Free Radical co-founder talks about disappointing closure of the studio that worked on the new TimeSplitters.
Co-founder Steve Ellis spoke to GamesIndustry about the closure of Free Radical Design.
The studio closed in December following a restructuring by parent company Embracer. They are working on a new TimeSplitters there.
Regarding the closure of the studio and the reboot of the TimeSplitters series, Ellis said that he probably wouldn’t go through it all again and won’t work on any more parts.
Ellis said: “This is probably the end of my involvement with TimeSplitters. I don’t know if Plaion or Embracer will do anything with it. I don’t know what it would take to make me go through all that again. It was a big disappointment.”
He went on to say that he had an idea for something other than games. During the interview he was probably also sitting in front of the Unity development environment. But he also said that in the end it will always bring him back to games. After all, he’s been doing this for 30 years.
At the beginning of March, five minutes of gameplay from TimeSplitters 4 leaked online. This was an old concept that was no longer being pursued at the time of closure.
“Personally, I would never release footage of a half-finished game because then people would come to the wrong conclusions about what it is. Of course, it would be pointless to simply clone Fortnite, so we didn’t do that,” said Ellis.
“We went through a number of different ideas. But there were three different concepts that we tried. And what is seen in the leaked video was not what we were working on when we were canceled. We had switched to a completely different concept and everyone on the team was really excited about it.”
Before the mass layoffs and studio closures at Embracer, people felt safe, or so Ellis thought.
“We had the situation with Embracer, who announced that they wanted to close some projects and studios. 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.”
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