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SiN Facts

Genre: First Person Shooter
Publisher: Activision
Released: November 1998
Engine: Quake II
Development time: 20 months
Budget: $2 million
Team size: 17 people, 1 plastic sheep

The founders of Hipnotic:
Back: Harry Miller, Robert Atkins, Michael Hadwin.
Front: Jim Dose, Mark Dochtermann, Richard "Levelord" Gray.

The SiN team frequently had meetings to discuss the game's progress.

The Levelord's Book of SiN contained a multitude of drawings and notes related to his maps.

A closer look at some of the Lord's notes for Munt Phoenix, put to paper during a design meeting.

Robert Atkins tries to stay on top of the many art tasks required for the game.

A common sight during the project's extended periods of crunch mode.

The big day: SiN arrives in stores in early November 1998.

SiN starred John Blade and his hacker sidekick JC in their fight against...

...Elexis Sinclaire, the ruthless CEO of SinTEK Industries.

The first level is perhaps the most iconic moment of the entire game.

SiN's intricate combat system rewarded accuracy and conservation of body armor.

SiN frequently broke up the action with unique gameplay sequences.

SiN was jam-packed with pop culture references and jabs at the competition.

The free SinCTF add-on proved to be extremely entertaining and popular among SiNners.

2015's excellent Wages of Sin continued the story of HardCorps and Freeport City.

In 2000, ADVFilms released SiN: The Movie to great success.

The story of SiN is very much the story of Ritual, and will no doubt continue to be, but more than that, it also provides a unique perspective on a very crucial period of time in computer gaming, especially in a time when First Person Shooters were changing in dramatic and exciting ways.

This story starts in the mid-nineties. It was the peak of a kind of golden age for PC gaming, and especially for first person shooters. 1996 specifically saw the release of a number of excellent first person shooters, one of the most well remembered being Duke Nukem 3D. 3D Realms, the developers of that famous game, proved to be fertile ground for the spawning of off-shoot development studios - this was the same company responsible for giving id software their big break, and now they would spawn one of the other longest enduring games development studios in the Texas cluster.

A number of people from the Duke3D team left together to form their own team, including Richard Gray, alias the Levelord. Called Hipnotic Interactive, they began by releasing a sophisticated expansion pack for Quake, called Scourge of Armagon, which was quite popular with the game's fans. But soon they would change their name to Ritual Entertainment, and announce their first full length, original game: SiN.

SiN was something special from the start. Developed on the Quake 2 engine, the game was to be one of a good number of next-gen shooters to be released in 1998, others included Unreal, Half-Life, Duke Nukem Forever and possibly Prey. All of these games, but also a few of their near-predecessors like Jedi Knight, were cut to a new sort of "action list" for first person shooters, emphasizing aspects of the genre's gameplay that had up to that point in time been overlooked – those mainly were realism (in terms of environments and combat), story-telling and features that made the game somehow more complex, involved or generally ‘smarter' – features that were supposed to add strategy and complexity to the thoughts of a player as he played the game. There were other things that the players wanted to see the back off – silly, arcadey combat, with highly unrealistic movement and abstract level design, tally scores in between levels and "exit" rooms, and a whole variety of other features that had become de rigueur, but got terribly in the way of immersion and suspension of disbelief, in short these games were now expected to make a serious effort at selling an experience to the player.

SiN, as a member of this list of next-gen shooters featured all three in spades – and in much larger quantity then some of its contemporaries like Unreal, which was perhaps the most traditional of all the major 1998 FPS releases. In fact, SiN was so bursting with all that was new and whiz bang at that time that the response not just from the general public, which was responding eagerly to the massive Activision hype machine, but from other developers as well. "The folks at Valve even admitted, many years later, that they were afraid SiN would outshine Half-Life when they had played the pre-release version," recalls Richard Gray.

