Back in the halcyon days of 1998, Ritual Entertainment’s Sin was shaping up to be the hottest shooter released that year. An over-the-top, hyper-violent gunfest with the backing of John Romero and a dash of what, at the time, qualified as sex appeal, Sin seemed destined to be the shooter on everyone’s hard-drive by the end of the year.
But it didn’t quite happen that way. A month after Sin’s launch, Valve released Half-Life, which sucked up all the FPS oxygen with its revolutionary approach to storytelling and environment design. But it turns out it wasn’t just Half-Life that caused problems for developer Ritual Entertainment. The studio had also accidentally put itself in the bad books of its own publisher.
The story was told by Sin’s design and marketing lead Robert M. Atkins, on Nightdive Studios’ Deep Dive podcast. Speaking to Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick, Atkins explained how Ritual inadvertently became the black sheep of its publishing family.
Atkins says that Ritual had big plans for Sin as a multimedia franchise. The promotional material included both a comic book and an animated movie that ended up coming out after the game launched. But Atkins says there were “a couple of things” that hindered Ritual’s ultimate plans for the game and the wider Sin world. One of these was the founding of Gathering of Developers, a radical new type of publisher formed from an alliance of eight different development studios, of which Ritual Entertainment was one.
“We were positioning that as a developer-owned publisher. And some of the core things that were being said was ‘We started this because we want developers to be treated fairly,'” Atkins says. “And some of the things that came out in the press—not necessarily from Ritual, but from people who were at the Gathering leadership—were basically shit-talking publishers.”
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This, apparently, did not go down with Ritual’s own publisher for Sin, Activision. “That pissed off Activision because they had given us an outrageously fair deal. We had a 50/50 royalty deal with Activision. We were the new kids, but it [started] looking like we were [the] problem child because we were bigger than our britches.”
This, it seems, didn’t encourage Activision to give Ritual much support. Indeed, Atkins says that Activision didn’t bother to test the gold master of Sin when Ritual shipped it. This turned out to be a problem because one of Ritual’s designers had accidentally turned off the game’s first boss just before the master shipped. “Activision took the gold master and they didn’t test the game. So our first boss was turned off,” Atkins says. “We got trashed in the press because of bugs … it really hurt us when it came to reviews.”
The other problem arrived a month after Sin’s release, in an unmistakable orange box with a lambda symbol on it. “This somewhat famous game [called] Half-Life comes out, and we ship[ped] our product a few weeks before Half-Life,” he says. “Half-Life just crushed the market. It completely changed the first-person shooter narratives.”
As such, Sin never saw the success it might have had things been different. But its time in the limelight hasn’t completely passed. Sin: Reloaded, Nightdive’s remaster of Ritual’s shooter, has recently resurfaced after a five-year hiatus. A fixed release date hasn’t been revealed quite yet, however, so let’s hope Half-Life 3 doesn’t get a surprise launch in the meantime.
