It was announced today that TimeSplitters has been acquired by Koch Media, and just in the nick of time. The German media conglomerate has also taken Second Sight under its wing. The two latest additions to the Koch Media’s Y2K stable are going to be published by Deep Silver, which is also bringing us Metro Exodus next year.
TimeSplitters and Second Sight were both hits back in their heyday. Koch Media paid Free Radical a confidential amount for the IP rights to both franchises, and it’ll be interesting to see what THQ does with the two franchises. In particular, TimeSplitters 2 was well-received upon its release when the franchise moved beyond the PlayStation 2 to occupy a home on the GameCube and the Xbox.
However, after the third entry in the TimeSplitters series, things started to slow down and developer Free Radical had to pull the plug when the company went into administration. Crytek bailed out the studio, but it was too little too late; the door shut on TimeSplitters in 2009, even though it gets wheeled around every few years when the industry remembers that it exists.
Luckily for us, it’s looking like THQ Nordic’s acquisition is going to wake the sleeping giant. We’re talking a lot more funds being invested into potential revival projects, and it’s unlikely that the franchises were acquired to only be sent to the equivalent of the game dev glue factory in a couple of years. Plus, it looks like THQ is dedicating itself to bringing back other blasts from the past; Polygon revealed that the company was planning on re-releasing titles based on Nickelodeon hits like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Danny Phantom, and The Wild Thornberries.
We’ve already seen what THQ has done so far with Darksiders, so it could well breathe new life into these old series and finally bring us TimeSplitters 4. We don’t know how soon we’ll actually see something new on this front but watch this space!
