Well, as impressive, ambitious, and hyped up we hope the game will eventually become, I feel it is only right to include some mention of the book series which it is based off of.  True, my royalties from sales actually helped pay for some of the initial production costs, and I would like to see more money like that, but even so, if you have some understanding of the books then I can imagine it would make playing the game a more rewarding experience.  It would also make solving the puzzles a bit easier too, in all likelihood.  And so, without further ado, I, Joseph J. Reinemann, present you with an extended history of:                    

 

 

THE ORIGINAL BOOKS:

Described as "works of genius", "an astounding mixing of multiple genres" and "bigger than your local deity" by absolutely no one who exists outside of my head, the books are really the center of Shadows of Time.  This is probably because, for all intents and purposes, they're all that Shadows of Time has got.  The first Shadows of Time book was written in 1998 and, two weeks after its completion, a sequel was released.  The titles of the books varied depending on which manuscript you looked at, which edition you had, and what day of the week it was, but eventually settled down to be Shadows of Time and Shadows of Time II: All Our Futures.  There would be pictures if not for the longing I have to deny their existence to whoever starts quoting them to me.  Soon after there was Shadows of Time III: Fall of a Titan, Shadows of Time III: The Last Titan, and Shadows of Time III: Death of a Titan, which were all in fact the same book, given different names in their printings because of a minor error in which I never bothered to actually put the title on the top of the manuscript.  The book was written mainly to capitalize on the fact that James Cameron had just released a rather popular movie about a passenger ship sinking, and I felt that I might be able to capitalize on its success while making fun of it at the same time.  Oddly enough, it worked, and Shadows of Time III: Death of a Titan was published in serial format for the school's paper I ran, a fairly easy task since no one else in the sixth grade seemed to have much interest in writing for it, and one chapter of the book was usually enough to fill up the empty space where submitted articles were supposed to go.  The success of the serial proved that the series had the ability of attracting interest in 7th graders.  Once it was finished, I ran Shadows of Time, then Shadows of Time II, and then Shadows of Time IV: A Time For All Things, which proved difficult since I was still writing it at the time.  This book was supposed to be the crowning moment of the series, explaining all sorts of loose ends and mysteries that I had subtly introduced in the series, as well as taking the readers to a place that I am not currently allowed to reveal any sort of details about.  When Shadows of Time IV was almost completed, I put aside writing for a while just in time for the beginning of June, 1999. 
You can say what you will about my earlier works, but you can't deny that I was certainly capable of churning the short volumes out at a much faster rate than I am today.

My writing was fairly infrequent after that, in fact it took me a few months to write down the final pages of Shadows of Time IV, and slowly I began to realize that I was slowly forgetting how to write the series.  Though I was understandably concerned at the time, I would later look back at the loss of what I had learned writing the first four books a amazingly fortunate occurrence.  Sometime before graduating from the 7th grade I started work on the first chapter of what I planned to be Shadows of Time V.  Well, maybe to be fair I should say I started work on a first paragraph to the book.  I put it aside, and then lost it altogether.  No doubt it is still somewhere in the memory of whatever computer I happened to be using at the time.  But, for whatever reason, the fact that I had even begun writing another Shadows of Time book meant that the time had come for a resurrection of the series.  True, there was the snag that I had killed two characters, blown up the Wells, and reduced the Amulets of Time to thick clouds of purple smoke, but I was confident I could work out a solution.  The book was the first thing of an appreciable length that I produced, and work on it proceeded into the first two months of my freshman year, when I juggled working on the new book and the publication of the previous four.  Titled The Return, the plot had so many twists and swerves that you would have thought there was a driver with a BAC of .5 at the wheel, but it was still a radical departure from the first four books, establishing a new set of rules, a new atmosphere, and new character relationships to keep the series fresh.

 

I still can't figure out how, after that, I suddenly got nostalgic.

Shadows of Time VI: Time Phantom picked up later, and at the time I was feeling a bit bitter towards the military for some reason.  The book was written in the old style of Shadows of Time, meaning it was short, vague, and not exceedingly good.  I can remember very little about it other than a lot of overt flirtation between John and Laura and the introduction of HIRC-1, and I have very few sorrows about the fact that with the sale of the one printed copy and the subsequent loss of its manuscript it has effectively ceased to exist.  Shadows of Time VII, VIII, and IX were intended to form something of a trilogy.  Entitled (respectively) Atlantis Minor, The Derelict, and Dimensional Diplomacy, the sub-series had its ups and downs.  Atlantis Minor was built around a concept that I always liked, and is therefore probably going to get a quite long and radical rewrite in a few years.  The Derelict had its moments, but was in the end a bit too short, confusing, and pointless for my tastes.  No copy of this book was ever printed, and the bulk of the manuscript has, like Time Phantom, been lost.  Dimensional Diplomacy stood as the most confusing of any of the books, oftentimes having characters in two places at once.  The length of the volume could be blamed for much of it, since I was forgetting what I had written earlier, and it took me quite a long time before I actually read through it to find, to my horror, the mistakes I had made, which were now present in every copy that had been sold.

Shadows of Time X: The Blue Pearl fortunately made up for it.  I'm not sure if writing the 9th book had made me more fit to write long stuff, but it proved in the end to be one of the books that would end up setting the tone for the books that came not only after it, but before it too.  The book's plot was more straightforward, the technical aspects were believable, and most importantly the writing was actually ordered.  From there I went to write the short but very solid book Time Raider, and the subsequent depression that I got after writing it was alleviated by the start of Shadows of Time XII It's all Greek to Me, the first Shadows of Time book that was expressly intended as a comedy, which has unfortunately never been finished.

