TimeSplitters Rewind remake is still alive, because these green crystals told us so

When I hear the name "TimeSplitters," the first image that comes to mind is a cartoon monkey with a minigun, not some slowly rotating green crystals. But after months of operating in silence, the mod team behind TimeSplitters Rewind just dropped a new trailer to prove the project is still alive—and it's about a minute and a half of slowly rotating time crystals set to dramatic music. Classic case of good news/bad news, here: TimeSplitters Rewind is still a thing, and it’s planned to release this year, but there's not much to see in this baffling “teaser”.

Last time we reported on TimeSplitters Rewind, back in 2013, we noted the project had Crytek's blessing, and was being developed as a multiplayer-focused remake of Free Radical's TimeSplitters trilogy. This video gives the development team a new name, Cinder Interactive Arts, and hints at a new release date. At the end of the video, 2018 disappears and is replaced by 2017.

In the first minute and a half of the trailer, eagle-eyed TimeSplitters fans will likely notice a few familiar faces reflected in the spinning crystals, but that's about it for substance. Comments on Reddit haven't exactly been kind about the vague teaser.

I reached out to one of the Rewind developers, who helped clarify the goal of the unusual trailer.

"It was a teaser and was developed in a short amount of time to get people talking, the date change at the end was designed to tease people with the final date being 2017," the developer wrote. They also confirmed that Cedar Interactive Arts is a new name for the team, which has changed quite a bit since the project began.

You can see more about the history of the TimeSplitters Rewind project on its website, which was last updated in September 2016.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).