We've seen plenty of timelines that put video game release dates in order. And recently, we've begun making timelines that put video game news in chronological order. But what about the timelines inside the games? The years over which the game's story takes place? Has anyone ever chronicled those?
Now, someone has. Alex Jaffe, specifically, who has assembled more than 1,200 games into an impressive master video game timeline that tells us, once and for all, when our favorite games took place relative to one another.
It starts waaaaay back with TMNT: Turtles In Time, which jumped the farthest back in time to 2,500,000,000 B.C. (and also gets pretty far up to the year 2100AD). Then, it travels through scads of time-travel games—Chrono Trigger doesn't even go second-farthest back—through modern times (with a lengthy digression in the early 1940s for all those WWII games) all the way up to… can you guess? The Warhammer 40,000 games, of course.
It's a Herculean undertaking that, according to Jaffe, has taken more than two years to get to this point. In fact, the timeline itself loads inconsistently—you might have to wait a bit. Apparently a timeline of this size has tested the strength of the space/timeline continuum. The data below the timeline, however, is always there, and is fun to look through even if the timeline won't load. Jaffe says he's open to feedback, corrections and additions, and that if you see anything he's missing, to please email him.
Update: Awesomely (not really), traffic has brought the timeline down for the time being. Fortunately, you can read the whole thing in PDF form here. I'll update once the timeline is back up and running.
Turtles in Time: The Video Game Chronology Project [Preceden]