Video Game / 60 Seconds!

A peculiar sort of Survival Game, 60 Seconds! has you play as Ted or his wife Dolores, who are the parents of Mary Jane and Timmy. Life is all fine and dandy, until a bomb-warning siren goes off. Good thing you have that bomb shelter installed! You now have 60 seconds to get as many resources (and family members) as you can and make it to the shelter before the bomb hits and everything goes to hell.

Of course, that's not all. Once you get down into your shelter, you've got to wait for rescue. During that time, you'll have to keep you and your family alive and healthy by managing their food and water, along with keeping a first-aid kit on hand to treat any injuries or sicknesses, and most importantly, having or getting the necessary items to be rescued or otherwise make it out of the shelter and the apocalypse in general.

Developed and published by Robot Gentleman Studios, the game was originally released in May 25th, 2015 on Steam, where its page can be found here. It was later ported to the Nintendo Switch on December 18th, 2017.

A sequel titled 60 Parsecs! was announced on October 6th, 2017, and can be summed up as 60 Seconds! in space, where instead of waiting for rescue in a nuclear apocalypse, you play as a space captain from the Astrocitizen Program who has to find a new planet to stay in when Earth gets destroyed. It was released on September 18th, 2018.

An Updated Re-release of the game, titled 60 Seconds! Reatomized, was released on July 25th, 2019.

---

TO THE TROPES!:

