THE HISTORY OF: TIMESPLITTERS

“WE HAD TO GO THROUGH AN APPROVAL PROCESS WITH SONY TO GET A DEV KIT, AND THOSE WERE LIKE ROCKING-HORSE SHIT – THEY WEREN’T HANDING THEM OUT AT ALL”
DAVID DOAK

When you’re responsible for a game like GoldenEye, a game that lives on in the minds of gamers around the globe as one of the most important releases of any generation, you have to expect a certain degree of dread when it comes to stepping out of the shadow of Rare and the Stamper brothers. That’s not to say that TimeSplitters isn’t deserving of the cult reputation that surrounds it, but when you can say that your game single-handedly shifted the way shooters were played… well, it’s a high tightrope with a very long fall back down to earth.

“At the beginning there was really only five of us,” says David Doak, one of the initial founders of the developer behind TimeSplitters as well as the game’s designer and programmer. “We had left Rare to set up Free Radical, and the project that we pitched to publishers when we were trying to get funding was actually the game that became Second Sight. The working title was called Redemption, and it was going to be a first-person narrative-driven shooter with psychic abilities.” In the end an agreement was made with Eidos for this small team to work for roughly three years on a novel FPS, and initial progress was fast. From leaving Rare in 1998, signing the contract with Eidos in February 1999 and moving into offices by April, Free Radical was up and running quickly.

“We had to go through an approval process with Sony to get a dev kit,” adds David, “and those were like rocking-horse shit – they weren’t handing them out at all.” Yet somehow Free Radical managed to get hold of one, and in very little time a prototype of the game was created for Sony’s soon-to-be powerhouse console..’”