It’s been 16 years since a game carrying the Timesplitters name was released, and all hopes of further titles in the series seemed to dissolve with the closure of British video game developer Free Radical Design in 2014, by then known as Crytek UK. However, Free Radical Design is back, and a new Timesplitters game is planned.
As Videogamer reports, the parent company of Free Radical Design is game publisher Deep Silver, which itself is a division of media company Koch Media. In a tweet today, the official Deep Silver account confirmed that Free Radical Design is being reformed as a studio and will be “headed up” by Steve Ellis and David Doak, both of whom were original founders of the old studio and creators of the Timesplitters games.
The best news for Timesplitters fans is the announcement of a new game, with Ellis and Doak being involved adding to the excitement that this will be a true sequel to the trilogy of games already released. Development has not yet begun, but a plan is in place and Deep Silver will announce more, hopefully in the very near future.
Timesplitters is a first-person shooter with a time travelling element. The first game was released for the PS2 in 2000, followed by Timesplitters 2 in 2002 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect in 2005, both of which saw releases on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube. A fourth game was rumored to be in development in 2007 as a PS3 exclusive, but following the very poor reception received when Haze got released in 2008, the studio went bankrupt and closed down before being acquired by Crytek. Timesplitters 4 therefore never got past the early stages of development.
