Free Radical Design co-founder seems to be completely done with TimeSplitters.
Steve Ellis’ career started at Rare, where he worked on groundbreaking shooters GoldenEye: 007 and Perfect Dark. After deciding to move forward with new projects, he joined some of his colleagues in leaving Rare and founding Free Radical in 1999.
This Free Radical made their name on the TimeSplitters shooter franchise, an offline shooter with a significant time travel narrative campaign, but became best known for its enjoyable multiplayer. The TimeSplitters franchise historically functioned as a transition point between Unreal Tournament and Call of Duty. Many of the ideas Free Radical came up with then, would go on to be adopted in the multiplayer shooter genre en masse.
In 2009 this original Free Radical was bought out by Crytek, as the company underwent bankruptcy. They were renamed as Crytek UK, but then went through closure again in 2014. This time, Crytek put the employees in a bad place, with months of missed payments culminating in some employees getting fired, and others going on to join Dambuster Studios.
Jumping to 2021, Embracer Group gets their hands on the TimeSplitters IP. They announce plans to bring back the franchise, and go on to actually try to revive the original Free Radical team. Many of the team’s original developers, including Ellis, came back to work on this revival.
As we know, just three months ago Embracer shuttered their TimeSplitters revival, and also closed Free Radical, after their notorious financial difficulties. And that takes us to today.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Ellis expressed his malaise and fatigue on working on the franchise. He said:
“It’s probably the end of me being involved with TimeSplitters. I don’t know if Plaion or Embracer will do anything with it. I don’t know what it would take to get me to want to go through all that again. It was a big letdown.”
Ellis revealed he expected that Free Radical and TimeSplitters would not be affected by Embracer’s announced layoffs. He may have been right to think that they were a pet project, but not know how much the company had lost that they would be forced to do this.
Ellis also shared an interesting revelation. As it turned out, the TimeSplitters prototypes that were leaked online had been cancelled years ago. The game that Free Radical was working on before they were shut down has yet to leak online. What we have been looking at this whole time was an earlier version of the game that Free Radical decided not to follow through on.
As for Ellis future, he implied he was already working on something else, and that he was actually looking at Unity on his screen during the interview. For those who don’t know, Ellis received special thanks credits on mobile puzzle game Highrise Heroes and QU.B.E. Director’s Cut, so he definitely has connections to this day.
