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At the time of its original release in 2000, TimeSplitters felt like the start of a new era for the classic style of console FPS action we first saw in GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark. But now, it's been more than 20 years since the release of the last TimeSplitters game, and despite the best efforts of the original creators, no official revival has managed to happen, and that might just be the sad reality of modern game development.
David Doak was one of the Rare veterans who founded Free Radical Design and built TimeSplitters there. In 2021, Doak and several other OG developers rebuilt Free Radical under the Embracer Group banner with plans to revive the series, but the studio was one of the numerous casualties of Embracer's mass layoffs and studio closures.
"I don't think it was our fault it didn't work out," Doak says in a talk at EGX at MCM London Comic Con, shared in a press release from event organizers. "I can't say much about it than that. Bigger forces were in play.”
Whatever those bigger forces were – you could guess at any number of specific issues at various levels in the corporate structure – it sounds like Doak feels that the spirit which made TimeSplitters work in the first place is difficult to maintain in the modern era.
“I think it's really hard now… certainly the prospect of making some kind of even Double-A shooter now… I'm not up for it any more. It's such an overworked scene, it's so hard to innovate in it. Certainly our experience of trying to build something, even with off the shelf engines it takes forever to get anywhere. [When we were making these games] you could think of something at night, in bed, come in in the morning and say 'hey guys, we should do this' and by lunchtime you've tried it, decided whether it's worth doing and by the end of the day it was either in the game or not in the game. I love working like that."
If TimeSplitters doesn't make our list of the 25 best PS2 games, it's only because the platform's library is just that good.