SiN was so full of cool new stuff, that making a list of them all is not only worthwhile, but a little bittersweet, because there were a lot of things in this game that are still not present in most shooters where they would find a very good home – like the augmentations on combat. SiN's format of combat involved a fast pace, and aggressive enemies whose behavior was straightforward (though they did regularly perform some acrobatics which made them a more difficult, moving target), but on top of this very familiar base Ritual expanded with complex locational damage for both the enemies and the player (where getting shot in the head, in the torso and in the limbs all did varying amounts of damage – AND the game visually indicated this damage with appropriate "pain skins") as a counterbalance to this, there was an armor system which allowed the player to find armor for all the major body parts on enemies and elsewhere, which not only added an element of strategy (helmets to protect the head being especially desirable when facing snipers in the single player game) but also encouraged better aiming, so as to damage as little of the enemy's armor as possible (instead aiming for a unprotected area) so as to ensure the loot to be more valuable.

Incidentally this kind of philosophy, exploiting tried and tested designs and adding on top of them to create a unique yet familiar experience, rather then changing them fundamentally, spoke of the team's 3D Realms heritage, which follow the same type of idea in their games. ‘Levelord' makes note of this as being nothing short of an asset: "I don't think being compared to Duke Nukem 3D could ever be a bad thing, ever!"

But SiN's richness expanded far beyond the combat. The game featured a wide variety of very impressive environments, like for example the Dam level which exhibited a scale matched by the likes of Unreal and Jedi Knight only, and arguably at a higher level of detail. There was its interactivity as well, which not only involved all the usual gag stuff that one would expect from 3D Realms disciples, but also rather involved stuff such as completely interactive computer consoles, and puzzles where one would have to gain the password to a computer that would then allow access to functions of the more mundane variety, like opening locked doors, or more interesting things like not only disabling the security system, but turning it on your enemies, plus much more. All of it was powered by a sophisticated scripting language attached to a specific map that worked on the fly create complex input-output relationships between game entities the likes of which have not been seen until as recently as 2004, allowing just about anything in the level to move, "think", shoot at you or be shot apart by you at a great level of complexity. This means that SiN's environments are still some of the most interesting in any game to date.

The developers did not neglect the need for good narrative when creating the game either, and they concocted a sophisticated narrative to drive the game – not in the literary sense, because SiN's antagonist is a female biochemist who sports a 36DD bust and has a serious BDSM twist to her – but in the sense that a first person shooter with a proper narrative featuring plotting, characters, dialogue character arcs and so forth was such a rare thing back then. In the eyes of Richard Gray, though, the story was a success on every level: "It had a great story and a great cast of characters." And you know what? It did. Elexis is awesome, Blade is awesome, I even love JC, and screw anyone who says otherwise!

However, there is no doubt that one specific feature was SiN's biggest innovation and possibly its undoing, and that was the ABO's or Action Based Outcomes. SiN featured a complex objective system which would determine by what objectives the player completed (and with what degree of success) not only how the story progressed, or whether or not the player would meet different conditions when playing through future levels but also whether he would get to play those levels at all, allowing whole sections of the game to be by-passed by the player.

The ABO's were definitely revolutionary – such systems were not completely new, but they were rarely done to this scale before, and never in such a way in a straight first person shooter before. Indeed the ABO's were so complex they caused major play-testing and QA problems, thus making them responsible for the lions share of the smaller technical glitches the player encountered playing the game. In retrospect, Gray feels that the ABO's were nothing short of a mistake, he tells: "Let me be clear, this was a great idea and it is something we still want to pursue, but we went way too far with it." Yet, its richness of features were one of the most appreciated things about the game, none the less, Gray feels that SiN's complexity could have been cut down at least by half, saying: "We tried to do too much in one game. We probably could have divided the original SiN into two, maybe even three full games,"

There is certainly wisdom in this statement – take for example FEAR, the 2005 shooter by Monolith featuring a Max Payne style bullet time sequence. Now, FEAR has a damage model of sorts, though not one as sophisticated as SiN's, and it has no complex armor feature, like SiN had. Taking FEAR's visceral, cinematic first person combat and giving it the added depth of SiN's combat features, while keeping all other aspects of the game strictly conventional, would have no doubt elevated what was already a good game to even greater heights of critical and quite possibly financial success.

