Throughout the decades, there have been a handful of titles that have become synonymous with the idea of “arcade games.” Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Street Fighter 2, and the like. But if you grew up in the 1990s, you, no doubt, played a lot of light gun shooters with a wide array of quirky little plastic armaments you had to pick up (no doubt riddled with germs). While Time Crisis didn’t create the light gun game, it did perfect it — and an entire generation of games simply wouldn’t exist without it. One of the most innovative arcade games ever made, 30 years later, Time Crisis feels, ironically, timeless.
First released in arcades in 1995, Time Crisis, quite simply, blew its competition out of the water, for two key reasons: a striking sense of style and the singularly brilliant mechanic of the foot pedal.
Time Crisis had a bright and striking art style, easily drawing your eye if you’re perusing which arcade cabinet to play.
One of the defining factors of the Time Crisis series is an almost needlessly complex story that’s interspersed among all the intense shooting. It’s a bit like an anime-tinged James Bond or Die Hard, where you play as an elite agent named Richard Miller, infiltrating a medieval castle to rescue Rachel MacPherson, the daughter of the president of Sercia. Rachel was kidnapped by terrorists after MacPherson became the first democratically-elected president of the country, with the help of the global intelligence agency V.S.S.E. That setup gives you more than enough reason to blast your way through the castle, giving little thought to the villains you’re gunning down along the way.
The pulpy story setup plays right into Time Crisis’ heavily cinematic feel, weaving high-quality cutscenes in between its light gun gameplay. In 1995, it felt practically unequaled in terms of being an immersive arcade experience, the kind of thing that ate your quarters up just because you simply had to see where everything went.
Of course, it helps that Time Crisis is a blast to play, crisp visuals making it easy to spot enemies and light gun mechanics that feel simple and intuitive. But the secret sauce that makes the game pop is the foot pedal and cover mechanic, a genius invention that completely changed the way you approach these kinds of shooters.
Time Crisis gets quite creative with its environments, especially in how they utilize the cover system.
Every Time Crisis cabinet had a foot pedal attached at the very bottom, and by pressing it, you could shift in and out of cover. This cover system gave Time Crisis an integrally different feel from anything else in arcades at the time, a brilliant edge that added a dose of strategy to how you reload and face enemies. But it equally made the experience that much more immersive, perfectly complementing the more cinematic experience. Keep in mind, this is also years before cover systems would become a thing in console shooters — it was quite literally unprecedented in every way.
It says something about how successful the first Time Crisis was that it’s one of the few arcade series that stuck around for decades. Across 20 years, the series would release eight new games, with the last one being Time Crisis 5 in 2015. And if you walk into any arcade today, you’re almost guaranteed to see at least one Time Crisis cabinet — these games became staples.
Time Crisis is quite simply everything an arcade game should be: engrossing, riveting, and an absolute blast to play. Whether you play it for five or a hundred minutes, you’re going to have a good time. That incredible cover system would prove an inspiration for not just arcades, but shooters at large, and it’s hard to overstate how important this little arcade shooter became to gaming as a whole.
