If you wanna know what games are coming up next on PlayStation, you just need to ask the Taiwanese ratings board. That’s Gemastu’s brilliant trick, that allowed the site to correctly predict the arrival of Octopath Traveler last week, and now suggests subscribers to PlayStation Plus are about to finally be reunited with TimeSplitters.
The PlayStation Plus Classics Catalog really seems to have sprung to life over the last month. In the middle of June we saw the arrival of Tomb Raider Legend, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Sly Cooper and the Thievius Racoonus. Now it appears the original TimeSplitters will soon be joining them, with ratings issued for both PS4 and PS5.
(Gematsu accidentally used a cover shot of threequel, TimeSplitters: Future Perfect.)
Read More: Beloved Square Enix RPG Series Octopath Traveler Is Now On Game Pass, PlayStation
The classic PS2 launch game, TimeSplitters, was originally released in 2000, created by the brand new studio Free Radical Design, formed by key figures from studio Rare. These were the people who had worked on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, aiming to recreate that magic once more—and in a twist, they succeeded. The century-spanning, multi-protagonist shooter was immediately loved, going on to spawn two more equally adored sequels, with a fourth in development, before everything started going wrong for Free Radical.
In 2008, the company went bankrupt, following the flop of Haze, and the sudden cancellation of Star Wars: Battlefront III, despite claims it was almost finished. It was bought by Crytek in 2009, but that was a complete disaster, and in 2014 the whole place broke apart. This all left the TimeSplitters franchise owned by Deep Silver, which in 2018 inevitably became part of Embracer Group.
So you’ll never guess what happened next: Embracer brought Free Radical back into existence in 2021, including original developers, with the goal of making a new TimeSplitters game, before fucking up the entire situation as only Embracer can. “Restructuring” saw the company closed down two years later, and TimeSplitters 4 thrown, once again, into limbo.
So while a new game seems to be cursed for all eternity, at least there’s soon to be a much easier way of playing the beloved original on your PS4 or PS5.
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