Sin is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ritual Entertainment and published by Activision in 1998. It uses a modified version of the Quake II engine. Sin is set in the dystopian future of 2037, where John Blade, a commander in a security force named HardCorps in the megacity of Freeport, is tasked to rid the city of a recreational drug that may be tied to the rival biotechnology megacorporation, SinTek.
Sin was released to generally positive reviews, with praise going towards its level design and premise, but criticism for technical issues that resulted from a rushed release. It sold poorly as a result of competition with Half-Life, but grew to have a cult following.
Nightdive Studios acquired the rights to Sin in 2020, and in March 2020 republished the game, along with the Wages of Sin expansion pack, as Sin: Gold. In September 2020, the studio announced plans to release a remastered version, titled Sin: Reloaded, originally for a 2021 release but currently delayed to an unknown time.[3]
Gameplay
Sin introduced some new features to the first-person shooter genre, such as the ability to knock the weapon out of an opponent's hand and to take area-specific damage from enemies. Although driveable vehicles did not play a big part in the game, there are some sections and levels which require the player to drive certain vehicles, including an all-terrain vehicle, a patrol boat, a forklift, and a helicopter. There are three different types of body armor– for the legs, for the torso and for the head, with each of them depleting separately according to where the player is hit.
Computer terminals can be manipulated through a DOS-like command prompt. Many levels have multiple ways in which to complete them, and actions can trigger changes in future levels.[4] Some of these actions can force the player to go through an entirely different set of levels.
The enemies can run for cover, call for reinforcements, locate the player, and respond to specific scripts.
Plot
Set in the near future of 2037, many of the levels and locations are reminiscent of their current-day equivalents. Banks, building sites, sewage works and other everyday recognizable buildings form the basis of many of the levels in Sin. One major difference in the world of Sin is the lack of a police force. Ten years prior to the game, the police force collapsed due to corruption and ineffectiveness against the rising tide of crime. Private security companies have taken the police's place, with some of them patrolling the streets like the former police, some in charge of protecting their employer's assets.
One of the companies which employ their own armed security forces is SinTEK, a large multi-national biotechnology corporation specializing in medical and chemical research, owned by the beautiful and charismatic Elexis Sinclaire. Elexis took over the company following the mysterious disappearance of her father, Dr Thrall Sinclaire, who founded it in 2005.
The protagonist of the game, Colonel John R. ("Rusty") Blade, is the commander of one of the largest security forces in the city of Freeport, HardCorps. Prior to the beginning of the game, Blade is working to rid the streets of a potent new recreational drug named U4, which is rapidly gaining popularity in Freeport and is rumoured to be able to cause genetic mutations to its users. Yet the source of the drug is still unknown, and its effects not entirely studied. As the game begins, the player is placed into the shoes of John Blade as he responds to a full-scale bank heist and hostage situation perpetrated by a well-known Freeport criminal boss Antonio Mancini. But as the player progresses and pursues the criminal behind the heist, further questions are raised: Who is really behind the heist? And is this linked to the reported appearances of mutants in the city?
Throughout the missions, Blade is aided via radio link by a computer expert working at HardCorps: JC, a skilled hacker, capable of breaking into even the tightest of networks. In fact, Blade had first found out about JC when investigating a cracker who had broken into the HardCorps system. After tracking down the hacker, Blade, recognizing the perpetrator's talents, decided to make him a job offer at HardCorps instead of arresting him. Thus, JC became one of the HardCorps most valuable assets and the only one able to assist them in hacking-based missions.
As the game progresses, it is gradually revealed that the whole bank robbery is funded by Elexis Sinclaire, who in fact only wanted Mancini to steal a safety deposit box from the bank's vault. When she learns that he launched a full-scale bank heist instead, she injects him with concentrated U4 and turns him into a mutant, sending him after Blade. John manages to defeat the huge creature and afterwards learns that it was, in fact, Mancini himself. Blade also finds out that the substance found in Mancini's body after his death is only manufactured by one company: SinTEK. All these unavoidable facts force Blade to embark on an investigation into SinTEK's vast industrial area located in the outskirts of Freeport.
