Free Radical goes down the pan

Free Radical goes down the pan

In some unfortunate news, it seems that UK development outfit Free Radical Design has been closed as of today. Employees arrived this morning to find themselves locked out of the offices, a meeting occurred later on with the announcement of the company's imminent closure.

Things don't look particularly good as FRD enters an administration period, but they could still potentially be saved. Cameron Gunn of Resolve Partners spoke:

"We will be spending the next three or four days assessing the financial position of the company but it's business as usual, although we have asked that almost all of the employees apart from a skeleton crew remain at home".

"All employees have been paid up until the end of December and we hope to make another announcement before Christmas or very soon thereafter".

Free Radical's best games were the popular TimeSplitters series. It's thought this closure is due to the failing of Haze, a PS3 exclusive. There was hope that TimeSplitters 4 may be heading to Wii, now it may not be heading anywhere at all.

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Rob Jones

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wiiboy101 said:

Imagine if free radical had gone Wii exclusive, haze would have been easier and cheaper to develop and also timesplitters 4 and both games would have benefited from wiimote controls. Another 3rd party gets it all so wrong. Wii exclusive would result in profits and polished games, why are 3rd parties so dumb.

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MediumBlueMetallic said:

Very sad. Those guys were largely responsible for Goldeneye on the N64 when they worked for Rare.

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Diddy Kong Lover said:

It's only karma for dissing Wii and calling it "out of touch". It's like only supporting SEGA systems that last a month at most, you can't do that, you'll be the laughing stock and die.

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Wii Rox said:

I wish these guys stayed with the rest of the RAREWARE team, maybe then BK3 would be more like the originals.

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