Out of all of Gary the Gadget Guy’s inventions, the Time Trekker is one of the most incredible. This modified Snow Cat pushed the boundaries of what was possible by allowing penguins to travel through time, as far back or forwards as they wish.
The Time Trekker was seen for the first time at the Halloween Party of 2012. If you looked through the Mansion Attic’s telescope for long enough, you would eventually see the time machine zoom across the sky and disappear in a flash of light.
Whether this flash was the Time Trekker journeying to a new time for the first time, or whether it was actually returning to the present is a bit confusing. Regular Club Penguin time travel rules point towards the time machine leaving the present, but Gary seems to be struck by the inspiration to actually build the Time Trekker in issue #375 of the Club Penguin Times, about a month later. Even more confusingly, when Gary officially revealed the Time Trekker for the first time in issue #376 of the Club Penguin Times, he said that it had taken him “months of work”, despite seemingly only coming up with the idea a week ago.
But let’s leave the confusing topic of when the Time Trekker was made for now and take a look at its design. As the name suggests, the Time Trekker is actually a redesigned snow trekker (which is, of course, a redesigned snow cat). What you might not know is that the Time Trekker was actually created from Gary’s old ‘Ice Cream Trekker’. Though it was never said in game, Gary’s mascot scripts confirm that the main reason Gary chose to use a Snow Trekker was just to make it more stylish.
While the exterior of the Time Trekker pays homage to the DeLorean from the Back to the Future trilogy (even including the iconic gull-wing doors), the interior has more of a steampunk aesthetic, with lots of visible cogs, gears and clocks.
The whole machine requires 1.21 gigawatts of power to operate, all of which is harnessed from a small chunk of the purple meteorite that crashed into Club Penguin for the Marvel Superhero Takeover of 2012. Unfortunately, even with all this power, the Time Trekker can’t just be used at a moment’s notice. Once the coordinates have been plugged in, it takes a week to calibrate, and several days on top of that to switch between ‘forwards’ (travelling to the future) and ‘reverse’ (travelling to the past).
Once all the information has been inputted and the time machine has calibrated properly, it uses the energy from the meteorite to accelerate a quantum field and create a tachonic wormhole. Without being an expert on the subject, this essentially means that the Time Trekker is producing a very powerful force that breaks the fabric of time and space, allowing a sort of portal (known as a wormhole) to open up between two separate times. The Time Trekker sits directly between these two times so that one door opens up to the present, and the other opens up to the other destination.
The Time Trekker was first used by the general public at the Prehistoric Party of 2013. Though there was no real reason for this journey other than to check out prehistoric Club Penguin, this journey paved the way for future events—securing Gary’s faith in his technology and allowing him to form ties with Garugg.
A year later, the Time Trekker was used again when an ancient message from Garugg the Ugg Ugg was discovered in the Snow Forts, asking Gary for help. Once the Time Trekker allowed it, penguins flocked back to prehistoric times to help Garugg save the dinosaur puffles from extinction.
Later that year, the Time Trekker was used for a third time. This was the first and only time that we saw the Time Trekker used to travel to the future. Gary made a quick trip to the year 4014 to see what it was like for himself before deciding to open it up for everyone for a short time. This time, rather than using the Time Trekker directly, Gary hooked it up to a large time portal that worked at double the speed.
The last time that the Time Trekker was used by the general public was at the Prehistoric Party of 2016. Due to Rookie storing the time portal somewhere in the Box Dimension after being tasked to clean up after the party, the original Time Trekker had to be used once again. This time, the main goal of the trip was to collect meteor fragments to power up the alien puffles’ UFO again after Herbert had stolen its power source.
We see the Time Trekker get used one more time in the comic ‘Lost in Time’, although it’s unclear when exactly the events in the comic take place. While showing a new agent around the gadget room, a reprogrammed Wheel-Bot accidentally activates the Time Trekker, sending the three back to prehistoric times, with the Time Trekker rapidly sinking into a lava pool.
Forty-five minutes later, Rookie and the new recruit are saved by Gary when he arrives in his spare Time Trekker after tracking them down using a cave carving that Rookie made.
The Time Trekker also makes a cameo appearance in the mobile app Puffle Wild, in the form of cave art. One portrait of it can be seen in the main area of the game, next to the clay puffle statues, but a second can be seen inside the puffle-shaped cave in concept art.
It should also be mentioned that, it is possible that the Time Trekker wasn’t the first time machine that Gary built. The second pick-your-path book tells of a “Time Machine 3000” that Gary created some time in 2010. Just like the Time Trekker, this time machine can travel both backwards and forwards in time by creating a wormhole. Unlike the Time Trekker, the Time Machine 3000 can only be used by a handful of penguins at a time, but can be activated at a moment’s notice, and even switched from forwards to reverse instantly.
So is the Time Trekker actually Gary’s second time machine? How did the drawings in the wilderness get there? When was the Time Trekker actually made? Feel free to leave your thoughts and theories down in the comments and, until next time,
Splosh Jnr Guides 