List of games containing time travel

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Contents

[edit] Games

Time travel has also featured in a number of games, including computer and video games, board games, Pen and Paper role-playing games and play by mail games.

[edit] Video and computer games

  • The Delphine Software International 1989 release Future Wars tells the story of a Window cleaner transported into a magical adventure through time.
  • Tim Schafer's Day of the Tentacle, a LucasArts graphic adventure, puts the player in simultaneous control of three separate characters in the same location, initially at the same point in time. For the majority of the game though, they are at three different points in time. Actions in one time period affect the circumstances in proceeding time periods.
  • The computer game series The Journeyman Project places the player in the shoes of Gage Blackwood, Agent 5 of the Temporal Security Agency (TSA), a secret organization in charge of guarding the timestream from being altered. Players would have to bounce back and forth in time to solve puzzles and find clues, visiting real historical places (Leonardo da Vinci's workshop) or places of legend (Atlantis). Players were also encouraged to not be seen either by avoiding contact with citizens of that time period, appearing as another inhabitant or becoming invisible altogether.
  • Timequest by Legend Entertainment shares a nearly identical premise, with the player chasing a person through time periods in order to prevent him from altering the past.
  • The computer game series that began with Command & Conquer: Red Alert was based upon a postulated time travel technique, and a particular event where Albert Einstein traveled back in time to remove a young Adolf Hitler, thus altering the course of history — with catastrophic results. Time travel would later be used in the Campaigns of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack, "Yuri's Revenge".
  • In the computer game Fallout 2, there is a special encounter involving a gate-like stone structure which is in fact a time portal. Stepping through it will transport the player back in time, to a period before the start of the first Fallout game, where they will find a computer with a water chip. Breaking the chip will ensure that the events of the first game will occur, as it involves the player of the first game seeking a replacement for the broken chip. This also ensures the Fallout 2 player's own existence as a descendant of the first game's player—a causal loop known as a predestination paradox. The encounter is called "The Guardian of Forever", a reference to the Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever.
  • In Shadow of Memories for PlayStation 2, the main character has to travel back in time to prevent his own death and to find out both the assailant's identity and reasons for the murder-to-happen.
  • Time traveling is a main theme in the Square Soft fantasy/role-playing game Chrono Trigger. A group of heroes for different eras travel back and forth through time in an attempt to prevent the end of the world in the year 1999.
  • Similarly, Tales of Phantasia features time travel both to the past and the future, using ancient technology.
  • The Legacy of Kain game series states that "History Abhors a Paradox". In the Kain series, the timeline, referred to as the "Timestream", is immutable. Changes made by individuals have no effect on the general flow of time, but major changes can be made by introducing a paradox. When a paradox is introduced, the Timestream is forced to reshuffle itself to accommodate the change in history.
  • The game Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? and two derivative television series (Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? and Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?) feature time travel extensively.
  • The games Freedom Force and its sequel, Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich, both feature a villainous character named Time Master who has absolute power over time.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the main character Link can travel back and forth through time via the Master Sword and the Temple of Time, but only his mind is truly traveling through time.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Link has only three days in order to avoid a moon crash into the country of Termina. In order to return to the first day, he uses the Ocarina of Time, which also allows him to slow the flow of time (or restore if it was slowed) or advance half a day.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, there is also a time travelling plot in which Link must rescue the oracle Nayru. Like in Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past, Link travels through two different eras, though unlike Ocarina of Time he travels physically and his age doesn't change.
  • The game Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped involves the use of time portals to travel to various points in time (both past and future) to scavenge "crystals".
  • The educational video game Mario's Time Machine involves Bowser stealing precious artifacts from history (such as Shakespeare's pen and Magellan's ship's steering wheel) and displaying them in his museum, which Mario must then go back in time to stop.
  • Dino Eggs produced in the early 1980s for the Commodore 64 computer system involved a character called 'Time Master Tim' whom the player had to guide around prehistoric landscapes in order to rescue dinosaurs and transport them through time to the present.
  • A game titled Time Machine on the Commodore 64 has no relationship to the book. Instead, it places a professor lost in the depths of time as terrorists ransack his laboratory, blowing up his time machine. Then, the professor must help out the fledgling mankind to evolve and grow civilized.
  • In the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time trilogy (consisting of Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones), the Prince continuously travels back through times to repair his errors, each time causing a disaster. In the first game, the prince travels back through time to prevent himself from unleashing the sands, therefore causing the Dahaka to pursue him, as seen in Warrior Within, he travels through time to prevent the Sands of Time from being created. In The Two Thrones, his stopping the creation of the Sands of Time resurrected the evil Vizier.
  • In Empire Earth's Russian Campaign, Sergei Molotov/Molly Ryan must build a time machine to come back to the year 2018 and destroy Grigor Illyanich Stoyanovich's Empire, Novaya Russia.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, the franchise's second arcade game (later ported to the Super Nintendo), features a plot in which the Turtles must battle their way through time before confronting Krang and Shredder.
  • In Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Mario and Luigi travel to the past to help their younger selves fight off an alien invasion.
  • In Final Fantasy, the villain Garland travels 2,000 years into the past with the help of the Four Fiends. Garland then sends the Four Fiends 2,000 years into the future to cause global destruction and send his present-day body into the past.
