Requiem For Timesplitters:

The Death Of The Playful Shooter?

by dkpatriarch

© 2008 David Hilton

Are we destined for only hard-hitting, serious shooters from now on? What ever happened to the “fun playful shooter” like TimeSplitters which has just died?  TimeSplitters, we will miss you.

Alas, it seems it is over for Free Radical and tragically also most probably the excellent Timesplitters franchise.  And it looks to mostly be the failure of its PS3 exclusive Haze which began the end.

TimeSplitters 4 concept art

According to an anonymous source from Free Radical who spoke to site Smashpad:

“I do know there’ve been problems since Haze was released. Lucasarts weren’t too happy with progress [FRD were working on an unannounced game believed to be Star Wars Battlefront III], and a bunch of people were made redundant.

Then we were asked for game ideas that were quick and cheap to make, and there was talk of re-doing some of our old games for Xbox Live or PSN. Coming after Haze’s failure and with Lucasarts being unhappy, there was definitely a feeling that things weren’t going well.

Then 90% of our QA were laid off suddenly, as well as some other people. We kept getting reassurances that everything was fine, but we didn’t believe it.”

While there are still conflicting reports that Free Radical is under administration, or that members have left and formed a new studio called Pumpkin Beach, or that the studio has just been shut down forever without notice, what seems clear is that the Timesplitters franchise, created by Free Radical, which many of us hoped to see made for the new generation will probably now never be made.

A short while ago I asked if game studios take too great a risk when they depart from their staple product, and used Free Radical as one of my primary examples.  Had they made another Timesplitters game instead of  Haze, would they have fared better?

According to another source quoted by Gamespot, Haze was a major reason for Free Radical’s present situation.  The source said:

“They had already started working on TimeSplitters 4, and had been for over a year, but due to the failure of Haze and the deal falling through with Lucas, they couldn’t get a publisher to back them.”

The Timesplitters games were revered for their fun, cute, fast-paced, bot-filled multiplayer modes set in a variety of exotic and excellently designed locals.  The characters you could play were hilarious and varied from zombies to monkeys.  My sons and I still play Timesplitters 2 (Gamecube version); that’s how enduring the game has been for us.

Timesplitters was one of the first console games to offer gamers a simple map editor, which, as anyone who has fooled around with Far Cry 2’s excellent editor can attest to, is incredible fun.  Sure the games hardly had any plot, but they were very satirical of  movies and games.  Now, that announced fourth game, in production for more than a year, will probably never come.

Free Radical was formed in 1999 by several members of the classic  Rare team that created Goldeneye and Perfect Dark for the N64.  What an inglorious end to finish up with the disappointment of Haze in 2008.

Even if by some miracle another publisher or studio were to pick up the rights to Timesplitters, would it keep the humour and tone of the originals?  The original Timeplitters was a shining light among very few good early PS2 titles and Timesplitters 2, released in 2002, is still rated in the top 3 of all PS2 games and top 10 of all Gamecube games released that year.

I sure hope someone does pick it up and keep the game’s style and spirit alive.  Even its bot gaming has made a welcome comeback in games like Perfect Dark Zero and more recently Gears Of War 2.

This seems unlikely though, and if there is a new Free Radical splinter group called Pumpkin Beach they are reported as wanting to distance themselves from Timesplitters and especially Haze.

Smashpad’s anonymous source said of that project:

“Pumpkin Beach was set up a few months ago actually. The project was worked on in-house at FRD for a while. Then we were told that because the project was going to be quite different from Free Radical’s previous games, they were setting up a new company, sort of a new label for the game, to avoid the associations with TimeSplitters and Haze.”

• So if Timesplitters is dead, do you mourn its passing as I do?

• Did you think it could have been a great return to good-old-fashioned accesible  fun amidst all the samey serious shooters?

• Do you see the end, if this is the end it seems, of Free Radical as a tragic footnote to an otherwise stellar gaming year?

Comment below or simply pay your last respects to what I would argue was one of the most significant gaming studios of the last gaming generation. Hopefully the ghost of Timesplitters will haunt game developers until one of them is brave enough to make something that iconic and fun again.

© 2008 David Hilton

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