Achron, an RTS (if you must) game being produced by Hazardous Software (founded by the awesomely-named Christopher Hazard), fulfills every nerd's dream of being able to muck around with time travel as a weapon of war. It was unveiled just a couple weeks ago at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, and it's the kind of game that immediately sparks conversations beginning with "But what if you ..."
Built onto a simple (so far) RTS combat engine is the ability to move forward and backward in the timeline of the overall battle to change the past in order to outwit your opponent. Didn't like the way an attack turned out? Go back in time to before you issued the attack orders and change them!
The stroke of genius about what's been revealed so far is how well the time travel plays into your strategic thinking. Like any good sci-fi concept, they took the "what if" of how time travel could be used militarily and appear to be incorporating it into the traditional RTS thinking of terrain, unit and resource management.
This game will be one to watch as it develops, not only because it already seems like the gameplay will be mind-bendingly intriguing, but also because as a proof-of-concept it shows how time-travel may be able to work in a multiplayer setting.