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: One would expect the owner of a personal fallout shelter to have it fully stocked sooner than just a minute before a nuke falls, but then we would only have half of this game.
• After the End: The game deals with a nuclear apocalypse, so this is a given.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing the various challenges unlocks hats and item skins that allow you to customize the family and items' look without any gameplay effects.
• Apocalypse How: The nuclear apocalypse during which the game is set in is of the Societal Disruption kind, with potential shades of Societal Collapse. Its extent could be City, Regional, or even Continental—since we never see the scale of devastation outside the shelter, we can't know.
• Apocalyptic Log: The events of the family's survival are told through this trope on a journal.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Played for laughs.
  • It's possible to use ammunition to cure a family member's wounds. Not by using it to cauterize a wound, but rather to "kill the smell".
  • Bug spray can be used to make drugs and refill the first aid kit. How this is managed in a room with nothing in it but four stools, a pair of tables, a cabinet and some other stuff that wouldn't be suitable as ingredients is never explained.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Most of the game's events utilize a lot of the common tropes associated with radiation. Glowing spiders, instant mutations, contagious mutations...
• Birthday Episode: Mary Jane and Timmy can have their respective birthdays as in-game events, where the player can choose one of a set of items to give either of them. Their sanity decreases significantly if the player doesn't give them any of the items.
• Bloody Handprint: One can appear on the shelter's wall, usually if you choose to raid another group's bunker. To quote a Let's Play video from Markiplier:
  "If you were curious why there's a red blood handprint, it's because I raided a retirement home and stole food from old people! I'm a good person!"
• The Colored Cross: In the game's initial release, the Medkit was white with a red cross. For unexplained (but presumably obvious) reasons, an eventual update changed the cross's color to green.
• Cosy Catastrophe: Downplayed, but it's made evident over time that while life is far from rosy after the nuclear war, it's not all bad. There's still a functioning government somewhere, periodic air drops, a chance of being rescued and even music played over the radio if you're lucky.
• Creepy Cockroach: The scary glowing giant (cock)roaches that are possibly as large as a cat.
• Curse Cut Short: Milder curses like "damn" and "hell" are all over the script, but stronger ones are censored this way, such as: "Ted seems to be doing alright, even though the world has gone to sh... a crappy place."
• Deadpan Snarker: Of all things, the journal can be this at some points.
  "If there was anything to report about Dolores, this is where it would've been written."
• Ding-Dong-Ditch Distraction: In an event involving someone knocking on the shelter's door, there's a chance that the ones knocking will turn out to be a couple of pranksters who are gone by the time the family opens up.
  We opened the hatch, but there was nobody there. Damn pranksters making jokes even after the apocalypse.
• Dysfunction Junction: The entire town the family lives in seems to be this beneath the idyllic facade, even After the End.
• Eagleland: The game's setting is mostly a parody of Type 1, with a few sprinkles of Type 2 mixed in for good measure.
• Fallout Shelter Fail: The shelter is built well enough for the family to survive the nuclear attack and the aftermath, but they didn't stock it with the necessary supplies ahead of time. If you do not get enough supplies or missed some key items you've considered at the beginning of the game, then you're in for a rough time: you'll have to send family members out to scavenge, and the ones who stay behind might go insane from boredom. The shelter is pretty much destined to fail sooner or later, so your only chance is to last long enough to get one of the good endings.
• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter: At the beginning of a normal game, the air sirens for a nuke begin to sound once the minute-long timer begins, and the player has to fill the house's underground shelter with supplies, items and family members while assuring that the scavenging character is also able to enter it by the moment the timer ends.
• Festering Fungus: The family may find a large amount of fungi growing on one of the shelter's walls in an event, with you being given the option of making them eat it or just leave it. If they proceed to eat the fungi, they may either find it healthy for them to take (with every member's hunger being replenished as with 1/4 of a soup can), or stop with it when one of the members gets sick.
• Game-Breaking Bug: If you're really unlucky, someone can die of something they shouldn't have, like dehydration when you gave them water not too long ago.
• Game Hunting Mechanic: In an event (which requires you to have the rifle and ammo beforehand), a herd of mutated animals stampede around the shelter, and the family considers to hunt them for food. Should you proceed with that, the most common outcome is that you won't get or lose anything. However, you may get three soup cans, and you could lose the ammo or the rifle; at worst, one of the members can die from getting attacked by one of the animals (referred to as a "velociraptor" in such case).
• Giant Spider: Possibly the "giant" spiders that are sometimes mentioned, although their exact size is unsaid.
• Go Mad from the Apocalypse: The game has a sanity mechanic, where the family members may go insane in the fallout shelter due to lack of mental stimulation, hardship, and stress brought on by the loss of loved ones. Effects of insanity include characters talking to sock puppets, hearing voices, smashing supplies out of rage or paranoia, and eventually wandering off into the wasteland on delusional (and suicidal) quests.
• Go Mad from the Isolation:
  • The fewer people are in the shelter, the higher the likelihood that the ones in there go insane. Considering you'll have to send members to scavenge eventually, and each expedition carries the chance that the scavenger will not return, this is all the more reason for you to take the whole family.
  • This is especially the case if you decide to leave behind all family members as Ted, to which he'll immediately go insane after the first day and is guaranteed to wind up either dead or running away within the next couple of days, causing a near-instant game over.
• Good Feels Good: Doing good deeds for other survivors restores sanity for the members.