Later, Blade learns that Elexis Sinclaire's main goal is to contaminate the Freeport water system with vast quantities of U4, turning all of the city's inhabitants into mutants. He manages to thwart that plan, but it turns out to be just a diversion because, in the meantime, SinTEK's troops steal nuclear warheads from a U.S. military base. Elexis threatens to fill them with U4 and launch them at specific targets, turning the entire world's population into mutants. As Blade becomes aware of that, he heads to SinTEK's main base in order to stop Sinclaire. However, once Blade defeats the SinTEK's security and mutants at the base, he reaches Sinclaire, only for her to escape by transferring her entire body into a rocket that launches itself into the sky, splits and spreads everywhere. Sinclaire disappears through the rockets, JC is unable to locate them, and in Blade's fury at the escape, he smashes a button, causing the nuclear missiles to abort their launch.
Development
Development started in 1997, on the Quake engine.[5][6] When the id Tech 2 engine was completed some months later, the developers switched to that engine.
The game demo was found to have a CIH virus infection in one of its mirror links. Activision had advised players only to download the game demo from their website.[7] Due to the amount of patches which made the game more CPU-intensive, primary Amiga developer and later AmigaOS developer Hyperion Entertainment had to eventually cancel the AmigaOS version due to the lack of hardware at the time.
Voice actress Hannah Logan, who voiced Elexis, thought she did it well as she could do "a really low" voice and "do sexy vixens pretty well and it comes pretty easily."[8] Logan commented on Elexis and Blade: "Love and hate are different sides of the same coin; I think they are in 'love' with hating each other. Passion, pain, pleasure, winning, it's all the same in their cat and mouse game. ... I think Elexis is very much in touch with her 'feminine' side, but uses it in a masculine way, as a weapon. A bimbo is, ultimately, a victim. Elexis knows exactly what she is doing - she uses her sensuality to win, not that it always works, but it is definitely a major piece of ammo in her arsenal."[9]
Sin received above-average reviews, according to the review aggregation website GameRankings.[10] While PC Zone gave the game a "Classic" award, praising its inventive level design and engaging plot,[27] most other publications did not have such a glowing view towards it. Next Generation said, "while we feel the game may be a little light in the originality department, it certainly shines where it counts – gameplay – and [is] definitely worth your time."[22]
One common complaint was the long load times, which measured in the minutes between each level, death, or quickload.[28] With later patches, the long load times were greatly shortened, although compatibility with old save games was lost, forcing players to play through the game from the beginning or use cheats to progress to their previous point in the game. Another major concern was the abundance of bugs and glitches littered throughout the game. Some of the more widely reported bugs include a total lack of sound in the game, an end of chapter boss which could not move, a level on one path through the game not being finishable and general game crashes. Although these bugs were quickly patched up, the damage of the negative publicity had already been done, especially with the majority of the press reviewing the unpatched version. The patch was exceptionally large; at the time it was normal to expect a game patch file to be up to 5MB in size, whereas SiN's first patch was over 31MB. This was at a time when a substantial fraction of internet access was via dial-up, causing Activision to take the unusual step of offering to send CDs containing the patch to any owners of the game who did not have sufficient bandwidth to download it from the Internet. A likely explanation for the multitude of bugs is that the game may have been rushed to meet the 1998 Christmas season, possibly as an attempt to beat Half-Life to market.[29]
Mark Asher of CNET Gamecenter wrote, "Sin had a good first month, but then tailed off sharply."[citation needed] Combined with the failure of competitors Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and Blood II: The Chosen, its performance led him to speculate that the first-person shooter genre's market size was smaller than commonly believed, as the "only FPS game that has done really well [over the Christmas 1998 period] is Half-Life".[30][failed verification] However, BBC News' Alfred Hermida reported that the game had achieved "decent success" over the holiday shopping season, and wrote that he expected a sequel to emerge as a result.[29]
The villain Elexis Sinclaire was received mostly very positively. According to Story-Driven Character Design, the "beautiful, sexy" Elexis Sinclair was in fact the main selling point of the first game.[31]PC Ultra included her among the three best elements of the game "definitely the most innovative opponent seen in the latest first-person shooters."[32] The character has also been often compared to Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, due to both characters being seen as sex symbols in gaming.[33][34] A 1999 article about female video game characters in Polish magazine Gambler opined that Elexis was a "tremendous" challenger for Lara, as she was "even better built, with even greater bust and with a beauty mark like Cindy Crawford."[35] However, Phaedra Boinodiris from WomenGamers.com, talking to GamesRadar in 2007, used Elexis as an example of game characters "sexualized to the point of deformity" as she looked "like she crawled out of an S&M club."[36]
Sequels and other media
A mission pack was released for the game in 1999 by 2015, Inc., titled Sin: Wages of Sin. The player reprises the role of John Blade, and the story picks up after the conclusion of the main game, pitting the player against Gianni Manero, a notorious crime boss looking to take over Freeport city.
