Whether you're trying to break into a room, chatting with passengers, or simply staring absent-mindedly at a tea tray, the game treats each action with the same intensity.
It helps create an uncanny and oppressive atmosphere that permeates Adventure Out of Time. Despite often-shaky accents, this digital ventriloquism is weirdly effective. The actors had their likenesses scanned to a computer and animated before being dubbed over with dialogue recorded by Nelson's friends at the BBC. There's Buick Riviera, a Blackjack aficionado in the smoking room John Smethells, the uptight ship steward a scouse lift attendant stationed near the grand staircase and the psychic Leyland Trask, who offers hints using his supernatural abilities.Īll of these roles were brought to life by real actors, many of whom were Knoxville locals and part of a theatre group that also provided the costumes. Occasionally you get into a first-person fistfight, but these instances are pretty rare, with the game mostly made up of exploration and puzzle-solving.įrom playing Adventure Out of Time as a kid, I mostly remember exploring the ship and talking to the oddball characters. You navigate the ship by using the arrow keys and interact with items and passengers by pressing the left mouse button and either dragging or selecting from a list of options. So, on the way back to Knoxville from New York, I was reading an article in the Economist about the Titanic and it mentioned that the ship had sunk in under two and a half hours."įor the most part, Adventure Out of Time controls like your standard 3D point-and-click adventure. "They had two toddlers at the time, and my sister-in-law… was intrigued with these new CD-ROM games, but she had heard they take forever and she didn't have all that much time. "I came up with the game while flying back from New York where I'd been visiting my brother and his wife," Nelson says.
That ticking clock was meant to make the game more approachable for time-strapped players. You only had a finite amount of time to accomplish this, however, with certain tasks moving the clock closer to the ship's inevitable sinking and the mad dash to escape the wreck. To obtain the perfect ending, you needed to find four MacGuffins, including a valuable copy of Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát, some diamond jewellry, a hideous painting concealing secret war plans, and a notebook with the names of Russian revolutionaries. Given a second chance he's determined to stop the trade from happening, in the hopes of steering Europe away from World War I. Carlson had actually been aboard the Titanic in 1912 to prevent the exchange of stolen war plans, but failed his mission the first time around. The game starts with Carlson looking over old newspaper clippings in 1942, when an explosion sends him back in time to the Titanic's final days (see, history can be exciting). In Titanic: Adventure Out of Time you play as Frank Carlson, a disgraced civil servant.
TITANIC VIDEO GAME SINKING MOVIE
"They were obviously searching for something that could be copyrighted, but they obviously couldn't find anything because the Titanic is a historic event."Īside from the ship, the game and the movie didn't have much in common. "I still remember being at E3… and having all these Hollywood lawyers rush over and stare at our demo reel," Nelson says. (Image credit: Cyberflix) (opens in new tab)