"So Sierra pulled me in the office last year--with seven bugs left to fix on TimeShift--and said, 'If we gave you a year, what would you do with that?'

I said, 'Are you fucking kidding me? I've got seven bugs, let's put the fucking thing out tomorrow. I'm sick and tired of fucking crunching. I can't handle hundred hour weeks for another year.' And Martin Tremblay, who had recently come on from [Ubisoft], said, 'No, Kyle, I really believe we can do something greater than what we're doing now. What would you do?'

"Well I said, 'I'd scrap the physics system, get rid of this Meqon and put in Havok. I'd kill off the first four levels of the game, because we made the classic video game mistake of doing the beginning first and the end last, and the end is great and the beginning is weak. All these FMVs we paid for, I want to get rid of them. I want to get rid of the story, I want to get rid of the style guide, I want to get rid of the weapons, I want to get rid of the menus, I want to get rid of the HUD, I want to get rid of the suit. I want to get rid of the main character; people aren't identifying with him.' I just went down this list. I was kind of going after that list so aggressively that I was kind of hoping people would say to just release the game tomorrow, and then I could be done with it. But he goes, 'Okay. Let's do that.'

"There was a little bit of shell shock for me--a lot of shell shock. And now we're doing it."

Thus began the current--and, as director and producer Kyle Peschel surely hopes, the final--chapter in the saga of Russian developer Saber Interactive's long-delayed chronology-warping shooter TimeShift, as described to me by Peschel outside of the W Hotel in San Francisco. Originally set to release in 2005 and now planned for this fall, the game gives players the ability to stop, slow, or reverse time while attempting to survive in its war-torn future environments. In the game's fiction, a scientist named Krone is contracted by the United States government to perform time travel research. As Krone progresses deeper into his work, he steals a prototype time travel suit, and makes a jump to an unknown place and time. The player, also employed by the government, is given a more advanced military-grade revision of the suit and sent in pursuit. After making the jump, it becomes clear that, in his new era, Krone has used his newfound technology to establish an oppressive fascist regime--and, of course, it is up to the player to not only put things right but to simply survive.

TimeShift has switched publishers (from Atari to Vivendi subsidiary Sierra), switched platforms (from Xbox and PC to Xbox 360, PC, and PS3), switched visual styles (from steampunk to gritty oppressive future), and switched innumerable control- and design-related decisions, but it has not switched its producer. Peschel described to me how he started on the project back at Atari, and how he managed to stick with it when it was dropped as a result of that publisher's well-publicized tumultuous financial situation.

"TimeShift was picked up almost four years ago almost as a value title," he explained. "When it was originally picked up by Atari, I had just come off of some other first person shooters. It was kind of opportunistic--let's take a chance on these guys in Russia. So I sat down and started looking at the game said, 'You know, I think we could really do something with this,' provided we really built the mechanics and made it not gimmicky, focused on an interesting art style like steampunk--set it apart from the myriad of things. So we started rolling with it, and got about done with the Xbox [version], and I sat down with [then Atari CEO] Bruno Bonnell and all the execs at Atari, and they said, 'So, Kyle, can you make this game for 360?' I'm like, 'What, am I a fucking genie now?' They say, 'No, seriously, it's for 360 now.'

"I say, 'Okay, I'm sure we can get that out.'"

That was to be the first time the game would undergo large-scale redevelopment. Soon, however, Atari's funding started to dwindle in the face of falling revenues, and in January 2006 the team was pressured to get a demo released quickly. Internet response illuminated some of the game's major issues, some of which were a result of the game being quickly ported up to target then-current hardware, and some of which went as deep as the game's perhaps poorly planned visual style.

"When you get something in that many hands, you listen to the feedback. I'm making games for guys like me, not for corporate America. I mean, I work for corporate America--I don't want to sell it like I'm the fuckin' hero of gamers everywhere--but I'm cognizant of what people are saying. I was on Shack reading the comments and, reading between the lines, people were saying basically, 'I really like some of what they're doing, but this steampunk shit is ass. Look at this fucking knuckleduster thing, what the fuck is that? It's all confused.'"

Soon after, Atari announced that it would be shedding much of its development to help reduce expenditures. TimeShift was put up on the auction block, and Peschel quit his job to go work for Vivendi's Sierra Entertainment label. "Within a day," he recalls, he was approached by management with the possibility of Vivendi acquiring TimeShift from Atari and reassigning him to the project. At the time, Peschel was working under industry veteran Drew Markham, who founded Gray Matter Studios, designed Xatrix's Kingpin: Life of Crime, and produced Gray Matter's Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Markham saw, as Peschel had when the game was first signed by Atari, that TimeShift had more potential than it was demonstrating, so Peschel went back and started rethinking major aspects of the game.

"I changed the storyline up at the last minute, and that's when we brought in [voice actors] Dennis Quaid and Michael Ironside and all those guys," he recounted. "A funny thing happens when you rewrite the story: you pay attention to everything. I was thinking, 'Fuck, X isn't working, Y isn't working, I wish I could do this.'"

That was when, at seven bugs away from completion, Peschel was called into Sierra's offices and was told that he had another year.

Turn the page for more on TimeShift's evolution, and for impressions of its current build.