In 2000, ADV Films released a 60-minute anime film Sin: The Movie. Although loosely based on the game, with similar characters and plot elements, there are some differences. For example, a major character from the game is killed off in the first few moments of the film; also, it takes place in the 2070s, whereas the games take place in the late 2030s.
A sequel, Sin Episodes, was made by Ritual and was intended to be released episodically over Steam network. The only episode, titled "Emergence", was released on May 10, 2006.
An alternate reality game based in the Sin universe was launched in 2005 to promote the announcement of Sin Episodes. Various cryptic puzzles could be found on the website, and solving these would lead to new pieces of media and art. However, support for this piece of viral marketing by Ritual Entertainment did not last, although it has been claimed by Ritual that the final puzzles still remained unsolved.
Sin was re-released on the Steam platform on April 5, 2006, bundled together with Sin Episodes: Emergence. This version of Sin (version 1.12) includes fixes for audio and video playback problems, as well as integration with the Steam multiplayer server browser. It was reissued, along with its expansion pack SiN: Wages of Sin, on GOG.com on January 30, 2014, DRM-free and fixed for modern hardware.
Nightdive Studios, a team focused on bringing classic PC games to modern systems, acquired the rights to SiN in January 2020.[37] On March 18, 2020, Nightdive re-released Sin on Steam and GOG as Sin Gold, an updated version of the game provided for free to accounts that already owned SiN. SiN Gold incorporates the Wages of Sin expansion pack, adds support for modern resolutions, restores the original game assets, and fixes many bugs.[38]
Additionally, alongside the Gold edition, Nightdive announced plans for a remastered version of Sin to run on their Kex engine, scheduled for release in late 2020 or early 2021. It was announced during 3D Realms’ Realms Deep digital event that the remastered version will be called Sin: Reloaded, and that it will see a release in 2021.[39] However, as of November 2023 the title remains vaporware.
At Realms Deep 2022, an announcement for the game Phantom Fury, a sequel to Ion Fury, was shown. Close to the end, John Blade makes an appearance, and HardCorps is mentioned briefly, implying that the two franchises are connected.[40]
Related Research Articles
Quake II is a 1997 first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Activision. It is the second installment of the Quake series, following Quake. The game's storyline is continued in its expansions, including one tying in Quake II and the first game, and Quake 4.
Blade Runner is a point-and-click adventure game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Interactive for Microsoft Windows, released in November 1997. The game is not a direct adaptation of the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner but is instead a "sidequel", telling an original story, which runs parallel to the film's plot, occasionally intersecting with it.
Pinball Dreams is a pinball simulation video game developed by Digital Illusions and originally released for the Amiga in 1992. It spawned several sequels, including Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions. The MS-DOS port was digitally released by Rebellion Developments along with its sequel and Pinball Mania on February 22, 2011 on GOG.com with support for Microsoft Windows. It received an OS X build on April 23, 2013; and a Linux build on August 19, 2014.
Aliens Versus Predator is a 1999 science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Rebellion Developments and published by Fox Interactive for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It is a part of the Alien and Predator crossover franchise, Alien vs. Predator. A sequel, Aliens Versus Predator 2, was developed by Monolith Productions and released by Sierra in 2001.
Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a 1998 platform game produced by Epic MegaGames. It was released for Windows, and later for Macintosh. Like the first game, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jazz Jackrabbit 2 is a side-scrolling platform game but features additional multiplayer options, including the ability to play over a LAN or the Internet. On November 30, 2017, it was re-released on GOG.com along with the first game.
SiN Episodes: Emergence is a 2006 first-person shooter developed and published by Ritual Entertainment. It is the first game in a planned series of episodic games for Windows that would have expanded upon the 1998 computer game SiN. A total of nine episodes were planned with only the first one released. It is powered by the Source game engine, the first episode "Emergence" was the first computer game by a major developer to both be produced episodically and delivered over the Internet without the intervention of a publisher. This was accomplished through Valve's Steam content delivery system.
