| Time-Gate | |
|---|---|
Cover art |
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| Developer(s) | John Hollis |
| Publisher(s) | Quicksilva |
| Platform(s) | ZX Spectrum |
| Release date(s) | 1983 |
| Genre(s) | Action |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Media/distribution | Cassette |
| System requirements
48K RAM |
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Time-Gate (also known as Timegate, 4D Time-Gate or 4D Defender) is an early ZX Spectrum game from Quicksilva, and one of the first 3D combat games.
This video game was (unusually for its time) an original concept, i.e. not a port of an arcade game[1].Although based on the common misconception that time is the fourth dimension (in fact, physicists regard time as a fourth dimension; mathematicians regard "dimension" as referring to space only), it was unusual (particularly when compared with the flood of me-too games which followed it) in that it treated time as a dimension, in which one could travel (albeit backwards only).
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Time-Gate had one embarking on a perilous mission to repel the Squarm invaders who have conquered Earth, by fighting through hordes of same, thus finding and locating the time-gates (hence the name) and using the gates to travel back through time to an earlier era, where one fought through more Squarm to find another gate... Eventually, if one hadn’t been killed by the enemy , one got back to the year before the Squarm invaded, located their home planet, and locked onto it with one’s meson RAM (48K), thereby destroying it and retroactively preventing its inhabitants from ever having invaded in the first place.
Time-Gate, due to its intense use of machine-code-driven sound, placed more stress on the Spectrum's sound capabilities than previous games[2], and thereby inadvertently revealed a design flaw in early machines, whereby the Time-Gate sound effects would crash those machines. This resulted in some people buying the game to stress-test their Spectrums.
Time-Gate was followed by several games (hastily written and rushed out to cash in on its popularity) which, like Time-Gate itself, based their "4D" claim on a common fallacy concerning Einstein and his Theories of Relativity. (Contrary to popular misconception, what Relativity says about time is that it is a fourth dimension; nowhere in either theory is there a single word about time being the fourth dimension, to the exclusion of all other candidates. Indeed, at least one of the current (June 2008) theories of cosmology requires there to be at least four dimensions of space, regardless of how many time dimensions there are. See also Robert A. Heinlein's short story "—And He Built a Crooked House—"; it can be found in several SF anthologies.) But unlike Time-Gate, these all without exception merely featured a display with some kind of perspective ("the first three dimensions") plus animation ("the fourth") — in no sense did they feature time as a dimension.
These games all rapidly sank without trace, although occasionally thereafter another game featuring time flow (e.g. animation) would wrongly call itself "4D". Ironically, there was at the time of Time-Gate's publication a game ("Knot in 3D" by New Generation Software) which mathematicians would call 4D (in that it took place on the 3D surface of a 4D hypersphere); but it was never advertised as such!
