About Meantime:

Meantime was a follow-up to the computer role-playing classic Wasteland by Interplay Productions and used the same game engine. The role-playing game's plot was centered around time traveling soldiers who's duty was to maintain the integrity of the timeline as we know it today. The game was being developed, at various stages, for Apple II and PC computers between 1988 and 1992 by most of the team who made Wasteland...(With potential for a port to the C64)

The Plot:

The plot was that parties of time-traveling villains were changing many important events throughout history.  Your mission was to go back to each instance where the bad guys visited, and thwart the bad guys by making sure that the important local event occurred the same way that it was supposed to in our timeline.  As a reward in most of these scenarios, the player got to recruit a famous historical figure into the party.

Recruitable characters:

Name:                                      Time Period:             Super Skill:

Cyrano de Bergerac                      1600s                        Fencing

Wernher von Braun                       1945?                        Engineering

Amelia Earhart                              1937?                        Navigation??

Albert Einstein                              1920's?                        Science

Al Capone                                   1930's?                           ??

P.T. Barnum                                1800's                            ??

Below is an Apple II based mock-up of the combat/recruiting screen.

Missions (Unknown order):

A) Rescue Amelia Earhart from Japanese P.O.W. camp.

B) Rescue Wernher von Braun from soviet capture and bring him to safety.

Mission Example: The end-of-world-war-two mission was that the bad guys tried to kidnap von Braun and bring him to the Soviet Union, which would have hurt American rocket research a lot and would have changed the course of the Cold War.  The Soviets would have landed on the Moon instead of the Americans. In this mission, you would arrive at about the same time as the bad guys and you were supposed to get into a gunfight with them, stopping the kidnapping.  Or you could recruit von Braun into the party and run to safety, and when you dismissed him from the party, dropping him off into the hands of the US Army, it completed the mission.

Below is an Apple II based mock-up of the traveling screen.

Why was Meantime never completed?

 When the maps used in the game were around 75% done, Liz Danforth quit the project (she wasnt an employee of interplay). This, coupled with declining Apple II sales, led Brian Fargo to cancel the project.

The Meantime project was revived around 1991 under the lead of Bill Dugan, with the aim of bringing the game to IBM PC-compatibles. A contractor was hired to port the program to MS-DOS, and an Interplay employee began work on EGA graphics for use in the game. Unfortunately, by this time the code was considered "ancient", causing porting to be very difficult. Bill Dugan finally recommended the cancellation of the project, after seeing the advanced (at the time) graphics of Ultima VII. It was felt that Meantime, which had a top-down perspective and no tile animation, had been overtaken by much more sophisticated graphic engines.

How much of the Meantime programming was completed?

There was an early rough version running on the Apple // (using the same basic engine as Wasteland), but it was not complete. There was a disk of Meantime source code for the Apple // 5.25" but it was bad.

At the time it was finally killed, the game was playable on DOS machines, still needed a lot of work to complete the port and get all functionality working, and something like 3/4ths of the maps were complete or mostly working; but even those maps were not actually polished enough to be shippable. The Apple II map editor was never ported to DOS. Part of the problem of the port, aside from lack of staffing resources, was that all the maps still had to be created and edited over on an Apple II, and then built, and then the built game files had to be moved over to a PC and tested there. The Apple II version of the game code itself was not maintained while those maps were being worked on. In general the developers needed triple the staff, and more producer attention.

Where are the Meantime development disks & materials?!

Interplay has the archive disks somewhere, if it hasn't sold off the physical floppy disks.

Special Thanks to the following people for contributing information:

Alan Pavlish

Bill "The Weez" Dugan

Rebecca Heineman

Chris Taylor

Meantime Web References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meantime_(video_game)

http://gtw64.retro-net.de/Pages/m/Creator_Meantime.php

http://wasteland.rockdud.net/meantime.html

Notable Sites:

My band, 8 Bit Weapon, released a Meantime themed CD EP featuring music inspired by the game.

http://www.8bitweapon.com/music.htm

Information Exchange:

In the meantime, please feel free to contact me if you have any new information here: 8bwinfo@gmail.com

Thank you :)