on specific issues." For this third game, the team had also shifted to a model where the level designers would choose settings that were "interesting to them" and the lead writers would then establish a narrative to connect those separate elements. TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, was released in March 2005, following on from Free Radical's first non-TimeSplitters game, Second Sight, in 2004. Prior to the game's release, the developers expressed a desire to establish an "ongoing relationship" with EA; however, in later interviews, Doak reflected that the game "wasn’t successful because EA buried it", recalling a scenario where he was told by an EA rep that there would not be significant marketing investment, because it was instead being invested in GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, developed by EA Los Angeles. Doak recounts being told that "your game's really good, but unfortunately we've got another game which has turned out to not be as good as we thought it was going to be, and we need to support it with the marketing money." In Doak's words:"We did Future Perfect with EA and I think delivered an amazingly good game, but they didn't make the effort to sell it ... and by that time Free Radical was a fairly big company, so we had a lot of mouths to feed. We were quite cross with them, to put it mildly." Future TimeSplitters games (2007–present) Following confirmation in 2007 that work on it had begun, TimeSplitters 4, having failed to secure a publishing deal, was placed on hold when Free Radical was taken over by Crytek, becoming Crytek UK in 2009. This was followed in 2014 by the closure of Crytek, at which time, the majority of staff were relocated to Dambuster Studios. In August 2018, Koch Media acquired the rights to TimeSplitters, and by 2019 had hired series co-creator Steve Ellis to plan the series' future. Work on "[bringing] the TimeSplitters franchise back to life" was confirmed in May 2021 with the reformation of Free Radical Design (as part of Deep Silver), although development had not yet begun on the game by that time. In November 2021, Microsoft added backwards compatibility to the Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One for both TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, as part of an Xbox 20th anniversary event. References External links Cooperative video games First-person shooters Temporal war fiction Video games about time travel Video games developed in