In 2002, I was 13, and I spent as much of my time as possible playing TimeSplitters 2. Six years later, I spent a sizeable portion of my 19th year in the extremely purple company of Saints Row 2.

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Between those two fairly formative experiences, I invented my own game modes with my brother in Red Faction 2. I had my mind blown by blowing up minds in Second Sight. Adult pangs of nostalgia already setting in, I rented Stuntman: Ignition to recall its PS2 predecessor. Friends introduced me to Destroy All Humans, and Painkiller. I’m also fairly sure I played doomed racing sim Juiced but, looking at it now, god knows why I would have chosen to.Aside from the fact that I played them at some point, there’s little to connect these games. That list represents different genres, developers, publishers, levels of quality. Some games I can remember as well as the alphabet, others I’d forgotten about until looking them up for this piece. Now, 16 years after I lost myself to TimeSplitters 2, they’re all connected – because THQ Nordic bought them.Reinhard Pollice is the publisher’s business & product development director; if not the man with the money, then certainly the man who directs where it flows to next. Since 2011, he’s been involved in swallowing up games, series, developers, even entire publishers, helping turn a little company once simply called Nordic Games into a genuine new publishing force. Well, that or he set up an extensive surveillance operation focused on me, which resulted in the company almost exclusively buying IP rights for games I played when I lived with my parents.Whatever the process, I put it to him that he has, essentially, bought my teenagerhood.“The thing is, it's the same for us”, he explains of the company’s unusual strategy. “It's the games we loved in the past. We think they should still have a place, and we feel like it's sometimes such a pity that there is no game like that out there, so whenever there's an opportunity to get the original, we just grab it instead of creating something new.”This seems to be the key to all of THQ Nordic’s recent business. Rather than chasing trends along with other major publishers, it aims to fill gaps. With regard to the older IPs the publisher buys up, Pollice wants to find areas of gaming that have been neglected, catering to underserved fans.“Whenever we acquire stuff,” he explains, “we really see it first from a game perspective. Is this something relevant? Is this something cool? Was it unique when it came out? Does it have a fan base? These sorts of questions are very important to us.”When I mention that that must be risky – there’s usually a fairly obvious reason a part of the market’s gone stagnant – Pollice calmly reverses the idea. Take the current Battle Royale gold rush, which he describes as “not a top priority”. With every other major publisher scrambling to cash in on the popular mode, it makes more sense for THQ Nordic to try and diversify its approach, to offer something else, rather than risk putting all its eggs into one, increasingly crowded basket.He doesn’t need to look far for the problems with that trend-chasing approach – just look at the history of one of his own acquired franchises, Red Faction. That series began with a neat idea, “everything can be blown up”, then achieved mass popularity by placing that idea into an open world context for its third entry, Guerrilla. It felt bold, and singular. And then Red Faction: Armageddon came along.“It's a bit sad. The initial concept was very different, and then it was toned down to be a linear shooter, because at the time THQ was trying to chase Call of Duty. Everything they did at the time was, ‘oh, this is Call of Duty in space’. ‘Oh, this is Call of Duty on the water’. They tried to follow these trends. And then weird stuff, like aliens, was introduced. Totally doesn't make sense.”The upshot, as fans of the series know, was that the game tanked, THQ iced the entire franchise, and then went bust. That was until Nordic came along, picked up Red Faction as part of a THQ buyout and, eventually, adopted the ex-publisher’s name (“it would be a pity to lose it”).But while it’s well and good buying the rights to these games, it’s been fairly unclear what the company plans to actually do with them. So far, the trend has been for its acquisitions to receive remasters of their most popular (rather than most recent) entries – Red Faction: Guerrilla, for example, has been Nordic’s choice to make the jump to current-gen. Making sure great games remain accessible is a worthy goal, but it’s not exactly exciting to the long-term fan, who wants to see their favourite series resurrected, not just resuscitated.Pollice assures me that Nordic sees remastering games as a “first step” for the way it wants to handle its acquisitions. The next step could differ wildly depending on the franchise, but it’s clear that Nordic sees the core of its approach to each IP as coming from the fans.Some fanbases have filled years without official releases by creating mods or fan games, while others have simply waited patiently. Some – like the community behind turn-based tactics series Jagged Alliance – have treated the new owners with some distrust, with Pollice saying its first job is to earn respect with a fanbase that’s been burned by previous owners. In the case of newly-acquired Kingdoms of Amalur, THQ Nordic wasn’t even aware of how many fans it had on its hands until the feverish reception to it buying the IP.