TimeSplitters 2 Was Fully Playable In Homefront: The Revolution

Here we go, this will start a firestorm: There is a fully playable 4K version of TimeSplitters 2 in one of the worst triple-A games of the last decade. Remember Homefront: The Revolution? The sequel to the laughably strange game about North Korea having enough power to bend the world over its knee and give it all a good spanking? It had plenty of its own troubles, taking what was a B-movie linear shooter set in American urban and suburban environments, and putting it in an open world with fetch quests.

I’ll be honest, I think I put a few hours into it, just enough to get to the TimeSplitters 2 section where you get to play a few levels. Well, it turns out that this wasn’t the intention of the developer. Just the other day, Jan Willem Nijman (developer of Minit, Nuclear Throne, and others) sent out a tweet asking: “Game Devs, please respond with the best easter eggs you ever hid in a game[.]” Some of the responses are interesting little Easter eggs, but as you can already guess, none of them really top adding a whole PS2 Classic in 4K into a game that otherwise could be ignored now.

My proudest moment. Fully playable, native 4K port of TimeSplitters 2 hidden in this arcade machine in Homefront: The Revolution. https://t.co/U0ulGEW1A1 pic.twitter.com/a4UsyOw7eh

— Matt Phillips (@bigevilboss) April 4, 2021

Matt Phillips (formally a senior programmer at Dambuster Studios) had a bit of an interesting response, a short thread in fact, about the TimeSplitters 2 arcade cabinet in Homefront: The Revolution. However, I don’t think the thread is the most interesting thing in there, instead, it is Phillips’ replies to surprised fans. For example, in one instance Phillips notes that doing this was “Started as an office joke” as Dambusters, the developers of Homefront: The Revolution was Crytek UK. This studio also was once Free Radical, developer of TimeSplitters 2.

However, the cruel twist of fate doesn’t end there, as there is one more thing that Phillips notes. One person asked if there was a way to unlock more than the default of two levels, with Phillips replying: “The unlock code has been lost to time, I don’t have the notebook with it in [anymore].” Going on to state, “I once gave it to a friend to leak in some Discord channel and they called him a liar and banned his account[.]” Yep! The code to unlock the proper 4K version of TimeSplitters 2 was leaked, and now it is lost to time because no one believed it to be true. In fact, they clearly didn’t check if it was true. I hate humanity right about now.