Taylor said. "Not too many people know this, but she was the producer on the first game I did called Hardball II years ago for Accolade. So I called her up and she introduced me to Ron. He invited me to move to Washington to join the company when I described the game I wanted to make. It was a really great time."

The game he wanted to make was Total Annihilation, or "The Really Cool War Game" as he called it on the design documents.

Chris Taylor / Clayton Kauzlaric

"I wrote that on the first design doc because I needed to call the game something to get things rolling," he said. "When we started playing the game, everything was exploding all over the place and it was crazy, that's when Total Annihilation seemed like the perfect name, although in the early days it was more like 'Partial Annihilation.' It was an exciting time because everything needed to be built from scratch everything from the core game libraries to assembling an awesome team."

Some of that "awesome team" included:

• Clayton Kauzlaric, another of Gilbert's initial hires and the Art Lead for Total Annihilation. He later became one of the driving forces behind game design at Cavedog once Taylor left in March of 1998. He was also the designer of the Cavedog logo.
• Kevin Pun, the creator of the animated opening for the game. Pun was brought near the end of the Total Annihilation project because so much emphasis was placed on the game that the intro and cutscenes were left until the last minute. Pun did these remarkably fast and his success gave him the chance to be Art Lead on another Cavedog work-in-progress, Amen: The Awakening.
• Rick Lambright an executive staff member, who handled many of the multi-player aspects of the game. Lambright came over from Starwave and is one of the creative minds behind Boneyards, Cavedog's own proprietary online gaming service, and Galactic Wars, an online Total Annihilation metagame.
• Assistant producer Jacob McMahon, who was the organizational genius largely responsible for most of Total Annihilation's units and unit behavior. Later left to become vice president at Chris Taylor's new company.

The project took off with new team members being added throughout the first year and a half. When GT Interactive purchased Humongous in late 1996, they were excited by the game and wanted to ensure the game was success. Little thought had been given to marketing the game and the company had not even come up with the Cavedog name yet. Cavedog was chosen over Frozen Yak, and the marketing campaign was underway.

What little marketing there was, anyway. Cavedog had given so little thought to selling the game that no one had been designation to market it. And despite GT Interactive's support of the game, no marketing help was available there, either.

However, it was the power of the World Wide Web that provided more marketing for Cavedog than any marketing team could have. It was decided to prerelease some animated screenshots and a unit viewer on the company's Web site. The screenshots added to the hype. By the time the game hit the shelves in September 1997, Cavedog already had a fan base for the game.

The success of the unit viewer prompted a revolutionary idea that has yet to be copied in the industry: A weekly unit release on the company's web site. This announcement caused even more of a stir, dramatically increasing the hits the site received every Friday night at midnight, the deadline for posting the new units.

"Some of the weekly units directly addressed some of the problems people were having with the game balance," Taylor said. "For example, the Flakker was released to help fight off large air attacks that could not be defended against with only the Defender units."

This response created a massive wave of fan adoration for Cavedog. Fans flocked to the message boards and got responses to problems from the resident DogMasters or DMs. Several of the subsequent patches were in response to problems fans were having with the game.

"In the first couple of months after we released version 1.0 of the game, we read almost every single post on the message board to collect feedback," Taylor said. And he also made himself accessible to the fan sites for interviews and Q&As.;

The buzz also created a wave of fans who created their own maps and units. That fanaticism grew even more with the release of two expansion packs in mid-1998, one of which contained a map editor. The game has stayed popular because of a few fans created their own map and unit editors and new AIs. Using these tools, literally thousands of fans have created their own maps and units.