This game has the player travel through five time periods, rescuing stranded fellow pilots. The player must fight off droves of enemy craft while picking up parachuting friendly pilots. Once 56 enemy craft are defeated, Initially 25 on the MSX platform, and increases by 5 after each game cycle (finishing the last battle against the UFOs), the player must defeat the mothership for the time period. Once she is destroyed, any remaining enemy craft are also eliminated and the player time-travels to the next level. All the levels have a blue sky and clouds as the background except the last level, which has space and asteroids instead. The specific eras visited, the common enemies and the motherships are:

1. 1910: biplanes and a blimp
2. 1940: WWII monoplanes and a B-25
3. 1970: helicopters and a large, blue CH-47
4. 1982 (Konami version)/1983 (Centuri version): jets and a B-52
5. 2001: UFOs

The mothership is destroyed with seven direct hits. Once all the eras have been visited, the levels start over again but are harder and faster. The Game Boy Advance version of Time Pilot in Konami Arcade Classics includes a hidden sixth era, 1,000,000BC, where the player must destroy vicious pterodactyls in order to return to the early 20th century.

According to his account, Yoshiki Okamoto's proposal for Time Pilot was initially rejected by his boss at Konami, who assigned Okamoto to work on a driving game instead. Okamoto secretly gave instructions to his programmer to work on his idea, while pretending to be working on a driving game in front of his boss. When Time Pilot was a success, Okamoto's boss claimed credit for Okamoto's idea. The free-roaming style of gameplay used in Time Pilot was influenced by Namco's Bosconian.

This game was one of the more successful games of the era. It spawned one sequel in 1984, Time Pilot '84. Though a respectable game, it did not do nearly as well as the original. A special version named Time Pilot '95 also appears in the Super Famicom game Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Douchuu: Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Wake (of the Ganbare Goemon series), and can be unlocked when the main game is completely cleared. A version of the game for Xbox Live Arcade by Digital Eclipse features optional updated graphics, although the game plays identically (it is a port of the original). Konami released a similar game, Time Ace, for the Nintendo DS in 2007. In 2011 a homebrew port of this game called Vector Pilot was released for the Vectrex console by Kristof Tuts.

The game was successfully licensed to both Atari and Centuri for global regions outside of Japan. Centuri obtained the license for North America, whereas Atari produced dedicated cabinets with the game for sale in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Like many games of the era, Time Pilot was ported to video game consoles for personal use.

• Atari 2600, MSX and ColecoVision in 1983
• PlayStation as part of the Konami Arcade Classics compilation in 1999
• Game Boy Advance as part of the Konami Collector's Series: Arcade Advanced compilation on March 18, 2002.
• Xbox 360 as part of Xbox Live Arcade on August 30, 2006.
• Nintendo DS as part of Konami Classics Series: Arcade Hits.
• Mobile Phones: Released for i-mode mobile phones in Japan in 2004.
• Microsoft's Game Room service for its Xbox 360 console and for Windows-based PCs in May 2010.