TimeSplitters

TimeSplitters was created by Free Radical Design, a studio founded by former GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark developers from Rare, and its first entry in 2000, released as a PlayStation 2 launch title, carried a similar spirit: a fast, arena-based first-person shooter built around multiplayer and a huge roster of characters, and thanks to four-player split-screen support it offered an unusually generous shared experience for consoles of its day. The series was defined by a wild sci-fi take on time travel spanning eras from cavemen through 1920s gangsters to a cyberpunk future full of robots and monkeys, giving room for a colourful cast of characters and weapons.

The series peaked with TimeSplitters 2, which reached PS2, Xbox and GameCube and added a full story mode, and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, starring the mercenary Cortez, whose time-spanning plot came with more elaborate storytelling. Both games were also prized for their extensive Mapmaker character and level editor, which let players build and share their own content well before that became standard on consoles, and for the self-aware humour with which the series poked fun at itself and the genre.

After Future Perfect, Free Radical Design moved on to other projects, and fans had to wait more than a decade for another entry. In the 2020s a revived Free Radical studio was set to work on a new TimeSplitters, but development was dogged by prolonged trouble and uncertainty, so in the meantime the series lived on mostly through players' memories and fan projects built on the older games.