'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.

'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)

Titanic video game switch