Meantime, a sort of sequel to Wasteland, was in development for a long time. A beta version was actually up and running on the Apple ][ when the 8-bit market took a nosedive. Interplay attempted to update and upgrade Meantime for the MS-DOS market, but after several attempts (contractor problems and other minor details) the project was scrapped. It occasionally rears it's head, but the project is currently not in development.
This is an excerpt from an Interplay FAQ document, and for quite some time, was about the amount of information you could get on this unfinished, unreleased game. On 1996-11-06 Chris Taylor said about it in an online chat:
We tried about four years ago to hire a contractor and finish Meantime. The whole thing fell through. Basically, the game is so ancient that it would cost too much money, time and resources to finish it properly. Basically, we would have to start a whole new game.
Bernard Assaf, the webmaster of the Wasteland Ranger HQ-Grid, mailed Chris about it and got the following answers:
- How protective are you guys of the Meantime source code?
- Very.
- I mean, is it forever lost to the archives?
- Yes.
- Does EA have any rights to it?
- No.
- Even though the Apple ][ platform died, why didn't Interplay rework it for IBM-PC platform?
- We tried.
All this can be read on the Meantime page of the abovementioned website. What it does not tell us anything about is the proposed story of the game.
On this issue, the veil was lifted a bit when Chris Avellone interviewed Bill Dugan, the producer of Meantime, for volume 8 of the Fallout Bible (October 2002):
Yeah, I worked on Meantime. Alan Pavlish was the lead on it while it was on the Apple II. Mark O'Green and Liz Danforth were designers on it. I produced the DOS version for a while. It was based on the Wasteland code. The great new thing was that Alan created a map editor (!), and the scripters/designers could actually create maps in it instead of having to know assembly language and use graph paper like on Wasteland.
The plot was that you would go all through time and pick up exciting personages throughout history with their own specialties. Clearly it was the inspiration for Bill & Ted's Big Adventure. Most of them ended with questionable fates and you had to rescue them, so you didn't mess up time by taking them along with you. You got to rescue Amelia Earhardt from a Japanese POW camp. There were plenty of characters who were just cool; Cyrano de Bergerac had maxed out Fencing skill. There was a group of bad guys trying to screw up time by slightly influencing various events, and you had to leap in and fix things. In one scene, Werner von Braun was about to be captured by the Soviets at the end of WWII and you had to get him into the party and help him escape. As I type this it reminds me of GURPS Time Travel.
There was a great piece of box art that was created, I remember. It had Albert Einstein on it; you got to recruit him into the party at some point, I think.
So the whole thing was built for the Apple II. If I remember correctly, probably 75% of the maps were done, then Liz Danforth quit, and then the Apple II and C-64 markets fell enough for Brian to cancel it. Then he had me try to bring it over to the IBM. We hired a contractor named Bill Besanceney to port it from the Apple II to DOS, and had an in-house artist do EGA graphics for it, and it went pretty slowly, and then Ultima VII came out with its 3D characters and lush graphics and I recommended we cancel Meantime with its top-down, non-animated graphics. It wouldn't really have had a chance.
(Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, so the correct title, was a 1990 game based on a 1989 movie with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, in which two high school boys have to travel back in time and collect "dudes" to pass a history test. It was developed and published by Capstone, so the reference to an "inspiration" is a bit mysterious.)
The interesting thing about this is that Meantime would have been less of a sequel to Wasteland than commonly supposed, less than Fountain of Dreams was, more something like Escape from Hell, the third game that used the Wasteland engine.
It is an interesting question whether the last statement of the interview is true, whether Meantime really wouldn't have stood a chance because of its top-down, non-animated graphics. It is true that at this time even the notoriously conservative Wizardry moved to something more lush, on the other hand the success of roguelike and ZZT games shows there are always exceptions to the rule.
