Microsoft Defense Force

Sir Chimpalot

Today, semi-famed games developer Free Radical Design, has shut its doors. It shut its doors for good. Shut its doors for good – and changed the locks, as employees discovered this morning. It was only later on that employees were called in a meeting to discover the fate of Free Radical Design.

Nottingham’s Free Radical Design started out when employees from Rareware, Twycross, left the company to start up their games studio. The team at the newly formed Free Radical Design were known due to their GoldenEye fame on the Nintendo 64. Since their time at Free Radical Design, they were responsible for popular titles such as TimeSplitters, TimeSplitters 2, TimeSplitters Future Perfect and more recently – the “meh” inducing Haze released on the wallet draining, studio-closing PlayStation 3 platform. The studio has been working on TimeSplitters 4, and sources say that Free Radical Design was in talks with Lucas Arts over a development project that could have possibly kept the ship afloat – but this had fallen through.

MDF cannot help but think that the high development costs of the PlayStation 3 platform, and time needed to work with its overly complex CELL processor architecture has contributed to this in some way or another. We feel that because of this decision by Sony Computer Entertainment – jobs have been indirectly lost and the lives of these people have been turned upside down.

We wish the best of luck to these talented game developers. Enjoy these concept art images for TimeSplitters 4 – as it may be the last work from Free Radical Design we may see. RIP Sir Chimpalot.