1990 Incident

The 1990 Incident is a major event in No Time. It was caused in the very beginning of 1990 which brought the Gamma Timeline's wasteland.

General
The 1990 Incident occurred underwater at the Deep Sea Base. The disaster featured a devastating explosion, which turned most of the world into a wasteland and had drastic effects to the western side of the island near Cape Dun where it blew up. In the future, the western side was eventually turned into the Dead Zone.

The reason why the base had exploded was because of a failed temporal experiment that Crimson was conducting that killed him and a large majority of his agents in the process. During the time, the CORE was running under Mount Uroruh and Crimson was its administrator, but when he was killed, the CORE decided to pick a new administrator which was decided to be P.E.N..

Gamma Pine Lake
In the Gamma Timeline version of Pine Lake, the citizens didn't have any knowledge of what caused the explosion and the nuclear fallout spanning across the world and hid in the sewers of the town for a decade. Jason from ACT III states that people thought it was a meteor or a bomb that had caused the disaster, but no one had known at the time due to it happening so quickly.

Archives
During the mission, Diverting Actions, the group of 3 enter the abandoned CORE Entrance in order to access the CORE. After arriving in the bunker, they reach an area with a locked door with rooms nearby containing an archived document from the 1990 Incident. The document describes the times before the incident, and how The Great Leader intended to have Crimson killed with the planned temporal experiment in the Underwater Base. Fortunately for the Great Leader, he did not need to intervene because Crimson had caused his death on his own with the explosion from the experiment, but the fallout from the disaster prevented the Great Leader from making his move to the island.

Parallel Disaster
Near the end of ACT III, during PC and Edward's infiltration into the Deep Sea Base to prevent calamity in the future, the player ends up in the hands of the 80s Gamma Timeline Crimson while in the temporal testing chamber of the base. The alternate version of Crimson starts a monologue about his ambitions in the future that were already stated by the Beta Timeline Crimson who had already done them.

After Crimson is done, he takes Edward's Time Core that he had with him after taking it out of the Time Machine, and uses it to conduct the temporal experiment. Unfortunately, one of his agents had initiated the time travel sequence instead of the warm-up sequence, which consequently led to the creation of an unstable black hole that absorbed the player and an agent with them, taking them to different time periods while the player must chase after the agent and retrieve the launch codes that were in his hand. After the player had retrieved the launch codes, they were sent back to 1989 and watched as Crimson fell into the black hole for his demise. The player walks in to the main control room and sees Edward in his crucial state while losing blood. The player is told by Edward to slide the launch codes into the panel and try to turn off the experiment. It does not succeed in working and Edward decides to sacrifice himself to the greater good. The player runs down a hallway and meets Gamma Timeline Edward and escapes with him after getting in an Escape Pod with Edward's Laser. The structure blows up but the explosion is much less severe and only launches up the seawater around it, not bringing a wasteland.