So SiN's design was often inspired, but what it lacked was focus. Ironically, another release which came just two weeks later and had a somewhat lower level of buzz then SiN itself was Half-Life – and Half-Life itself lacked none of that focus, it had its own innovative features, like its AI, its unique storytelling style and NPC interaction, and for that it was rewarded with the most sterling success of any FPS released that year. Yet, it was not these features, as parts, that perhaps made Half-Life look more sophisticated next to SiN, but rather the simple aesthetic of the two games. Blade was the black Duke Nukem, wise cracking, one-liner-spouting and generally irreverent, Gordon Freeman dabbled in theoretical physics and was silent to a fault, and while Blade's sidekick is a whiny-voiced juvenile nerd who just won't shut up, Gordon has a dejected, melancholy security guard at his right side. This must have gotten back to the developers, because during the development of Emergence, the latest SiN game, Blade's mouthyness became a point of controversy, Levelord had this to say on the matter: "We found that there were two camps related to this feature, and both had strong feelings about it. There were those that loved Blade's one-liners and vocal personality, and others that thought it was juvenile and interfering." So Blade's 80's Rambo oiled up Dolph Lundgrenian persona made him decidedly unfashionable in a time when making games that took themselves seriously was all the rage. This resulted in reviews, like Gamespot's for example, which would describe SiN as "nothing new but solid", when the game was in terms of design very much new and groundbreaking, as has been demonstrated before.

But all such negative comparisons would have looked petty if it had not been for SiN's major drawback: there can be no doubt about what buried SiN, and that was the bugs. Gray imagines a dramatically different future for SiN, had the game not been in such a sordid state at release. "It would be a completely different world right now, if we had had more time to debug. Those few-but-show-stopping bugs were the punch that put the game on the ground. We had them all fixed within a couple weeks when we released the patch, but it was too late, …the release of Half-Life was like a truck rolling over the fallen body. There was no saving the game after that." The publisher of the game was adamant, though, that SiN must be released on their originally agreed-upon date, to beat Half-Life out the door. A costly decision, because it was a waste of Activision's significant efforts to hype the game, and the loss of SiN to Ritual as a major franchise.

SiN could have had a big future, it was very accommodating to developers, and as a popular title, that is a massive boon in this age when mods can extend the longevity of a game to the point of, perhaps, even doubling sales. Indeed, despite its botched release SiN had a small but fiercely dedicated community, whose rich fruits one can see on this very website.

Yet, SiN was not finished after the release of the original game – far from it. The first would be Wages of Sin, an add-on pack developed by 2015, who would later go on to develop the critically acclaimed Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Wages of Sin featured a ton of content, including seven new weapons, six new enemies, a whole bunch of new multiplayer modes (like the Bike Deathmatch mode, where one could race around a track to score points, and also eliminate their competitors with rocket launchers and so forth, good times!), along with a good helping of extremely self-conscious and very clever humor that lampooned pretty much every aspect of SiN's design ("Damn, a security crate!") and the design of shooters in general, along with a cool story about maniac mafiosos who wanted to use the nefarious work of Elexis Sinclaire to make an army which would conquer Freeport for them – this made Wages of Sin truly worthwhile of purchase, something that is so very hard to say of an expansion pack.

Then there was ADVFilms's SiN: The Movie, something that Ritual did not even pursue, but the game's obscured shine generated all by itself, as Levelord recalls: "I believe ADV came to us first with the idea for a SiN anime movie. They were big fans of the game and thought it would fit nicely into an anime feature." The SiN movie was a feature-length anime dealing with yet another battle between Elexis and Blade across Freeport, and ended up being one of the most popular anime releases in the United States and look, even Levelord is a fan! "It was filled with the incredibly cool stylized gore and lots of blood and violence. My favorite part was how they killed off JC (sorry, JC) almost immediately and replaced him with his sassy, little female cousin.", so go check it out, it's still hanging around somewhere and can be bought both online and in stores.

But most importantly, Ritual themselves have returned to the franchise with SiN Episodes, which you no doubt have heard about, but we'll elaborate on that in a future article that will be part of this series.

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