Longtime readers and first-person shooter fans might remember how excited we were for the announcement of Timesplitters 4 in late 2008. Unfortunately, an intriguing trailer was the last we saw of the game before the project was killed amidst Free Radical’s bankruptcy later that year.
Today, though, we actually have a chance to see and play what we missed over 15 years ago. That’s thanks to an eagle-eyed eBay trawler who grabbed an aging PlayStation 3 development kit that happened to have a prototype of Timesplitters 4 sitting on its hard drive.
Reddit user Flimsy-Zebra3775 posted about the find earlier this month, asking the PS3 subreddit community for guidance on what looked like a working prototype of the long-lost game. After reportedly asking the seller “a lot of probing questions” and confirming that the prototype could be booted, Flimnsy-Zebra reportedly paid 525 pounds (about $670) for the dev kit, saying, “for history and my collection, it’s worth it.”
Footage from the now-archived prototype, running on an actual PS3.
Once the dev kit was in hand, Flimsy-Zebra shared the prototype files with the Timespliters subreddit and Hidden Palace, a site devoted to archiving these kinds of prototypes for posterity. While the incomplete build doesn’t work on PS3 emulator RPCS3, fans have uploaded a few videos of the game running on actual PS3 hardware, showing off battles with computer-controlled bots outside a gothic castle (and some incredibly kick-ass music, to boot).
Free Radical founder (and noted GoldenEye/Perfect Dark developer) David Doak confirmed the footage’s authenticity on social media, reminiscing that “this is exactly the kind of nonsense that [insert any publisher name] wasn’t interested in back in 2008. You’re welcome.”
After Free Radical closed for good in 2014, a studio with the same name was re-formed under publishing conglomerate Embracer in 2021 to once again try to make a version of Timesplitters 4 a reality. Ironically enough, that Timesplitters 4 project was also shuttered amid massive layoffs at Embracer late last year. Who knows, maybe in 2040 a prototype version of that completely different Timesplitters 4 will turn up on some random dev kit, ready for archiving.
