Putt-Putt Travels Through Time

Once your series has a standard sequel and a game in space, the only sensible choice for the next entry is "game through time"...and so Putt-Putt Travels Through Time, learning all about cowboys, dinosaurs, and wizards of highly questionable historicity. He also discovers that, in a truly prescient vision of the modern gaming industry, the only video game in the era of flying cars and conveyor belt sidewalks is a crappy pseudo-3D Breakout clone. (It's not actually on a cell phone, though.)

Note: This game's subtitles are riddled with typos and inconsistencies with the spoken dialogue. Anything on this page labelled "Subtitles" is copied directly from the game, even if it appears to be in error.

Debug Mode
This game has a set of standard debugging features shared with many other Humongous games.

Room 55 (Path Select)


Accessible by warping to room 55 (room 55 in ScummVM's debugger). Allows any valid game path to be selected.

Room 53 (Room Select)


Accessible by warping to room 53. Clicking on a room warps directly to it.

Room 54 (Item Select)


Accessible by warping to room 54. Clicking on an item puts it in the inventory. Having some items precludes having others (e.g. picking up Pep disables the balloon maker, rope, and firewood).

Debug Options
Adding the line SputmDebug=1 to the hegames.ini configuration file enables a few keyboard shortcuts allowing control over various aspects of the game.
 * Ctrl + E: Brings up a series of dialog boxes that prompt for a variable number, give its current value, and allow it to be changed.
 * Ctrl + F: Enables "fast mode", causing most things (e.g. animations) to run as fast as the hardware will allow.
 * Ctrl + G: Prompts for a room number to warp to.
 * Ctrl + O: Prompts for the number of an object to place in the inventory.

Fun Zone Skip
The extremely annoying teleporter maze in the future's Fun Zone can be skipped by holding Shift while clicking on any of the buttons, no INI codes required. This even works on the last button, which is supposed to lead back to the entrance. At least someone remembered to mention this in the help file.

Unused Graphics
This game doesn't have quite as many unused graphics as Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, but there are still some interesting bits and pieces lying around.

Artist Easter Egg


This uncolored lineart is stored with the animations for the various creatures at the end of the desert. Its internal name is "Artists Hanging Out", so these are presumably self-portraits by some of the animators. (The animation is made up of several component pieces; this is just a guess at how they all go together.)



Here's what it looks like on the intended background.

Storyboards
A few storyboards for various events snuck into the game. Some of these are out of order in the data; they're rearranged here to be more or less in sequence, though the scenes differ enough from the final version that it's mostly guesswork.

Pep and the Pterodactyls
The same, minus Pep.

Sketches
Putt-Putt trying to push over the stone bridge.



A lone sketch of Tobias T. Train.

Time Continuum Notes






The animation data for the Time Continuum Song sequence contains quite a few duplicate frames that have labels in the margins indicating either their function or their order in the animation sequence. All of these have cleaned-up counterparts that are used in-game.

It's worth nothing that frames with unnecessarily large margins are fairly common in Humongous games. The leftover labels in this game indicate that these may have originally been used to make notes about the animation, which were later erased without resizing the image to compensate.

Miscellaneous


Placeholder save/load image for unknown rooms. Similar images exist in most Humongous games.



The background for the future's museum has some text from the artifact displays hidden behind the dashboard.



A placeholder graphic for unnamed stories in the Silly Story Maker. A duplicate version also exists, perhaps for the two partially completed stories.



This Squoosh background (the first in the data) isn't actually unused, but for some reason it's duplicated 25 times after the last unique background. Maybe more pictures were planned than the artists got around to drawing?

Unused Music
Additionally, several of the music files are present in duplicate: two from the medieval era, one from the Old West, and one from the future. There are also copies of the Time Portal music and one of Max Wellington's songs ("The elves got into trouble...").

Unused Dialogue
All of these are said by Putt-Putt.

The Silly Story Maker
Somehow, the Silly Story Maker ended up being quite the hive of unused content.

King Chariot Narration
Every line of every story was recorded in the voices of both the female narrator and King Chariot, but King Chariot will never ask for the stories "The Hero", "The Scale", or "Pajama Sam". As a result, his voice clips for those stories can never be heard.



In fact, because those lines aren't used, no one ever noticed that this clip from "The Hero" was mistakenly sampled at 44000 Hz instead of 11000 Hz like the rest of the game's dialogue. If it ever played in-game, it would be four times too slow!



Here's what it sounds like at the correct sample rate.

Unused Stories
Several unused stories are in the game data, in various stages of completion.

The Magician
Distracted by the [X], Merlin turned the King's [Y] into a [Z].

X: jester, fly, mouse, elephant

Y: crown, staff, throne, wife

Z: frog, martian or gorilla, ice cream cone, accordian

Narration

Recordings exist for both the female narrator and King Chariot, though only the former are presented here.

This one seems to have been mostly completed. It has voice recordings from both narrators and even some of the necessary lines for being requested by King Chariot, but there are no corresponding graphics. Note that for the third selectable word, the second choice is "martian" in the text but "gorilla" in the voice files.

Too High
The [X] is trying to get the [Y] up on the [Z], But it's too high

X: bear, troll, wolf, spider

Y: billy goat, three pigs, porridge, curds and whey

Z: picket fence, pile of straw, stone bridge, briar patch

Narration

As above, only the female narrator's lines are presented, though the king's are there as well.

Almost as complete as the Merlin story, although the story text seems rather rough and none of the King Chariot request dialogue exists. May have been scrapped because making "bear" one of the choosable words would have made King Chariot's request for "a story about a bear" ambiguous.

The Kids
The [X] kids are going shopping. They all want the [Y] that features [Z].

X: smart, tall, weird, hyperactive

Y: game, novel, magazine, movie

Z: Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, Luther, Putt-Putt

This one exists only in text form. Apparently, someone decided one blatant plug for another game was enough.

Freddi Fish/Spy Fox
More canned Humongous ads! These are listed along with the used story titles, right after "Pajama Sam". No other resources exist for either.

Removed Arcade Game?
One of the locations on the Room Select map is labelled "arcade game". Clicking on it does nothing, though. Instead, the button marked "arcade game 2" starts the Squoosh minigame. This suggests that at some point there were supposed to be two arcade games, or that the minigame was significantly reworked at some point and moved to another room.

Unused Subtitles
Most Humongous games have inaccessible subtitles, and this one is no exception. To activate them, add the line TextOn=1 to hegames.ini.

1999 Version
The 1999 rerelease made a few changes:
 * Title logo updated to include a link to humongous.com
 * Title screen copyright date updated
 * Unreferenced audio files removed

Miscellaneous
Many games produced after Humongous stopped allowing easy access to the subtitles have very sloppily done transcription. The text is often typo-riddled and sometimes diverges wildly from what's actually being spoken, apparently reflecting an earlier draft of the script. A few particularly noteworthy cases:

Note that "CarChat" was a radio program in Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, where it was itself a replacement for what the subtitles identified as "CarTalk".