9 Genre-Defining Video Game Franchises That Died While You Weren't Looking

7. TimeSplitters

Silent Hill 3
Free Radical

Former Rare employees sure do like to get around, don't they?

After wrapping up loose ends with GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, various members of the studio splintered off to form Free Radical Entertainment. Rather than start small, the eighteen-strong team decided to go one better than the aforementioned N64 classics by settling on TimeSplitters as its first project.

Packed with homegrown British humour (nobody does self-depreciation like us Brits) and a wacky, era-spanning narrative, the series' debut and its sequels became a near-permanent fixture in disc trays.

A true GoldenEye sequel we'll never get, but TimeSplitters adopted several of the pioneering features that transformed James Bond into a gaming icon, including the crème de la crème: four-player split-screen.

But what about its current whereabouts? A sequel to 2005's Future Perfect, TimeSplitters 4, was a thing once upon a time, but ever since Free Radical went caput, the franchise has been placed on hold indefinitely. And just in case your hopes for a sequel weren't already ground to a fine dust, even the series' developer, Steve Ellis, doesn't think a sequel would be saleable in the current climate.

Need a bucket for those tears?

 
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Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.