C&CV: Supreme Commander is being labelled 'the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation' and expectation is high. What part or parts of the game do you think will most surprise TA fans?

Chris Taylor: I think they're going to be pleasantly surprised about how ambitious we were - we did not cut the ambitious aspects of the design at all. I would really be horrified if they were disappointed with any of it. We've added the modding so that the community can get in there and be creative, the AI system is fully scriptable, the unit control system not only is fully scriptable but we've got a complete scripting debugging system. The map editor that we include in the game, the mod management - we've gone overboard with what we're providing to the community. I would be broken-hearted if they were disappointed with the game.

C&VG: People have always been talking about the death of the PC as gaming platform, what's your view on this?

Chris Taylor: I was really intrigued to see Call of Duty 2 as a top seller on Xbox 360 because you would have no Call of Duty 2 unless you had a PC, because it was developed on the PC and the 360 version was a direct port. So really the PC is a next-generation game platform. People just don't recognise it as that, they think of it as just a PC. Right now the Xbox 360 has a state of the art video chipset in it, which means that a year from now it will be dated and the PC will once again excel.

The fact is consoles utilise their resources three times more efficiently than the PC, so the PC has to be a lot more powerful than a console before it exceeds the capabilities, but all of that is just observations of different kinds that mean the same thing to me. The PC will continue to hold its ground. We're seeing consoles go up which is bemusing because as consoles go up in price the PC becomes more attractive. That was one of the most attractive thing about the original 8-bit Nintendo, it was $99 and the PC was $3000. Well now a console rigged out is $400 or $500 and a PC you can get for $899, so the gap has radically closed and if that trend continues and MMOs and great products continue, then the PC will do great.