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“We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is? When will we get to the cowboy level?”
– Professor Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Time travel and videogames are a perfect fit. Not only does fourth-dimensional falderal justify all manner of shiny sci-fi doodaddery, but also it frees designers to set levels in any period of earthly or extraterrestrial time. Did they have fiery lava continents in prehistoric times? You betcha! Could the future hold a new ice age? Hello, slippery ice world! Does history have cowboys in it? It sure does - and now so does your game!
More canny developers incorporate time-travel elements at a gameplay level, monkeying with players’ brains in a manner that can be alternately delightful and absolutely infuriating. So we’ve taken it upon ourselves to survey 30 notable time-travel games from throughout videogame history. Our guiding spirit will be high-topped Marty McFly (whose crummy games, incidentally, won’t appear on this list); our criteria will be what every time-travel game should aim for. Which is to say, utter incomprehensibility. And cowboys.
Time Pilot (1982)
A weird hybrid of side-on and top-down shooter, Time Pilot puts you in the role of a futuristic fighter ace whose buddies have (impressively) been downed not only behind enemy lines, but in hostile periods in history. Piloting a future-century fighter jet that gets shot down regularly by World War I biplanes is as humiliating as it sounds.
Did it do your head in? Forget the game’s fourth-dimensional trappings – it’s hard enough to get your head around the notion of a world where either every craft flies sideways, or gravity ain’t shit.
Were there cowboys in it? The game includes both World Wars, but the difficulty ramps up in 1970. Not only wasn’t Konami clever enough to make you fight cowboys, they passed up the opportunity to have the pilot shoot down waves of eight-mile-high hippies.
Above: That’s entertainment!
Time Travel Satisfaction Rating:
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress (1982)
Cult RPG series Ultima has its dark horse in Ultima II. The game sees the series’ cipher of a hero, The Stranger, track a time-bending sorceress across human history and future, as the latter attempts to destroy mankind in revenge for the events of the original Ultima. She’s eventually defeated, because she’s not smart enough to try simply intervening in those events.
Did it do your head in? In later days, it would: the only Ultima to be set on Earth, this proved to be such an unbearable anomaly that the developers inexplicably wrote the game’s setting out of series continuity.
Were there cowboys in it? There was creator stand-in Lord British, who would disguise himself as a cowboy in other games for reasons that beggar comprehension.
Above: Also, with the right amount of imagination, those horns almost look like cowboy hats
Time Travel Satisfaction Rating:
Time-Gate (1983)
Time-Gate was one of the first ZX Spectrum games that wasn’t a conversion (read: embarrassing bastardization) of an existing arcade title. The game tasked players with fighting off waves of Squarm invaders, each level taking place before the previous in the game’s timeline; the final level was the aliens’ home planet, before the creatures had even launched their invasion. Whoa there, H.G. Wells, slow down for the dummies at the back!
Did it do your head in? Maybe not, but it did do in plenty of computers. The game’s sound code was so complex that users took to using the game as a Crysis-esque performance-test.
Above: Basically we just ran the same screenshot twice
Were there cowboys in it? There weren’t even people in it, let alone cows to herd.
Time Travel Satisfaction Rating:
