It’s been two and a half years since THQ Nordic and their parent company Embracer Group acquired the TimeSplitters franchise. Ever since then, fans of the popular FPS series have been clamoring for either a remake/reboot or a brand new entry. Fast forward to today in 2021 and one of their subsidiary publishers, Deep Silver, has made our wish come true. The company has officially announced on Twitter that they will be, at last, bringing back the TimeSplitters franchise.
As if this news wasn’t exciting enough, Deep Silver also announced that Free Radical Design founders Steve Ellis and David Doak will be brought into the fold to reform their old studio and develop the title. Both developers worked on the original TimeSplitters and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, both of which were highly acclaimed at the time. Deep Silver noted that the actual development of the project has not yet begun, as they are still building the rest of the studio.
As we already mentioned, the TimeSplitters series was purchased by Embracer Group back in 2018, one of many acquisitions that the company made during its two year run of buying IP’s. The series received a fairly obscure resurgence last month when hacker reverse engineered Homefront: the Revolution and discovered a fully playable 4K port of TimeSplitters 2 hidden within the game. The developers hid the port with the intend of making it available to those who could find it, but those plans ended up being scrapped as development progressed and instead left the code for the game dormant instead.
It’s important to note that this was just announced, and while the new Free Radical Design developers have some ideas on what to do, it’s more than likely that we won’t be hearing any major updates for a while. Hopefully we’ll have something a little more concrete by the end of the year, but it’s more than likely that we’ll be waiting a while on this one. Either way, TimeSplitters is finally back.