A couple decades ago, I was driving to GenCon (a non-computer gaming convention, for the non-geeks in the audience).  Magic: The Gathering was fairly new and really hitting it big, with the predictable objections:  The kids are neglecting their schoolwork, the kids are memorizing these cards instead of their schoolbooks, and of course the kids are being seduced into magic.  I had an idea for a CCG (Collectable Card Game) about time travel that might get around some of those objections:  The cards would be historical figures and events, so it’s educational!  Then I got to GenCon and saw there were about as many CCGs coming on to the market as there were people attending the convention, and realized the market was saturated and due for a collapse.  So my brilliant idea went back into the idea bucket.

This morning, it popped back out, but this time as a computer game.  So curious, what do people think of this:

Game is multiplayer, but playable on a browser or other lightweight systems.  (Yes, there would be an iPhone version.)  The players are heads of organizations trying to control time so their group “wins”.  The resources are:

Your Time Computer.  This makes up the interface to the game.  It identifies the focal points in time that need tweaking for your victory to be achieved, and shows the status/issues control to all other resources.

The focal points – this is an event/time period that needs to turn out a certain way for your goals to be achieved.  For example, the Lincoln assassination:  Booth is stopped and unable to fire, he shoots and misses, he shoots but kills Ms. Lincoln instead, he shoots and hits President Lincoln but Lincoln survives, he shoots and kills Lincoln but is caught in the theater, he shoots and kills Lincoln and escapes for a while, he shoots and kills and gets away cleanly, no one ever knows who killed Lincoln.  Each of these options affects the timeline, and is better or less good for your organization.

The Time Agents – members of your organization that travel through time, both directly affecting results and also working with contacts.  In the CCG, these would have been famous fictional characters (Phileas Fogg was the first one I thought of), but given IP, they’d have to be original characters.  Time Agents have time periods of expertise (one may be really good at dealling with the 19th century, less good in the 21st century) as well as skills.

Contacts – people in history that your Agents can hand assignments to.

This would take place in “real time”, you’d periodically check your Time Computer to see the state of things and issue some orders.  It’s not the sort of game you spend all night playing.  It’s the sort of game you spend 15 minutes on, about two or three times a day.

Is this worth pursuing?  Haven’t done any game development since the 1980s, it would be fun to get back into it.