Holograms. The word immediately makes me think of cool sci-fi movies and not so cool real world tech, like reviving a dead musician and making them dance around a stage. But back in 1991 Sega was using holograms for a more noble purpose: Creating an arcade game about a time travelling cowboy.
Simply titled Time Traveller, also known as Hologram Time Traveller, is an arcade game that uses a Laserdisc and plays a lot like Dragon’s Lair. Which makes sense, Time Traveller was designed by Dragon’s Lair creator Rick Dyer. When it was released, Sega described the game as “The World’s First Holographic Video Game!”.
Similar to Dragon’s Lair, players watch a video and at certain points hit buttons to proceed. This is basically an early version of a quick time event. Unlike Dragon’s Lair hand drawn animation, Time Traveller used live action footage of actors wearing different costumes. The narrative involved a cowboy saving a space princess using time travel.
Technically, this isn’t really a hologram. Instead Time Traveller uses an optical illusion to display what appears to be holograms. What’s actually happening is that a hidden CRT is reflecting onto a large curved mirror. Regardless, it looks remarkably crisp and cool. If I was a young boy with coins in my pocket walking through an arcade back in the 90s, I would have been excited to play this thing.
Unfortunately for Time Traveller and Sega, the arcade cabinet was expensive and at the time fighting games like Mortal Kombat were all the rage. Sega actually converted some Time Traveller cabinets into a holographic fighting game named Holosseum. This was one of Sega’s first attempts at making a competitive fighting game. Sadly both holographic games didn’t find much success. But they sure looked cool.
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5 responses to “Sega’s Holographic Arcade Game Was Pretty Strange”
Remember seeing one of these at Timezone in Bourke street, Melbourne. Looked pretty simple and never played it.
I totally forgot about this! My local arcade had it and I thought it was amazing. Gameplay typical laserdisc almost non-existant but what a treat for the eyes it was at the time. It literally felt like it was from the future.
I remember this at the arcade when I was in Grade 10? At first, people used to crowd around it whenever someone played. At first.
After a while, it was like Emperors new clothes, where people quickly figured out it was a pretty crap game unfortunately. It looked neat but played terribly and was expensive as hell (2 dollars at a time where 60c was the new standard and 1 dollar was expensive). So it kinda sat in the corner, going unplayed in the end.
Sega then tried again with eternal champions. I bought it. I wanted so bad for it to be great I was in denial. It wasn’t.
I’m trying to build one of these at the moment, the spherical mirror is a challenge.
The one in our hometown arcade was always broken 🙁