Co-founder Steve Ellis details the relationships, games and politics behind the fall of the TimeSplitters studio

There was a period during the last generation of consoles where Nottingham's Free Radical Design was at the top of the console development business, producing some of the most-loved, entertaining and distinctive first-person shooters on the home systems. As the FPS game became accepted on consoles, Free Radical were quick to zig while others zagged. Po-faced war games, space shooters and ports of PC favourites were being churned out at a remarkable rate, but Free Radical created all-new IP featuring flaming invisible monkeys, a mash of environments displaying a complete lack of respect for genre conventions and the kind of inventiveness and humour long since gone from the UK development scene.

"It was great. It was really good fun, the studio was smaller, everybody knew everybody, everybody knew what everyone else was doing," recalls Steve Ellis, one of the three co-founders of the studio. "The projects were smaller so we got more freedom to work on them as we thought we needed to as opposed to being led by publishers. It was good times."

Formed in 1999 by three of the original GoldenEye 64 team, David Doak, Karl Hilton and Steve Ellis, during the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox generation Free Radical Design was on a roll - creating and releasing three TimeSplitters games and third-person adventure Second Sight in six years.