14 Totally True Facts About Super Time Force Ultra

Hey everyone! Nathan from Capy here again. As you probably noticed, Super Time Force Ultra is coming to PS4 and PS Vita on September 1st, free for PS Plus members (and $14.99 for everyone else). The game is cross buy, has a Platinum Trophy, and lets you explode robots and/or dinosaurs and/or angels.

The last time I was on the blog, I shared our PlayStation-exclusive additions to the Super Time Force: President of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida, the traveler from Journey, and Sir Galahad from The Order: 1886. This time I am here to share a whopping 14 facts that you probably didn’t know about Super Time Force Ultra.

All of these facts are 100% true, 0% exaggerated, and 1000% awesome. Some are also really quite dumb.

Let’s dive in!

1.) Super Time Force Ultra’s main character and reckless leader, CDR. Repeatski is actually based off Capy co-founder Matt Repetski, right down to the earrings and certain verbal expressions. Matt, however, does not wear two eye-patches… we added those for character.

2.) Lou Don Jim’s laser sword is called a Light Saver. Repeat after me: Light. Saver.

3.) We worked on the game for the better part of a year before adding the game’s key feature: the Time-Out mechanic. Previous to that, time would automatically rewind to the beginning of a level only after the player had died. It took us awhile to figure out that this was seriously impacting the length and depth of level, enemy, and boss designs. It was also frustrating as heck. The addition of the Time-Out mechanic changed everything and ended up defining the game.

4.) After a successful debut of the Time-Out mechanic at PAX East, Kenneth Yeung (programmer/designer), Kris Piotrowski (Capy creative director), and Dan Vader (designer) celebrated by eating more than 100 oysters in a single sitting.

5.) Capy artist Vic Nguyen hid a 1-frame smiley face in one of the explosion animations that appears throughout the game. Players who are paying attention and slowly rewinding back through time can spot this happy subliminal message.

6.) We made a single, endlessly-scrolling, eye-scorching collection of Super Time Force Ultra GIF’s we call The Wall of Gifsanity. It is perhaps our finest achievement. Behold.

7.) Some of the characters that didn’t make the final cut: US Citizen Ninja, Robo Constable, Jesus, and Normal House Cat. There was also a character with a fully functional grappling hook as well as a “portal”-ing character. They were cut because they broke every single level in the game.

8.) The police antagonists that appear in the game don the name “SWAZ” rather than “SWAT” as a tribute to the late American actor Patrick Swayze. There is also a copy of the 1988 movie Tiger Warsaw permanently glued to the Capy fridge.

9.) All death screams used in the game were recorded by audio director Sean Lohrisch from inside his bedroom closet to reduce the chance of frightening his neighbours and/or having the police called on him. Sean himself screamed for the male cast, while musician 6955’s wife Kahori screamed for the women. There are also two appearances of the famous Wilhelm scream, both during boss battles.

10.) More than 20 different enemy types didn’t make it into the final game, including spin kicking ninjitsu priests, pogostick-riding football robots, werewolf mermaids, and blackhole fur balls from another dimension.

11.) A few of the reasons for the game’s Teen rating include one image that contains 2 pixels of “butt crack”, as well as the game containing numerous instances of “poo coils” (those are ESRB’s exact terms), and usage of the word “fudge.”

12.) Originally, the button icons used for the time rewind controls were the “play,” “rewind” and “fast forward” buttons that you see on a VCR. Then we realized that a lot of the players who will play the game probably have never seen a VCR. We then proceeded to feel pretty old.

13.) Dolphin Lundgren was originally called Soniq the Dolphin. He wore a pair of oversized red sneakers and shot out golden rings as his attack. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen. It was also pretty, pretty, pretty funny.

14.) The original game jam version of the game was called Super Time Squad, which had some fair-sized trademark-related issues. The team rallied around the new name, Super Time Force, partly because we wanted to make a version called Super Time Force Ultra… or STFU. Other names we were considering for the game were:

• Re/Run (in hindsight, this is a rad name!)
• The Endless 6 (when we thought we’d only have 6 characters)
• Timeliners
• Super Time Defenders (this didn’t abbreviate well)
• Space Heroes In Time (this also didn’t abbreviate well)

So there you have it. Tons of facts about Super Time Force Ultra, which comes out next week on PS4 and PS Vita. Whether you’re a PlayStation Plus member or not, do us a favor and check this bonkers game out on September 1st.

Kookabunga, folks.