“It's always an interesting challenge to learn about that and find out about what's important for a specific group of people”, Pollice enthuses.No matter the approach, it’s clear that the goal, at least for Pollice, is to make new games for the old series he’s picking up. For some franchises that’s already begun, with the likes of Darksiders 3 and Desperados 3 well into development. Others are easy wins. Nordic not only bought Red Faction, but recently acquired the series’ creator, Volition. Pollice won’t be drawn on specifics, but something is clearly in the works.“We had already made our conclusion [about where to take the franchise], then tried to understand what [Volition’s] internal thinking about Red Faction was. It was kind of interesting. Funnily enough it matched very well with what we had come up with.”Some IPs are harder to work with than others, however. TimeSplitters, for example, is saddled with two warring issues: well over a decade of fan hopes, and a deeply out-of-fashion approach. Pollice admits that this is the “difficult phase” of working with such a popular but aged IP: “We have to figure out what's the best first step, how we can please the fans, and how we can make the franchise relevant nowadays.”He won’t even go as far as saying that a new game is in the planning stages, rather that Nordic is “spinning ideas” about how to approach the franchise (hopefully with developers at the also-acquired Dambuster Studios, which began life as TimeSplitters creator Free Radical).The heartening fact of the matter, however, is that the company’s choosing to go through that difficult phase at all, rather than simply make whatever money it could by capitalising on existing products.Pollice recognises the problem the company faces with the classic FPS, but approaches it more as a challenge than a roadblock. “We see a lot of people are actually like, ‘yeah, what we like about it is it's so old school’. I think the key essence will be to find an angle where are this feeling can be conveyed in a [modern] game, right?” He finishes with something akin to magic words: “In the end, Doom also managed to do that, so I'm not too worried about that.”This is, of course, too early to get excited that my rose-tinted teenagerhood is returning. There could be any number of potential problems along the way: plans or philosophies could change, developments could sour, and games can just come out feeling wrong, no matter how much love has been poured in.But there is love at the heart of this. I came into this interview if not skeptical of, then a little concerned by THQ Nordic’s acquisitive approach, but there’s an enthusiasm for and real knowledge of the products Pollice talks about. Our time talking is filled with near-constant references to how THQ Nordic wants its approach to be directed by fans – and that includes those within the company. “It all starts out,” he says of how he and his colleagues choose what to buy, “when part of our team really loves those IPs.”Pollice is no exception – I ask if he has a personal favourite acquisition from the burgeoning list, and it turns out one of the company’s biggest deals so far comes down, in part, to his own drive to be the one to handle it:“I was really happy when we acquired Darksiders from THQ, because I was a fan before. We were a really small company [at the time], and making the call to invest this amount of money for these franchises was kind of tough, and the majority was for Darksiders. There was some talk of carving it out of the deal, but I was like, ‘No, we have to do this. This is awesome. I want Darksiders.’”After our talk, I begin to think about what I’d go and buy if I had a game publisher’s worth of capital behind me, and why I’d do it. I realise that I’d probably choose most of the same games THQ Nordic has. My reasoning would be that if the likes of Red Faction or TimeSplitters have had such a lasting effect on me, that I’m still thinking about them this much later, there’s something about them worth preserving, and trying to make work for the modern landscape (OK, maybe not Juiced). After talking to someone who actually could do that, I feel like we might share the same aspiration.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and looked at so much TimeSplitters concept art during the course of writing this story. Follow him on Twitter