TimeSplitters has a strong cult following among many gamers who are tired of the cliché Call of Duty style of first-person shooter, however the last entry in the series was over 7 years ago. So there can hardly be an interview with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli where the fate of the TimeSplitters franchise doesn’t come up.
Mr. Yerli’s latest chat with GameInformer is no exception to this rule as one question inevitably leads to TimeSplitters.
I’m sure you get this question a lot, but is TimeSplitters a franchise still very beloved at Crytek? A lot of people hope you’ll eventually return to it. Can you speak to that at all?
There is actually a petition running online trying to bring the fan base together. But unfortunately the petition doesn’t look that convincing unfortunately. If the petition picks up it will be an even better argument for us. At a personal level, I’m a big fan of TimeSplitters 2. For me, I would love to see the game out there, as a newborn HD version or what not. I definitely would love to see it. But the case of turning this into a business decision is still difficult, despite the fact that there was a Twitter request feed to test the waters. And now the petition, it just seems to be as we expected, as it was when it was Free Radical.
There’s a very hardcore market that is very verbal about it. I would love to see this, and if the fan base approves a further petition. They’re trying to call 300,000 voices, I think it’s at two or three thousand right now. If they could get the petition together I would be very happy to put in front of decision makers in the company, the key stakeholders, and say “Look here. This is how it is, let’s make it now.”
The TimeSplitters 4 petition in question is one started by a Facebook fan page trying to gain a 100,000 strong following. At just under 38,000 fans as of the time of this writing, they have a little ways to go for their goal, but they are at least showing that there is a large following of gamers that want to bring back the TimeSplitters franchise.
Meanwhile, the goal for a HD collection is 300,000 signatures for the petition. Currently they have about one fiftieth of the needed voices, but perhaps the fans will rally together to prove to Crytek and Cevat Yerli that TimeSplitters is worth revisiting in the form of a TimeSplitters HD Collection. Until then, Mr. Yerli can expect to repeatedly hear the question “Where is TimeSplitters?”.
Are you surprised that it is taking this much effort to prove to Crytek that fans want a triumphant return of TimeSplitters? Let us know if you’re spending Black Ops 2′s release day wishing that you were shooting monkeys in TimeSplitters instead.
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