 

THE NEW BOOKS:

This category for the books includes the rewrites as well as the books The Blue Pearl, Time Raider, and what there is of It's All Greek to Me.  While I had been working on Shadows of Time X, someone who had bought a set of the books was commenting on how he thought that the first book in the series was not bad, but could be much better.  The complaints he had was that the book had a great deal of momentum through most of the story, but that it somehow seemed to fall off at the end.  More exactly, the plot seemed to trip, roll over, get tangled up, and drag just about everything else wit it near the end.  He also pointed out that the characters were less than believable, and in some cases a bit overly confrontational.  The suggestion had later been made that, perhaps, I should consider releasing a revised edition, in which I redid the ending and polished it up a bit.  Once I got writers block while working on Shadows of Time XII, I decided to go back and see if I could fix the first book up a bit in an attempt to get me back on track.  I've told the story many times about how I got a copy of the book, sat down with a pencil and a cup of tea, and read through the book two times, choosing bits that I wanted to change or get rid of, until I had reduced the entire volume to two or three random sentences and the first line.  Then I crossed out the first line and half of one of the random sentences.  Needless to say, it was far easier to start from scratch.  Since I had gotten used to working on a comedy in the months when there had actually been productive work going on with the twelfth book in the series, the new Shadows of Time soon began to define itself as a comedy as well, and a fairly good one at that.  Once that realization had been made, I had somehow become committed.  Shadows of Time went from being straight, cut and dry writing and suddenly became a science-fiction comedy series with the stated aims of making fun of every cliché possible.  John Roley and Tim Jackson, previously the intelligent leading characters who always knew what to do in a tight situation, suddenly became to ordinary intelligent guys who, after having the weight of the universe thrust upon them, didn't have the first clue about what they were supposed to do with it.  By the end of the rewrite process, Shadows of Time had been acknowledged by the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, received rave reviews from everyone who read it, and completely destroyed any chance it had of fitting the established continuity in the other books.

Faced with the problem of a book that did not match the established storyline, I did the only thing possible, and began to rewrite the entire series.  So far, it has been a most satisfying experience.  To give you a brief example of what the rewrite has done, allow me to present you with several side by side comparisons of passages from the revised Shadows of Time and the passages they were based on:

NEW BOOK:
Before John could even get his bearings he was pushed to the floor, followed closely by the person who had pushed him.  John was slightly surprised by this, and he almost tried to make a run for it before he realized exactly why he was on the floor.

OLD BOOK:
"Ouch."

NEW BOOK:
Before ISAC could finish, the man pressed the button on the tube.  John saw the familiar red glow of laser light reflecting off the dust as the beam shot through the sequence of mirrors and lenses, finally hitting a prism that split it into four separate beams, each of which hit a separate amulet.  Later, John and ISAC would compare memories and come to the conclusion that they had definitely not been hallucinating, but at the time they had both been more than willing to seek professional help.

OLD BOOK:
The

NEW BOOK:
"Blue."

OLD BOOK:
"Red."

And so on. 

Rewrites have since been completed for Shadows of Time II: Probable Outcome, which by all accounts outdid the first rewrite, and are almost completed for Shadows of Time III: Titan's Fall, by far the most effort anyone has ever went through just to tell one joke as far as I'm concerned.  Similar rewrites are planned for every other book in the series up to a point about half way through book 10. 

 

GAMES:

Though this game represents the first attempt to produce a large scale game based directly on the books, it is not the first adventure game to feature elements of Shadows of Time.  In fact, there are at the moment three S.o.T. adventure games:

Shadows of RON

A crossover between the worlds of Shadows of Time and Reality on the Norm, and the first Shadows game ever made.  Originally it was intended as practice for me to learn the AGS engine, but in time it began to grow, and after a week of work I submitted it for Beta Testing by one Dave Gilbert, who runs the RON site.  It's one of the few Shadows of Time related things I've done that works to emphasize the absurdity of the series, and I rather like the effect.  As far as John is concerned, the date for him is sometime after the period set in Shadows of Time V, possibly between books seven and eight.  Though it's not a very important detail, there may be one or two references to things that haven't technically happened yet, meaning that it, in its own way, is reshaping continuity.  There will almost certainly be references to it in the completed version of the latest game, so go download it at http://ron.the-underdogs.org, and while you're at it try some of the other games there.  What most of them lack in technical aspects they more than make up for in wit.

Shadows of RON 2: Deus Ex Machina

Started before it looked like there would be any other form of Shadows of Time game; this is the sequel to Shadows of RON, which was requested when someone on the forums said they would take a cheese grater to my character's head if I failed to produce more.  A far longer, more complicated game than its precursor, Deus Ex Machina will most likely be completed sometime in the summer.  It also uses a plot structure somewhat similar to what we're planning for the big game, with multiple player characters (John and Tim) that swap depending on your accomplishments in the game. 

SHADOWS OF TIME: THE ADVENTURE GAME

Actually, that's this one.  The most ambitious and well funded of them all.  Also, for the moment, the most incomplete, as you can see by the partially finished Wells bridge set above, complete with temporary chairs.  It’s not very pretty, is it?  This is much nicer.

 

 

 

COVERS:


Please remember not to judge a book by its cover.

Unless you like the cover, of course.

 

ORDERING INFO:

If anyone has actually gotten down this far and actually is still interested in reading more of what I write, there are two places you can go to get Shadows of Time.  The first and most obvious is the online store for the books: www.lulu.com/timestream/.  The second is the shameless merchandizing outlet filled with some really great and some completely useless stuff: www.cafepress.com/timestream.  Easy to remember, eh?

To see what we at Time’s Shadow Productions actually look like (and, even scarier, what we do in our free time) go to www.obeytrevor.com.