Didja Notice?

As the game opens in 2015, you are a human survivor who has just escaped from a Skynet incarceration camp in Los Angeles with the help of Resistance fighter, Sgt. Roberts. This is the first appearance of Roberts in any timeline. Roberts is hit by gunfire during the pursuit away from the prison camp and he tells you to go on without him and find an office building behind the Tiki Grand Hotel where a Resistance car is hidden you can use to make good your escape from your machine pursuers. In The Terminator, Sarah and Reese stayed a night at the Tiki Motel (a different place with similar name).

The ruins of stores called Elsewear Clothing is seen throughout the game. Though there are several independent clothing stores by this name around the world currently, the one presented here is presumably meant to be fictitious.

You soon enter the ruins of a gas station/automobile repair shop called Global Shop and then a photography store called CCF Photographic. Later you enter Carole's Music. These appear to be fictitious businesses in Los Angeles. They turn up over and over as you run around the city searching for the hotel and office building.

The car you finally find behind an office building is a pick-up truck with the personalized license plate D STROY. As you get in the car and drive, a number of other abandoned vehicles have the same D STROY license plate!

In this game, John Connor is said to be a colonel in the Resistance. As far as I can recall, the only other time a military rank has been applied to him is when he was the captain of Tech-Com in Salvation.

Connor's second-in-command here is Major Kathryn Parker. This game is the first appearance of Kathryn Parker in any timeline (though she appears first, chronologically, in Skynet).

A number of USO Gasoline trucks and gas stations are seen throughout the game. The name and logo design may have been a nod to USA Gasoline (U Save Automatic), an American oil company with gas stations located mostly in the western states.

Kyle Reese is wearing what is probably a Daggerfall t-shirt. Daggerfall is a 1996 video game published by Bethesda Softworks as part of the Elder Scrolls game series.

You walk close past the famous Hollywood Sign during the course of the game. The Hollywood Hills on which it is perched seem to be much closer to the Hollywood business district here than it is in real life. In the real world, the area around the hills is a residential area.

Shop'N'Spend is a store seen during the game. This is a fictitious business, though it may be a parody of the now defunct Shop 'n Save grocery store chain in the St. Louis area.

At one point in the game, a Bethesda building is seen. Bethesda is the video game company that made this game, though they've never had an office in L.A. as far as I can tell.

You help to retrieve a downed Aerial HK which the Resistance converts for human use. You then fly the HK yourself to make an attack on a Terminator base camp. In Skynet, there is also an HK modified for human use. Presumably that one was lost at some point, necessitating you acquiring one here.

A billboard advertising a movie called Loch Ness, coming soon to a theater near you, is seen in the city. It features an image of Nessie. Since this video game came out in 1995, this may be a reference to the real world independent movie by that name released in 1996 if the game developers were aware of the upcoming film.

During the course of the game, the Resistance's L.A. headquarters is discovered and attacked by Skynet forces, so Connor moves it to the basement of the Mother of God Church in Santa Monica. This is a fictitious church.

Dr. Hanover says they've recently seen the emergence of the T-600 Terminator with rubber skin to mimic a human. In The Terminator, Kyle Reese mentioned that the rubber-skinned infiltrators were 600-series models and easy to spot. Here, Hanover remarks that some soldiers have started calling them "rubbers".

Near the end of the game, you pass a megaplex theater. Two of the movies showing there are For the Love of a Woman and The Danish Invasion. These are both fictitious movies.

An NPP Insurance office is seen in the ruins of L.A. There appears to be an actual company by this name currently, but does not seem to have existed in 1995 when this game was developed.

At a late point in the game, you follow a highway to the main Skynet complex in Arcadia.

During the last few levels of the game, Skynet has finished developing its time displacement technology and begins both sending information about its own construction to itself in 1995 to speed up its sentience (through TDTS--Temporal Data Transmitting System) and sending Terminators and HKs to the recent past in 2015 to thwart the Resistance's (and the player's!) victories against it. The machines begin popping up from nowhere in the blast of a blue sphere of light and immediately start attacking you and the Resistance forces (this is similar to events in Timeline JD-3 in An Evil Hour, Book 3 of The New John Connor Chronicles). Eventually, even Kyle and John are killed by the Terminators and it is down to you to load a virus disk into Skynet's mainframe to stop it. Once you finally succeed in that, the timeline is rewritten so that the machine war never happened, due to corrupt data sent back in time via the Resistance's virus. Perhaps this is the timeline where John and Sarah successfully prevented Skynet's development for good in Judgment Day and neither Skynet nor Legion ever came into existence.

The future war ends much earlier than in the film series, in 2015; in fact, the entire war is erased as stated in the paragraph above.

Several characters die in this storyline. However, since the timeline is rewritten such that Skynet never came into existence, these individuals are presumably still existing in the new, peaceful timeline.

The storyline

In order to make the game's plotline more clear, I am providing screenshots of briefing sessions the player has with Resistance members (thanks to Nomad Soul, Smiggy100, and Nametag for their YouTube videos):

View Briefing Screenshots