TimeSplitters boss says cancellation was ‘a big letdown’, and he’s likely done with the series

The co-founder of Free Radical Design has spoken about his disappointment at the cancellation of the TimeSpliters reboot, and has suggested he’s likely finished with the franchise.

Free Radical was closed in December, just two years after it was re-established, as part of huge company-wide cuts at Embracer and its owned publishers.

The team was working on a new game in the TimeSplitters series, the last of which was 2005’s TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. However, the closure of Free Radical meant the project was cancelled.

Now, in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz about the reforming and eventual shutdown of Free Radical, co-founder Steve Ellis – who also worked on the original TimeSplitters games – said the experience has likely ended any chance of him working on another series entry again.

“It’s probably the end of me being involved with TimeSplitters,” Ellis explained. “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 added that he’s potentially working on something else, confessing that he had Unity in front of him as he was giving the interview.

“I did have an idea that I would do something that wasn’t games,” he explained. “But… I always end up gravitating back. It’s what I’ve done for nearly 30 years.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Ellis said the TimeSplitters footage shared earlier this month by the team’s former head of art was from an older concept that wasn’t being worked on when the studio was shut down.

“Personally… I would never release footage of a half-finished game because you’re going to get people jumping to the wrong conclusion about what it is,” Ellis explained, referring to online reaction likening the footage to Fortnite. “Obviously it would be pointless to just clone Fortnite, so that’s not what we were doing.

“We went through a number of different ideas. But there were three distinct concepts that we tried. And the one that the leaked video showed was not the one we were working on when we got cancelled. We had changed to quite a different concept, and everyone on the team was really enthusiastic about it.”

Ellis said he thought Free Radical would be safe during Embracer’s mass layoffs and studio closures.

“We had the Embracer situation going on, where they had announced they were looking at closing some projects and studios,” he recalls. “But the public statements they had made up to that point made us feel like we were safe. The criteria didn’t seem to apply to our project.”