  • In the video game for Futurama, the crew must travel back to prevent the sale of Planet Express. They fail in doing so and get themselves killed which provides an infinite loop as the game starts all over again.
  • In Sonic CD, Sonic had to travel through time to stop Robotnik from using the Time Stones to alter the past and take over the Little Planet. Each Zone (called a Round) of the game had three versions, a past, a present, and a future.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes and Shadow The Hedgehog, Chaos Control is used as a method to stop time while the user can either move as usual or teleport.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), the main villain is Solaris, a sun god with absolute control of time. In addition, one of its split forms, Mephiles, is capable of time travelling and previously mentioned Chaos Control has the additional ability of creating time portals when used by two users simultaneously.
  • In Knowledge Adventure's JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain, the goal of the game is to prevent a bratty girl from altering history so that her answers to a history quiz she failed will be correct.
  • In the TimeSplitters series, the player must travel to the past and the future to destroy an evil race of beings called 'TimeSplitters'. The most notable game in the series is TimeSplitters: Future Perfect in which the player must help both his past and future selves solve puzzles and defeat enemies.
  • Onimusha 3: Demon Siege involved the two playable characters being switched in time due to instability in a chief enemy's time machine. A feudal Samurai was sent to modern day Paris, while a modern day French officer was transported to feudal Japan.
  • In Gradius V, the Vic Viper comes across a time-space rift, from which a future Vic Viper and an enemy battleship emerge. The future Vic Viper destroys the battleship with the help of the present one. Later on in the game, the Vic Viper comes across the same battleship and must take itself and the battleship back in time to get assistance from its past self.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, the character Ellone has the ability to send the consciousness of a person she knows back in time and junction it to another person she knows in the past. The plot in Final Fantasy VIII also deals with a sorceress from the future and "Time Compression" in which past, present, and future would all be mixed together.
  • In Kingdom Hearts II, Sora, Donald and Goofy travel to a past time period (called the Timeless River) when Disney Castle is being built. Black Pete tries to take the Cornerstone of Light that protects the castle from evil, but is stopped by Sora and company, along with Pete's past version.
  • In EarthBound, the journey of Ness begins after a time traveler, Buzz Buzz, tells him about a future apocalypse which only him and his friends can stop. In the last part of the game, the protagonists travel to the past, when the villain Giygas is most vulnerable. One of Giygas' minions, Porky, escapes to another time period and becomes the main antagonist of Mother 3.
  • The game Second Sight is initially presented as a thriller/time travel story; the character, John Vattic, who remembers nothing of his past has periodic (and for the purposes of the game, interactive) flashbacks. However, awakening from his flashbacks, he finds that events and circumstances in the present have radically changed since before he had the flashback (said changes being directly connected to the actions of the player during the flashback). The twist ending reveals that the flashbacks are actually the present time and what was initially thought to be the present is actually Vattic seeing the future.
  • The game Clock Tower 3 involves the main character traveling through time to destroy supernatural killers after their final murders.
  • In the first-person Shooter Half-Life 2, a slow Teleporter is used and this holds protagonists Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance back one week in real-time but for them the trip was instantaneous. This resembles time travel.
  • In Jazz Jackrabbit 2, the protagonists must chase the villainous Devan Shell through various points in time. The cancelled sequel, Jazz Jackrabbit 3, would have also seen Jazz going to a future ruled by Devan.
  • In Croteam's Serious Sam series, the games First Encounter, Second Encounter, and Next Encounter involve a hero from the future sent back in time by means of ancient Sirian alien technology in order to find a means to reach the homeworld of the alien overlord Mental, who has ravaged Earth in the future. Sam visits such places as ancient Egypt, Incan ruins, English villages, Chinese cities and Roman temples, albeit sometime after the respective civilizations have died off. Serious Sam 2 abandons the time travel theme in favor of various planets.
  • The Jak and Daxter series uses time travel as a story tool, especially in Jak II where Jak and Daxter travel 300 years into the future only to discover that this era is Jak's true home and he must send his younger self 300 years in the past to become strong enough to perform the feats the older Jak had just accomplished, making the game both a sequel and a prequel.
  • In the Guilty Gear series, the character Axl Low suffers from involuntary time travel, in fact coming from the 20th century (whereas the series takes place somewhere around the year 2180). Most notable amongst the instances where he timeslips are when one of his story paths in the game Guilty Gear X has him thrown back into the events preceding the series, and when one of his story paths in the game Guilty Gear XX: The Midnight Carnival has him fighting a version of himself from the future.
  • In Ape Escape, Spike, Jake, Specter and his monkey army are warped into the past where Spike must travel through different eras in time such as the time of the dinosaurs and the Middle Ages in order to catch all the monkeys.
  • In Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future the player must travel through different times and time lines in order to restore history.

[edit] Board games

Various kinds of family and simulation games exist, where people play face-to-face or around a table, or within earshot of each other, or passing written notes around, and the topic of the game occasionally includes time travel.

  • Alternate Realities, designed by Kelly Coyle
  • Assassin, designed by Al Macintyre, with several variants such as:
  • Chrononauts
  • Doctor Who, FASA boxed game, designed by Michael P Bledsoe
  • Time and Again, packaged by Time Line Ltd, designed by Voss & Worzel
  • Time Master, Pace setter boxed game, designed by Marc Acres, with several variants such as:
    • Red Ace High
    • Time Tricks
  • Time Marines, designed by Dan Reece
  • Time Travel Kriegspiel Chess variant, designed by Macintyre and Reece
  • Time War, Yaquinto boxed game, designed by J Stephen Peek
  • U.S. Patent Number 1, designed by James Ernest and Falko Goettsch

[edit] Role-playing games

[edit] Play-by-mail games

Play-by-mail games were human-moderated games where the moves were sent by postal mail, before the advent of computer-moderated multi-player games. Some of those games were about time travel, such as:

  • Out time days, designed by Freitas
  • Time Trap, designed by Richard Loomis