Description Time Crisis is a light gun shooter arcade game, developed and released by Namco in 1995, and the first title to be released in the series of the same name. The game differentiated itself from other light gun shooters of the time by incorporating a pedal that controls when the player character takes cover to reload and avoid enemy fire. Players have a limited amount of time to clear each section by defeating enemies.

Time Crisis is a rail shooter similar to Virtua Cop in gameplay style. The player moves automatically, using the light gun to eliminate appearing enemies, after which he can proceed to the next screen. The stages typically culminate in boss battles. The player can also press a button to make Richard dive for cover. However, using this feature too much might result in expiration of the time limit imposed on each screen.

The game's story focuses on Richard Miller, a secret agent, who is sent to rescue a kidnapped woman from a ruthless tyrant seeking to reclaim control of their former country from a new regime.

Development A port of the game for the [Sony] PlayStation was released in 1997, as part of a bundle coinciding with the launch of the Guncon light gun controller, and featured a add-on pack of additional stages that are set after the main story.

Though both the arcade and PlayStation versions were developed internally at Namco, none of the arcade development team had any direct involvement with the PlayStation version. Since the PlayStation's CPU speed is much lower than that of the System 22 arcade hardware, the team reduced demands on the PlayStation CPU by cutting the game's frame rate in half, reducing the number of polygons used, emulating the real-time lighting by coloring the polygons one-by-one, and delaying the appearance of enemies so that only a certain number of enemies could appear on-screen at any time.

The development team took photos of hotels and factories in the Tokyo area as reference for the PlayStation mode's hotel design. To make the large areas in the hotel work on the hardware, the team left the portions of these areas not visible to the player unrendered. Three planned sequences - an outdoor restaurant, a missile room explosion, and a boat race - were left out because the team eventually realized that creating them was not practical, at least not within the time they had to complete the PlayStation version. New music was recorded for the Special Mission mode by Tatsuro Tani and Tomoko Tat2, using a "synthesized orchestra" of 50 individually synthesized instruments.

Legacy The title was also released exclusively in Japan for the PS2 in 2002, under the title of Gunvari Collection, which includes Gun Bullet, Gunbarl, Gunbalina (these games are known as the Point Blank series outside of Japan). There are two versions of the collection available: a standalone version, and a boxset which includes the collection and a Guncon 2 lightgun.

Sequels The game proved a commercial success and spawned a sequel, Time Crisis II, in 1998, and a spin-off title, Time Crisis: Project Titan, in 2001.

Alternate Titles "化解危机" -- Chinese spelling (simplified) "タイムクライシス" -- Japanese spelling