Although a remaster of the game has been released, the story surrounding the original has been quite the rollercoaster ride.
In 1998, Sin, developed by Ritual Entertainment, looked set to be the most popular shooter of the year. Backed by John Romero and spiced with what was considered sexy at the time, this excessively violent, gun-toting bloodbath seemed destined to be on everyone’s hard drive by the end of the year. However, things didn’t quite turn out that way. A month after Sin‘s release, Valve released Half-Life, which brought a revolutionary approach to storytelling and level design. However, Half-Life wasn’t the only thing causing problems for developer Ritual Entertainment. The studio had also inadvertently fallen out of favor with its publisher.
Robert M. Atkins, Sin’s design and marketing director, recounted the story on the Nightdive podcast. In conversation with Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick, Atkins explained how Ritual Entertainment had become the black sheep of the publishing family. According to Atkins, Ritual had big plans to launch Sin as a multimedia franchise. The promotional materials included a comic book and an animated film, both of which were released after the game’s launch. However, Atkins noted that several factors hindered Ritual’s plans for the game and the Sin universe. One of these factors was the formation of Gathering of Developers, a radically new type of publisher created by an alliance of eight development studios, including Ritual.
“We were positioning ourselves as a developer-owned publisher. Some of the core messages were, ‘We started this because we want developers to be treated fairly,’ and some of the things that came out in the press – not necessarily from Ritual, but from people at the Gathering leadership – were basically publishers bashing. That pissed off Activision because they had given us an extremely fair deal. We had a 50/50 royalty deal with them. We were the new kids on the block, but it started looking like we were the problem child because we were acting like we were bigger than we were.
Activision took the gold master, but they didn’t test the game. So our first boss was turned off. We got trashed in the press because of bugs, which really hurt us when it came to reviews. Then this somewhat famous game called Half-Life came out. We had shipped our product a few weeks before Half-Life. Half-Life crushed the market. It completely changed first-person shooter narratives,” Atkins said.
Sin never achieved the success it could have had if things had turned out differently. However, Nightdive’s remaster, Sin: Reloaded, recently resurfaced after a five-year hiatus. However, the exact release date hasn’t been announced yet, so let’s hope Half-Life 3 doesn’t make a surprise appearance in the meantime.
Source: PCGamer