• Guide Dang It!: Unless you've read an unofficial wiki for the game, you'll probably have no idea what the use of bringing items with a member on expeditions is. Bringing certain items with said member can trigger events to increase the chances of getting what you need. For example, bringing the ammo can cause an event in which the scavenger uses it to blow open a medical cabinet at a hospital, obtaining a first-aid kit but losing the ammo in the process.
• Handwave: One potential journal entry on the first day lampshades the lack of supplies in the shelter by saying the family always found better in-the-now uses for them, like needing the shotgun to deal with pests or having a soup dinner party, though that doesn't explain why restocking the emergency supplies wasn't top priority.
• Heroic Sacrifice: If someone at the door turns out to be raiders, or if you know they're raiders but take no action against them, Pancake (if you have him) will chase them off, but you'll never see him again.
• Homeschooled Kids: Parodied in an event where Dolores considers to homeschool Mary Jane simply because she can't spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" right, with you being given the option to allow Dolores to proceed. For some reason, there's a rare chance for you to get a random item for choosing "yes", despite the correspondent journal entry not even mentioning such a thing to happen.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: The wide and stout Ted and his rail-thin wife Dolores; this actually affects the scavenging portion, too, as Ted requires one more inventory slot to hold compared to Dolores. Inverted with their children.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Each level of difficulty is named after a nuclear bomb.
  • Little Boy (Easy)
  • Fat Man (Normal)
  • Tsar Bomba (Hard)
• Improbable Infant Survival: If Ted or Dolores, the parents, go without a needed resource for too long, they die, but if Timmy or Mary Jane, the kids, go without them, they're said to "run away".
• It's Up to You: In the opening resource-gathering portion, only Ted/Dolores does any work to stock the bomb shelter; the rest of the family has to be forcibly dragged along, and they don't even help carry anything.
• Knight in Shining Armor: One event features two of these, on a quest for a grail, asking to look at a map for directions. If the family grants this request then the knights give them a powerful tool in return. If the family refuses, or doesn't have a map, then they leave before insisting that the family stinks of elderberries.
• Lethal Joke Character: Mary Jane tends to be the least liked of the family among fans, since she consumes the most resources, takes more space than Dolores and Timmy when carried, is sometimes involved in events/options with negative results or effects, and takes a long time to return from expeditions, usually with bad results and a low chance of survival. It gets to the point where some players just decide to leave her. However, if you ignore the "radioactive spiders" or "pipe leaking green goo" events, she can become a mutant that doesn't need water (though she'll need food more often), can easily drive off raiders, can't get sick or injured, and will always return from expeditions unharmed.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: If you choose to raid your neighbors:
  We are now richer in some supplies, but for some reason we don't feel very good about it... let's just never mention this whole thing again.
  We had to do this for the family. It HAD to be done. We really don't want to mention it again. How about we talk about something else. Soup, perhaps?
• Live Item: The other three family members have to be grabbed and dumped into the shelter just like any of the other provisions in the house.
• Mutants: Mutates, actually.
  • You can encounter a person who mutated to have "several fully operational hands" and he brings information about a camp of other mutants.
  • Mutant Mary Jane.
• Neglected Sidequest Consequence: Zig-zagged. Sidequests will often allow you to create a new path to an ending, and ignoring them makes you lose that opportunity to win. However, if you spend too many resources while completing them, you might not have enough for the family. A lot of events are mainly luck-based, where they could either provide you with what you need to accomplish an ending, or lose resources, inflict negative status effects or at worst kill a member. Specific sidequests include obtaining Sharikov the cat, who can lead you to a good ending but keeping him too long leads to a game over, and the events that acquire Mutant Mary Jane, who can be a Game-Breaker assuming you can feed her and manage her sanity.
• Nerf: A patch reduced the chances of Mary Jane turning into a mutant.
• Nobody Poops: Averted.
  • The journal entries repeatedly mention "the bucket in the corner", including an event where Ted and Dolores argue over whose turn is to empty it.
  • If Ted goes insane, he may destroy the map, mistaking it for toilet paper.
  • In an event where the family considers if they should banish Timmy from the shelter after finding out he has "propaganda books", they state in the entry for the "no" option that they'll use the books as toilet paper.
• No FEMA Response: Averted. Despite the nuclear war, not only is there still a surviving government, but there's still functional civil and military services, including air drops that the family can retrieve. Indeed, one of the good endings involves being rescued by the military.
• Non-Standard Game Over: In the scavenging section, if your character isn't next to the shelter's hatch when the time expires, then the bomb will go off, and all Ted/Dolores can do is duck and cover.
• Only Sane Man: The town's police, which managed to survive the apocalypse as well, seem to view themselves as this. Except for their deluded schemes to Take Over the World, seeing the firemen as enemies.
• Post-Apocalyptic Dog: Pancake.
• Post Apocalyptic Gasmask: One of the safety items is a gas mask, which is highly recommended for characters who exit the shelter to go scavenging, as there's an extremely high risk of them falling sick or failing to return without it. Said risk becomes lighter once you're informed that the fallout outside is mostly gone.
• Radiation-Immune Mutants: Mary Jane, should she be bitten by a radioactive spider or if the pipes leaking green goo are ignored.
• Randomly Generated Levels: The layout of the house is different every time one plays, with the rooms in different positions; for instance, the fallout shelter's entrance can be sandwiched between several rooms in one playthrough, and in another it can be next to the outside door. There are still some patterns that it follows, however, such as the bathroom and shelter being always on opposite ends of the hallway.
