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Free Radical Design Ltd. was a British video game developer based in Nottingham. Founded by David Doak, Steve Ellis, Karl Hilton and Graeme Norgate in Stoke-on-Trent in April 1999, it is best known for its TimeSplitters series of games.
After going into financial administration, it was announced on 3 February 2009 that the studio had been acquired by German video game developer Crytek and would be renamed Crytek UK. Crytek had a good relationship with the city of Nottingham due in part to its sponsorship of the Gamecity festival and its recruitment drives with Nottingham Trent University. In 2014, the studio was closed, with a majority of the staff transferred to the newly formed Dambuster Studios.
In May 2021, two of the original founders, Doak and Ellis, reformed Free Radical Design under Deep Silver to create a new entry in the TimeSplitters series. Two years later, the second iteration was shut down on 11 December 2023.
Free Radical Design was working on from 2006 to 2008, but it was cancelled by their publishing partner when it was supposedly "99 percent" complete. The cancellation of this title, and the poorly received release of Haze, contributed to Free Radical Design going into bankruptcy. In late 2008, Free Radical Design was approached by Activision to work on a GoldenEye 007 remake. Although the studio rebuilt the Dam Level for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, negotiations fell through, with the studio entering administration soon afterwards. The remake would release on those consoles without FRD's involvement in 2011 as an enhanced port of its original release on the Wii and Nintendo DS a year prior.
On 18 December 2008, it was reported that the studio had shut down, though it was later confirmed that the company had gone bankrupt, leaving only 40 of the original 185 staff still employed. On 3 February 2009, the Haze scriptwriter, Rob Yescombe, announced that Free Radical Design had been purchased by the German developer Crytek. In 2010, the company moved from Sandiacre to brand-new offices in the new central Nottingham Southreef development. The £50 million investment would then have allowed Crytek UK to "grow over the next few months".
On 30 July 2014, Crytek announced that, due to an internal restructuring, it would sell the intellectual property of Homefront (the sequel for which, later restructured as the reboot , was in development at Crytek UK at the time) to Koch Media, parent company of video game publisher Deep Silver, and lay off much of the company's staff. Crytek left it unclear whether the company had been shut down entirely, however all staff were transferred to the new Dambuster Studios being established in Nottingham in accordance with British law, where they afterwards continued to work on Homefront: The Revolution.
In November 2023, VGC reported that the company was set to be closed down on 11 December by the Embracer Group, which had been restructuring its company and subsidiaries for the last six months, unless a third-party buyer was found. Developers confirmed the closure on 11 December.
| 2000 | TimeSplitters | Eidos Interactive | First-person shooter | |||||
| 2002 | TimeSplitters 2 | |||||||
| 2004 | Second Sight | Codemasters | Action-adventure, stealth game | |||||
| 2005 | Electronic Arts | First-person shooter | ||||||
| 2008 | Haze | Ubisoft |
| 2011 | Crysis 2 | Electronic Arts | First-person shooter | |||
| Crysis (port) | ||||||
| 2013 | Crysis 3 | |||||
| 2014 | Warface | Microsoft Studios |
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