Timelapse

Timelapse is a first-person graphic adventure patterned after games such as Myst. Gameplay consists of the exploration of various ancient temples and cities, and the solving of complex and difficult puzzles. The game is made up of five areas: Easter Island, Egypt, Maya, Anasazi and Atlantis.

Professor Alexander Nichols, a friend of the unnamed and silent player character, has called the player to Easter Island, where he believes he has found a link to the legendary city of Atlantis. The player arrives at the island, picking up the Professor's Camera and Journal, only to realize the Professor is already gone. The Player then explores the island, finding the Professor's camp abandoned, and eventually stumbles upon a cave which contains a Timegate, with the Professor trapped inside. The player then uses this time gate to go to one of three time periods; Ancient Egypt, the Maya civilization, and the Anasazi civilisation.

Each civilisation is deserted or almost deserted, with the people having recently left in mass exoduses. The player may visit the three civilisations in any order, but the Professor's journal claims that he visited them in the order listed; this is also the order of the game's four CD-ROMs. The player encounters a robot which appears to be constructed out of energy in each civilisation; this robot is not named in the game, but is referred to as "The Guardian" in official materials. The player's main goal in each civilisation is to collect a device known as a Gene Pod, which contains DNA from the culture, and install it into the Timegate.

Timelapse was conceived in early 1994 by lead designer and producer Lori Nichols, who had worked at GTE Entertainment since 1991. Her main inspiration for the project was Myst, which she later said had "combined puzzles, graphics, and story in a style that I had never seen before." She sought to build a superior game upon this foundation that drew from her fascination with archaeology, ancient cultures, science fiction and the myth of Atlantis. Obtaining permission from GTE Entertainment head Richard Robinson to start the project—on the condition that she work on it concurrently with her regular job at the company—Nichols approached artist Ed Deren to flesh out the idea and design a proof of concept demo.

Timelapse remained in the prototyping stage for six months: Nichols and Deren collaborated with programmer Tim Bank to create part of the Egyptian world as their demo. The art direction and game design of this early sequence were handled by Deren. Research and development of the game's technology were key focuses during this time, as the team planned to use ray-traced and pre-rendered visuals at a resolution of 640x480, a technique that Nichols said "hadn't been done before" in a game. According to marketing manager Mike Yuen, the team worked extensively with focus groups while prototyping, both to refine Timelapse and to determine players' opinions on Myst and similar adventure titles.

In January 1997, Variety reported that Timelapse and the GTE-published Titanic: Adventure Out of Time were both "selling well". However, on the 7th of that month, GTE announced its plan to shutter the majority of GTE Entertainment by March, with a final closure set for June. According to GTE's Richard Scott, the parent company "made a strategic decision that it does not need to be a primary participant in the creation and management of content." The plan to close GTE Entertainment outright came after it was unable to find a suitable buyer.

The rights to Timelapse were obtained in February 1998 by the company Barracuda, founded by Michael Kaye and Mike Yuen of the game's original team. By that point, the title's global sales had surpassed 200,000 units, of which half were sold in the United States. It had been localized in Japanese, German, French and Portuguese, and been shipped in 30 regions worldwide. In the United States, the game's strategy guide had sold above 30,000 units.