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 videogame 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

To do: Of the two codes on the ScummVM wiki, only SputmDebug seems to work, and it only activates the debug keys. "Someone" should figure out what's up

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

Debug Rooms

Path Select

Accessible by warping to room 55, which is most easily accomplished by running the game in ScummVM and using the room command in the debugger. Clicking on the buttons alters the current game path (plot item locations and objects that are needed for puzzles).

Room Select

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

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 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 everything except sound playback 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.

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 presumably these are self-caricatures by some of the animators.

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

Storyboards

A few storyboards for various events snuck into the game.

Mr. Firebird's Lab

Graphic	Internal Name	Notes
Due to technical limitations on large GIFs, see the full-size animation here.	opening a	The first part of the intro, with Mr. Firebird explaining the Time Portal to Putt-Putt. Note how some frames were "axed" out of the final sequence.
Due to technical limitations on large GIFs, see the full-size animation here.	openingb	The Time Portal malfunction.
	putt launch	Putt-Putt entering the Time Portal.
	vortex	Glowing animation for the Time Portal in the storyboards.

Pep and the Pterodactyls

Graphic	Internal Name	Notes
	10-1	Pep being force-fed grubs …
	10-2	… and again.
	10-2a	The same, minus Pep.

Prehistoric Bridge

Graphic	Internal Name	Notes
	7-3 Help Wheel mutated	Putt-Putt helping Wheel push down the bridge.
	none	Some full-size test images of the fallen bridge and the various possible missing pieces.

Train Station

Graphic	Internal Name	Notes
	Enter 1 old	A lone storyboard sketch of Toby arriving at the station.

Miscellaneous

Graphic	Notes
	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 story names in the Silly Story Maker. A duplicate version also exists, perhaps corresponding to 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?

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. The game's animation data does some less-than-straightforward things in order to place all the graphics correctly throughout the song, so the animations shown here are just mockups of how these would look if they were placed in sequence as intended.

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 for animation notes, which were later erased without resizing the images to compensate.

Music

A few variations on used tracks are hidden in the music data. Note that these technically can be heard in the game, because the credits are programmed to play anything stored in the HE4 file at random once the "Time Continuum" instrumental ends, but that is just a happy coincidence; these pieces listed are otherwise heard nowhere else in the game, and it's extremely unlikely the player will hear any of these anyway due to the vast array of music that is stored in the HE4 file to begin with.

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 (though one of them actually is used) and one of Max Wellington's songs ("The elves got into trouble...").

Dialogue

Putt-Putt has a few lines of unused dialogue.

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 TextOn=1 to hegames.ini.

Revisional Differences

To do: 2002 and 2007 version differences.

1999 Version

To do: Look at this more thoroughly.

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

Additionally, the 2002 re-release from Infogrames made several more changes:

• The opening logos are replaced with the flashy Infogrames logo followed by the paper-flip Humongous logo


• The copyright date was removed altogether on the title screen


• There is a fade-in before the intro. According to a former developer, this actually was planned for the original release, but was scrapped when some computers did not support the palette animation.


• During the Time Continuum Song, the portal the history report originally flew into is now missing due to a bug


• The books in the background on the line "When you've returned, you'll know what you learned" from said song were originally a monochromatic blue; they were colorized for this release

The demo for this version added a few more changes on top of this:

• The line "I'm back in a brand new adventure!" was cut due to the game being five years old at this point


• Pep is no longer present, which removes the strange conflict with the line "These must be the places where Pep and all my things landed."


• When clicking on an inaccessible area, the cursor now disappears as Putt-Putt informs the player


• Originally when the demo finished, the game would just quit after the last spoken line. Here, the game cuts back to the title screen for a bit before exiting.

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:

To do: Probably lots more of these

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".