Free Radical shuts down. TimeSplitters 4 couldn’t find a publisher
It looks like Free Radical Design is no more and TimeSplitters 4 along with it. Or at the very least, a release of that game looks very slim at this point unless it gets picked up by another developer.
Edge is reporting that workers arrived at work only to find that the doors were locked and signs were posted telling them of a meeting at a nearby hotel while heavy security patrolled the buildings.
Employed at Free Radical were between 150 and 200 staff. A tipster told Edge, “After the poor reviews of Haze and subsequent loss of a contract with LucasArts, [Free Radical was] struggling to find publishers to back the long-awaited TimeSplitters 4 and other smaller projects and were left with no choice but to pull the plug.”
The company was made up of ex-Rare employees that worked on the Nintendo 64 hits GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark and is most well known for their TimeSplitters series, although they also developed Second Sight and, most recently, Haze for the PS3. They also had a publishing deal with LucasArts for the unannounced Star Wars Battlefront III, but the deal reportedly fell through after the failure of Haze, a critical and commercial bomb.
But for fans of the studio, the worse news is the fact that TimeSplitters 4 has now met it’s demise. It had already been worked on for over a year but due to the failure of Haze, the company couldn’t get a publisher. Which means the game is all but dead at this point.
This is definitely a shame. But like with Midway, I believe that you can only go so long without making a big-selling “great” game and expect to last. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, as they say.
