Time travel's often viewed as a cheap, desperate tactic for storytellers, an all encompassing deus ex machina that both solves and creates a million different problems.

Hazardous Software founder Christopher Hazard came up with the idea for his time travelling real-time-strategy game, Achron, back in 1999, and spent the years after working out the kinks.

Turns out there were a bunch of kinks.

"There was a lot of balancing aspects that I don't think people fully appreciate that went into Achron," said Hazard.

In situations where Hazardous could have easily compromised its central mechanic, it didn't.

I spoke with Hazard while on a business trip recently, and already filed a story on the game's 10 years of development and involvement with our nation's military (no, our government doesn't have time travel), but part of our conversation never made it into the story. Hazard watched our Quick Look (it's below) and read the comments from all of us--including you.

He wasn't upset, since many of the observations had been echoed elsewhere before. Instead, he started explaining the reasons behind them.

One of the basic decisions we puzzled at was having to select all your units simultaneously to chronoport, letting you warp across the map, rather than just telling the commander to do so, as in other games.

"You wouldn't believe the amount of balancing and thought that went into that simple decision," said Hazard. "You can send something back in time, and now, if you wait until the arrival--let's say the arrival was a minute ago--if you wait until that falls off the timeline that was committed into the past and now you undo the departure, now you end up with a permanent clone of that unit--a permalone, as we call it."

But if movies and books have taught us anything, clones (and paradoxes) are an intrinsic part of time travel. Hazard didn't want to erase it, only to ensure cloning didn't break the game and make Achron an interesting experiment, rather than fun to play.

"Early on," he said, "we knew this would happen and we had a whole bunch of tools to mitigate it, but we didn't want to break that mechanic because it's so consistent in our engine, so we wanted to come up with economic ways to mitigate that."