Time Travel Locations
and Destination Years
The story begins in a garage where you have built a time machine. It is a hack-job machine of sorts, built from loose ends and spare parts, but it works well. Take your hand-held travel device for peace of mind, and step into the time machine to travel to a choice of several destination years. Each destination year has a story – perhaps you will explore a small open-world environment, or maybe you will be confined to detailed interior rooms where you must piece together the past.
Various Paleolithic art can be found in Chauvet and Lascaux caves in France. Although the exact purpose of this artwork is unkown, many archaeologists believe the paintings are more than just decoration. Rites of passage into adulthood and shamanistic rituals are some theories. The creation of Paleolithic art represents the earliest stages of mankind’s need to tell his own story.
Pompeii was an ancient Roman city on the coast of Italy that met a destructive end in 79 A.D. when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearby. The town, along with neighboring Herculaneum, was buried in volcanic ash. Like a time capsule, many artifacts have survived to this day, including a large number of frescoes that give us details of daily Roman life. As a matter of interest, plaster casts were made from the cavities left from the decaying dead.
Beginning in the year 793, Christian monasteries along the coast of England were subjected to raids by Vikings from the north. These Anglo-Saxon monasteries served to spread Christianity throughout Britain in a time when the religion was just beginning to take hold. Some of the best known medieval texts, such as “Caedmon’s Hymn” and Venerable Bede’s “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People” were written by these Anglo-Saxon monks.
The plague known as the Black Death devastated medieval Europe during its first outbreak between the years 1346 –1353. There were an estimated 75 to 200 million deaths as a result. The first symptoms of the plague were large boils or buboes on the neck and armpits, with the victim typically dying from suffocation within a day or two. In the years of the outbreak, it was commonly believed that the plague was spread by a pestilence in the air, but it is now suspected that the plague was carried by fleas living on rats.
During Prohibition in the United States 1920 – 1933, the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages was illegal. Establishments known as speakeasies served illegal drinks, often with the looming threat of police raids. In order to circumvent the law, the speakeasy would charge a customer to see an exotic attraction, such as a “blind tiger” or a “blind pig,” then serve the customer a complimentary alcoholic beverage. Jazz music, organized crime, and multi-cultural forms of entertainment flourished during this time.
The Nazi air force, called the Luftwaffe, struck England furious blows early in World War II. Beginning in 1940, the Luftwaffe bombed London for 57 consecutive nights in what became known as “The Blitz” – taken from the German word for lightning. These nightly air assaults in England posed a great threat and soon led to food rationing in Britain. During the Blitz, English Prime Minister Winston Churchill bolstered national strength even while the bombs fell overhead.