Time Crisis at 30: how peekaboo with guns put cabinet gaming back on target

In the mid-90s, it was easy to dismiss video game arcade cabinets as being on their last life. Capcom may have shipped 60,000 machines to meet the demand for their worldwide smash Street Fighter II (1991), but the era of spending change to play games seemed to be over. There was a new console in town – the Sony PlayStation – and it was destined to become the first home entertainment unit to break 100 million sales.

But one cabinet looked set to challenge it. It featured a hero with a bad-ass attitude, a bomber jacket, a plotline that drew from gung-ho blockbusters and a revolutionary gameplay mechanic – one which combined the machine’s pedal and lightgun to help players duck and attack, like peekaboo with a sidearm. 

Time Crisis (1995) saw developers Namco take the rail shooter genre and push it from plodding speed into a blur. Determined to conquer cabinet gaming – their earlier sports simulator Alpine Racer (1995) had used machines fitted with handlebars to recreate the feel of the slopes – Time Crisis was a pistol game that rewrote gunplay. Unlike previous shooter hits such as Operation Wolf (1987) and Virtua Cop (1994), the game incorporated weapon reload time and physical blowback on the lightgun to drop you into an authentic movie gunfight, right down to the corny dialogue and no-frills plot. 

It worked at the box office, so why not in a game? Movie fans had paid $320 million to watch Eddie Murphy storm a mansion in Beverly Hills Cop (1984), rescuing Lisa Eilbacher with nothing more than a Browning 9mm. The following year, Arnold Schwarzenegger had been strong-armed into an island assault in Commando (1985), again mowing down bad guys to save his daughter. Time Crisis took aim and sought to make the same rescue scenario interactive.

In the game you play ‘one man army’ Richard Miller, who’s called to action when his intelligence agency employer VSSE oversees a coup in the fictional Sercia, deposing a royal dictatorship and installing progressive leader William MacPherson. However, the last heir to the outgoing regime, the dastardly Sherudo Garo, isn’t going quietly. He kidnaps MacPherson’s daughter and holds her hostage in an island fortress, hoping to force his replacement’s resignation. Cue bullets and bloodshed as Agent Miller crashes his way ashore in a speedboat filled with explosives, then ziplines into a warehouse – and the first of many gunfights.

This is where Time Crisis’s reload peddle and Namco’s arcade software show what they can do. Each screen begins with a cry of “Action!” followed by a ticking clock which will consume health points if it runs to zero. The only way to extend it is to shoot, duck, reload and re-aim. Clearing a screen of goons adds seconds to the countdown, and builds a life-saving (and, for your opponents, life-ending) rhythm as you cover and fire. If that’s not frantic enough, the enemies have their own unique survival instinct: they’ll reposition themselves while you’re crouched out of sight. 

It was an addictive smash which took off worldwide, and became a second cash cow for Namco fifteen years after Pac-Man (1980) went global. Two years on from its 1995 release – and after winning five stars from Edge-adjacent magazine Next Generation – it was little surprise that Time Crisis would be ported onto its rival game system the PlayStation, where it was given bonus story content (as well as assassin bosses armed with boomerangs).

The graphics were less silky than they’d been at the arcade – the frame-rate had to be slowed by 50% as part of the PAL conversion – but there was no doubt about it: to anyone who’d bought the GunCon plastic pistol on offer with Sony’s first console, Time Crisis was still the best bang you could get for your buck.

After it swept the world, films and TV seemed to borrow a few of Time Crisis’s ingredients. Run Lola Run (1998) was a thriller that offered ‘replays’ at the flame-haired protagonist raced in real-time to save her boyfriend. Fox’s 24 (2001) was the first mainstream TV show where each second felt vital to stopping the terrorists and saving the day. 

Time Crisis enjoyed a more direct legacy thanks to its sequels, which didn’t damage the original’s reputation as the greatest lightgun game of all time (and very possibly one of the greatest arcade games). If Time Crisis 2 (1997) felt more big-budget with its loose nuclear missile plot, it also delivered a crucial component that the original had overlooked in the shape of two-player co-op.

Time Crisis 3 (2003) added more weaponry. But by the time of part five in 2015 the franchise had gone back to basics with no console port and double cabinet pedals: an experience a little like driving an automatic. 

The impact of Time Crisis can perhaps be best measured outside of the franchise, and among the other games which sought to rethink gunplay as radically as Namco had done back in 1995. Superhot (2017) took the first-person shooter and added a delay where bullets freeze as long as you stay still: a literal how-to in staying cool under fire. The long-running Metal Gear franchise contains traces of Time Crisis, encouraging you to cover as much as it does draw your weapon. The most recent entry, Delta: Snake Eater (2025), even rewards laying waste to every Kerotan frog on the screen to advance you towards the all-important stealth camo.

Given the current popularity of retro arcade cabinets and the recent acclaim for revisionist shooters such as Terminator 2D: No Fate (2025), maybe Richard Miller will one day travel back to Sercia – (light)guns blazing.