If your an owner of an Ecco the Dolphin website then you're used to being asked the same question over and over. What does the secret password at the end of Ecco 2 the Tides of Time suppose to do?
In an interview with Ecco's creator Ed Annunziata the password was suppose to trigger thematic events in Ecco 3, allowing the player to SEE back into the Tides of Time.
Ecco the Dolphin 3 was never developed and a lot of people have a strange misconception that Ecco, Defender of the Future is Ecco 3. The fact is Ecco, Defender of the Future is a re-imagining of the Ecco universe, same hero different story. Think of it as Ecco in an alternate universe with different problems, yup that's pretty much the best way I can sum up Defender of the Future.
So lets gather some facts from the game that gives us clues on what Ecco 3 would have been about had it ever been developed. After the Vortex Queen was defeated she escaped her hive in the form of a giant Vortex larvae. A glyph in Atlantis said that only recognized ones could use the time machine so obviously they granted Ecco access.
In the final level, the City of Forever, Ecco is harassed by a giant Vortex larvae. My theory is a normal Vortex drone larvae should be a lot smaller and the Queen larvae was purposefully larger. If this is true then Ecco lead the Queen to the time machine since the larvae had to be pushed in front of the pillar that guards the teleport ring leading to the time machine.
Watching how Ecco used the time machine and knowing the time machine had a trap, the Queen knew the only way she'd be able to fool it was by using DNA sampled from Ecco during battle; confirmed by Ecco's creator Ed. The trap was in Ecco the Dolphin for Sega CD, if Ecco doesn't sing to the Glyph used for activating the time machine a special trap will kill him.
So Why did the Queen travel to the prehistoric era, maybe because that's where Ecco traveled to since a special song was needed to travel to different points in time. Ecco only knew two songs needed for time travel, the one the Asterite gave him to travel back to Home Bay just before the storm and the other to travel back to pre-historic times.
Why Ecco decided to use the time machine instead of destroying it i'm not sure. We could say the Queen following theory is wrong and that Ecco had a sorta gut feeling the Queen had beat him to the Time Machine.
According to the Japanese translated ending Ecco - knowing his existence is a junction - opened a doorway in time, and disappeared forever. We know Ecco exists out of a paradox that his intervention in the past caused dolphin kind to exist (when he lured his ancestors into the sea in Origin Beach).
We also know as long as the time machine exists Vortex from the dark future will eventually use it to steal two of the Asterites globes which Ecco eventually saved. It is this situation that created another paradox where the Vortex kidnap the globe and Ecco, causing the Dark Future to exist in the first place. So if Ecco destroys the time machine the Vortex Future can never exist, causing a problem in Ecco's past of the Vortex from the future never traveling back to steal the final two globes and Ecco having to travel to the future to retrieve them.
With these paradoxes in place Ecco had to have figured out the time machine must not be destroyed otherwise his whole adventure would never have happened. Something must have lured him into the past back to prehistoric times, since that's the only one out of two activation songs he knew. We know Origin Beach is where the paradox began and we also know the Vortex Queen will eventually travel back and give rise to anthropods, when she realizes she cannot rule primitive Earth.
What else could eventually lead us back to this point in time and what secret could we be missing? After the Atlanteans were defeated by the Vortex and their city plunged into the sea they had used there machine to escape into the past. The time machine we know can only travel "up the stream of time" into the past. Since both Ecco 1 and Ecco 2 seem to point out a special significance to the prehistoric era then perhaps the beginnings are not with Ecco at all but with the Atlanteans who may have arrived in the past before Ecco. The only problem with this theory is Dolphin kind existed in Atlantis, helping Atlantean fisher men catch food.
So we have run into another wall in our theory, time travel. Well it seems that Ecco deals with time travel very uniquely. Two theories exist about time travel the immutable theory and the alternate worlds theory. The immutable theory states that if someone travels into the past and tries to kill there own grandfather some event would happen to prevent that, because the future is already fixed. Nothing could be done in the past to alter it because something else will intervene to keep the flow of time natural.
Ecco the Dolphin's story follows the immutable theory where no matter what happens the past cannot be changed. In an alternate world theory if someone travels into the past to kill there grandfather it would create an alternate time line where that person never existed but since that someone is from another time line he is unaffected.
Ecco the Dolphin's story also follows the alternate world theory because both a dark future and natural future exist. So what the hell is going on?! Ecco's story actually uses both theories at the same time. What! that just doesn't make sense, sure it does just follow along. The new theory states that the past cannot be altered but the future can change but if events in the past were altered by a future event then nothing in the past should be altered.
If Ecco destroyed the time machine he would alter the Vortex Future from ever happening, this is altering the past. The future is not set in stone but any manipulation to events that happened in Ecco's time-line cannot be changed. Destroying the Vortex Future would destroy the natural future whose inhabitants took Ecco under there wing to inform him of the split in the stream of time.
So Ecco 3 is about Ecco traveling into the past, into prehistoric times where he may ultimately find out from the Atlanteans why this point in time is so critical. I also assume the Vortex Queen will attempt to kill Dolphins ancestors and Ecco will have to prevent this from happening. It seemed Ecco's creator intended for us to see these ancestors but a graphic was never designed for them.