Time Crisis

Time Crisis, from Namco, launched a new era of arcade light-gun shooters in the mid-1990s, at a time when the genre was still dominated by games like Virtua Cop built purely around aiming and shooting. Its key idea was a foot pedal that let the player duck behind cover and reload - holding the pedal kept the character safe, releasing it exposed them to enemy fire. This cover-shoot-cover rhythm gave the genre an entirely new pace, and in the first game it followed agent Richard Miller as he rescued the kidnapped daughter of the president from a mercenary named Wild Dog.

The sequel, Time Crisis II, introduced the duo of Keith Martin and Robert Baxter and two-player co-op, cementing the series as an arcade flagship alongside Sega's House of the Dead. A PlayStation-exclusive entry subtitled Project Titan also appeared in between, tying the story of the first two games together. Time Crisis 3 then brought new protagonists, a choice of two weapons and a limited special weapon, without straying from the core formula.

The series stayed closely tied to arcade cabinets and the GunCon peripheral, yet it also transferred successfully to PlayStation and PS2, swapping the pedal for a button while keeping the same feel. Thanks to a simple but effective mechanic and a melodramatic story of terrorism and hostage rescue, Time Crisis became one of the genre's most recognisable representatives and defined what a modern light-gun shooter should feel like, even after arcades themselves later began to fade. Few later genre entries ever committed as thoroughly to that pedal-driven cover-and-shoot rhythm, which gave the series its own distinctive, easily recognisable place among arcade classics.