• The Remnant: The government and military are implied to be this, given that the rest of the wasteland's filled with bandits, strange people and monstrosities.
• Resources Management Gameplay: The first part of the game has you actually get the resources. The second part has you distribute food and water between family members, along with making sure you have the necessary items to deal with various events.
• Retired Badass: One event features Mary Jane asking to seek out the home of her old music teacher. If she's allowed to go on the expedition then she'll return with food and water, explaining that her old teacher thrived after the bombs fell by virtue of being a hardened war veteran had enough excess food and water to share with his former student.
• Running Time in the Title: The amount of time the player has in the game's scavenging phase is exactly 60 seconds, though the Little Boy and Fat Man difficulty levels have an additional time period of up to 30 seconds wherein they look around the items in the house.
• Sanity Meter: Without something to do, the family members will start to go insane. If this keeps up, they may well destroy an item or disappear. They'll also lose sanity if they're left alone for too long (so no, you can't conserve food and water by not bringing any family members).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Once family members are insane enough, they might wind up leaving the shelter into the harsh wasteland.
  • Due to the above mentioned Improbable Infant Survival, Timmy and Mary Jane will do this if they're left without food, water, or needed medical treatment for too long. However, it's implied that they still actually die if the cause is a choice taken for an event.
• Secret Diary: If the boy scout handbook is present in the shelter, the family may discover that Mary Jane is keeping a diary inside it, with them deducing about reading it. Regardless if you decide to make them read it or not, the diary ends up being destroyed by Mary Jane in a fit of anger, but there's a high chance that she'll injure one of the other members if they do read it.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Sickly Green Glow: Implied to be the glow of the glowing roaches and other things, given how connected the trope is with irradiated creatures.
• Social Semi-Circle: In the shelter, the family members are all sitting behind a flat table, facing the screen.
• Stealth Pun: The family consists of Ted, the father, Dolores, the mother, Mary Jane, the daughter, and Timmy, the son. They're a nuclear family!
• Stepford Smiler: Ted and company can be interpreted as a family of these, with their facade being put to the test in the shelter.
• Subterranean Sanity Failure: In the game's survival phase at the underground shelter, insanity is one of the various negative status effects that family members can get, usually when they're unable to do something for entertainment over a long time. Insane members have risks of destroying items in the shelter, and may escape out into the nuclear wasteland if they remain like that for too long.
• Tank Controls: When scavenging in the house, the left analog stick makes Ted/Dolores run straight in all directions, while the right analog stick makes them turn separately from the left stick's movement. These controls tend to be noted as awkward by many first-time players.
• Too Dumb to Live: Even ignoring the fact that the family decided to wait until literally the last minute to stock their underground shelter, Ted/Dolores is the only one to actually do anything to stock it or even enter on his/her own; the rest of the family just stands there and essentially has to be dragged into the shelter by Ted/Dolores.
• Unwinnable by Design: It's easily possible to trap oneself into an unwinnable playthrough by running out of supplies too early, attracting the attention of raiders too soon, or developing too many negative status effects.
• Vague Hit Points: Aside from the more variable status effects, a member's health is measured via hunger, thirst or sanity. They aren't given a definite measurable value, and you have to go by descriptions in the Journal to see how they're doing. Two members could be both described as "hungry", but you won't know who needs food more than the other. Someone can also be described as perfectly sane one day, but the next day they'll completely lose it.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • On top of maintaining your whole family, you get the opportunity to adopt a dog. The sequence to keep him costs a can of soup and a medkit, but he restores everyone's sanity in return.
  • Several random events involve people coming to your shelter asking for help. Not all of them give you something in return, but that doesn't make it any less satisfying when you help them out...
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • ...though you could just as easily turn them away.
  • It's not uncommon for players to let some family members die early on to conserve supplies, or simply not bring them along.
  • Three potential random events are the options to go steal supplies from the elderly, a group of kids, and your neighbors.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • On some occasions, a gaggle of survivors without supplies will come to the shelter and ask for some of yours—water, food, or a first aid kit. You can not give them anything... but this could have them attack you and take every last resource in your shelter. Basically, after this, a Total Party Kill is all but inevitable.
  • If you take the opportunity to raid someone else, everyone takes a hit to their sanity. If they go completely insane, they could run off or destroy vital items. Such actions also lock you out of being rescued by the twins.
  • If you try to conserve resources by leaving the rest of the family to burn while playing as Ted, he'll go insane pretty much instantly.
• We Cannot Go On Without You: Of a sort. In the normal mode where you have to scavenge for supplies before the bomb hits, the scavenger must enter the shelter to move on to the survival portion. Once in there, the scavenger can die as long as the other adult remains alive; the game is only over if both are dead.
• When Elders Attack: "A group of old ladies ... attacked us with their umbrellas, canes and something that looked like a spiked table leg!"
• "X" Marks the Spot: One of the events involves the family finding an "X" on a wall outside and deducing if they should check it (via choosing a member). If you choose a member, it's very likely for them to find a hiding spot behind it (but not always), with you getting a random item you don't have in the shelter. There's also the chance that the chosen member will become tired or sick afterwards.

---

YOU PERISHED.

---