This Week In Retro: Time Killers (Patreon)

November 1992: Time heals all wounds—even dismemberment

by Diamond Feit

Violence and video games have gone hand-in-hand from the earliest days of the digital medium's existence. For decades, gaming's abstract graphics and surreal subject matter helped mollify the matter, but controversies about violence in games began as early as 1976 when Death Race hit arcades. With a cabinet adorned with images of the Grim Reaper and tiny headstones appearing on-screen whenever the player ran over a humanoid figure—officially identified in the game as "gremlins," not people—Death Race garnered national media attention for its depiction of vehicular gremlin-slaughter.

Of course, there's Violence (said with a furrowed brow and gnashed teeth) and there's "violence" (said wide-eyed and with a grin). Presentation matters: Mario's been killing common pests for almost 40 years now but my parents didn't blink when I played Mario Bros. Even Street Fighter II, a game where players beat each other unconscious, never raised many red flags because the characters are cartoonish stereotypes and, save for a flash of blood or puke, none of the fights have consequences. Ryu and Ken can shoryūken each other until the cows come home and they'll never even need a Band-Aid.

Yet as competing studios rushed to cash in on the Street Fighter II craze in the early 90s, they sought ways to make their creations stand out in the rapidly-overcrowding fighting game landscape. One obvious method was to lean into the inherent violence of the genre and provide an answer to the question lots of players already had on their mind: "what if Ryu could kill Ken?"

If you're at all familiar with video games, you probably already know that one 1992 fighting game successfully blended Street Fighter II action with enough blood and guts to start a multimedia franchise of its own: Mortal Kombat. However, Midway didn't have a patent on fights to the death, so Johnny Cage and Liu Kang weren't the only pixelated pugilists willing to take a life. 30 years ago this month, Incredible Technologies debuted Time Killers in arcades, a punch and kick gorefest that never reached the heights of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, but not for lack of trying.

You have to imagine the developers at Incredible Technologies patted themselves on the back for coming up with the name Time Killers, a beautiful pun that succinctly describes the concept of their violent video game. All the warriors come from different eras in history, ranging from the distant past to a few thousand years in our future. Players don't get any sense of who these people are or why they're traveling through time to slaughter one another, but Street Fighter II never explained why anyone competed in that tournament either.

Unlike World Heroes, another historical grab-bag fighting game released earlier in the year, the motley crew of Time Killers don't resemble any real people, only broad concepts. Players can pick from a caveman, a viking, an armored knight, a samurai, a punk with a mohawk, two different future people, and a giant mutant bug. Oddly enough, no one in Time Killers comes from the 20th century; the closest combatant to our present era is the mohawk-guy who comes from "New Chicago" in 2024.

Like Street Fighter II, a single-player session of Time Killers sends your character on a quest to battle each opponent on their home turf, but instead of hopping onto an airplane, you fall through a time portal. The stages don't have much more personality than the characters, lacking spectators or any sense that human beings actually occupy that space. Rather, the levels tend to have an assortment of ghastly decor in the background, such as heaps of dead bodies, severed heads displayed as trophies, or in the case of the caveman's area, a freshly-dead dinosaur. Talk about unrealistic: Thugg comes from Mesopotamia in 20,000 BC, millions of years after the dinosaurs all died out. Incredible Technologies should expect a strongly-worded letter from Neil Degrasse Tyson regarding this screw-up.

Then again, I don't suppose "realism" was a priority during the creation of Time Killers. Rather, the combat places an emphasis on spilling as much blood as possible. Every character in the game carries a bladed weapon, and after landing enough hits, you can lop your opponent's arm off. This does not stop the match or slow them down in any way; they merely cannot use said limb anymore. However, chopping off a second arm means robbing your opponent of their weapon and neutralizing their ability to block, yet the match continues as they may still attack with their legs or head.

Speaking of heads, Time Killers also lets you decapitate your foes, though it requires connecting with a special attack specifically aiming for the neck; heads don't simply fall off mid-match like arms do. Each character's quick-kill technique and range entirely depends on their weapon of choice, but the move carries significant risk as it leaves them wide-open for a few seconds should they miss. A much safer approach is to dizzy your opponent first with successive blunt blows to the head. A stunned fighter is a helpless fighter, and by getting in close and mashing all the buttons, you can perform an execution that cuts off their arms and head in a flash.

Note that murder will instantly win you the round but not necessary the match, since Time Killers remains a two-falls-out-of-three contest. Regardless of damage dealt or received, each fighter starts each round with full health and all appendages restored to working order. Should you take your opponent's head and the match at the same time, you get the satisfaction of delivering your win-quote to a corpse, their portrait on the results screen replaced with a bloody stump.

As a Street Fighter II homage, Time Killers successfully innovates on the formula beyond the superficial inclusion of graphic violence. Very few games in these early days of the genre assigned every fighter a different weapon to use, shifting the focus of the action from martial-arts to swords and axes. Time Killers also uses a unique five-button control configuration, with a dedicated input for each character's individual limbs and their head. I can't think of another fighting game that would devote 20% of its button layout to operating a person's noggin.

Ideas alone do not make a video game rise above the competition, however, and Time Killers does not fare well when compared to any of its peers, least of all the other blood-soaked fighting game of 1992, Mortal Kombat. MK has fewer playable characters (two of whom are identical twins) but it embraces its cinema-inspired roots with a detailed story for all seven kombatants, all while setting up a surprising amount of lore for the tournament and its champion. Whenever I played Mortal Kombat, I felt like I was participating in a brutal kontest of strength with real stakes. Meanwhile, Time Killers feels like a cheap slasher movie, one that delivers on its promise of grisly mutilation, but offers little lasting appeal.

For a game centered around traversing history, Time Killers failed to forge a worthwhile legacy of its own. A planned Super Nintendo port never materialized, while a Genesis version did not arrive until 1996 and reviewed rather poorly. The arcade original did sell well enough for Incredible Technologies to make a spiritual sequel called BloodStorm in 1994, dropping the time travel angle and setting the entire affair in a savage post-apocalyptic future. By that point, however, the Mortal Kombat phenomenon had exploded and no amount of impromptu amputation could draw the crowds away from Scorpion and Sub-Zero.

I don't dislike Time Killers because of its violence, I dislike it because its violence has no substance. For all the moral outrage directed at Mortal Kombat over the years, those first few arcade releases perfectly balanced shock value with engaging gameplay. We didn't keep pumping quarters into those cabinets out of sheer bloodlust, the games offered genuine entertainment. When dullards like Joe Lieberman decried violent video games "that glorify violence and teach children to enjoy inflicting the most gruesome forms of cruelty imaginable," he may have thought he was describing Night Trap or Mortal Kombat, but he actually came closer to summing up forgettable titles like Time Killers.

Ironically, I never encountered Time Killers anywhere in the United States but instead I found it in a French arcade in 1993 alongside Warriors of Fate. I know I inserted my share of francs into the coin slot and got pretty good at using Rancid, the chainsaw-wielding punk from the Windy City. I was still too young and too timid at the time to watch horror movies, so Time Killers served as a half-step towards experiencing taboo material. In hindsight though, I should have spent more time experiencing France; my money would have been better spent sampling local patisseries or wines instead of hammering buttons in order to see a few pixels worth of blood.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.