SIN: Wages of Sin is an expansion pack for Ritual Entertainment's first-person shooter game SiN. Wages of Sin was developed by 2015 Games Inc. as their first retail product and published by Activision in 1999. Taking place after the events depicted in SiN, players once again assume the role of HARDCORPS officer John R. Blade as he attempts to stop Mafia boss Gianni Manero from taking control of the remnants of SinTEK following the disappearance of its villainous CEO, Elexis Sinclaire.
DethKarz is a futuristic 3D racing game by game publisher Melbourne House. It was released for Microsoft Windows on 10 November 1998. A Nintendo 64 port was planned but never released. It was released digitally on 20 December 2019 by Piko Interactive on GOG.com.
Return to Krondor is a role-playing video game set in Raymond Feist's fictional fantasy setting of Midkemia. A sequel to 1993's Betrayal at Krondor, it was released for Windows on the PC in time for the 1998 Thanksgiving and Christmas season. Within the game, the player commands a group of heroes with different attributes, strengths, and weaknesses which the player may upgrade over the course of the game.
Redline is a 1999 post-apocalyptic combination first-person shooter/car combat game for Windows. It was developed by Beyond Games and published by Accolade. In Europe, the game is known as Redline - Gang Warfare: 2066. It is a spiritual successor to the Atari Lynx video game BattleWheels. The game was noted for allowing players to enter or exit vehicles during combat at anytime, thus combining the genres of car combat and first-person shooting. This was the last game Accolade published before being acquired by Infogrames.
Quest for Glory V: Dragon Fire is the fifth and final game in the Quest for Glory computer game series by Sierra FX, a former "sub brand" of Sierra On-Line. Unlike the first four games, Dragon Fire is primarily an action role-playing game with some elements of graphical adventure.
Star Trek: The Next Generation – Klingon Honor Guard is a first-person shooter set in the universe of Star Trek during the time of The Next Generation. The game was developed by MicroProse in 1998, using the Unreal game engine. The critical response to the title was generally positive with praise for the graphics, but mixed opinions of the level design.
Shadow Man is an action-adventure video game developed by Acclaim Studios Teesside and published by Acclaim Entertainment. It is based on the Shadow Man comic book series published by Valiant Comics. The game was announced in 1997 and was originally slated for a late 1998 release on Nintendo 64 and an early 1999 release for Microsoft Windows, but was delayed to August 31, 1999. A PlayStation version was also released on the same day. A Dreamcast version was released three months later on December 1.
Space Bunnies Must Die! is a third-person action-adventure game originally developed by Pulse Entertainment but ultimately by Ripcord Games and released on October 27, 1998 by Jinx for Microsoft Windows 98. The player character is truck stop waitress and rodeo performer Allison Huxter, who must save the world and her abducted sister from an invading race of mutant bunnies from space.
Rage of Mages is a PC game that combines role-playing and real-time strategy. Produced by Nival Interactive it was first released in Russia under the name of Allods: The Seal of Mystery. The game was published in April 1998 in the EU by Buka Entertainment and on October 13, 1998 in the US. It was re-released in 2016 on GOG.com.
GOG.com is a digital distribution platform for video games and films. It is operated by GOG sp. z o.o., a wholly owned subsidiary of CD Projekt based in Warsaw, Poland. GOG.com delivers DRM-free video games through its digital platform for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux.
Sin: The Movie is a Japanese cyberpunk action horror film original video animation released in 2000 by ADV Films, adapted from the game of the same title.
Night Dive Studios, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Vancouver, Washington. The company is known for obtaining rights to abandonware video games, updating them for compatibility with modern platforms, and re-releasing them via digital distribution services, supporting preservation of older games.
System Shock is a 2023 action-adventure game developed by Nightdive Studios and published by Prime Matter. It is a remake of the 1994 game System Shock by Looking Glass Studios. The game is set aboard a space station in a cyberpunk vision of the year 2072. Assuming the role of a nameless security hacker, the player attempts to hinder the plans of a malevolent artificial intelligence called SHODAN.
Jack Nicklaus 6: Golden Bear Challenge is a golf video game developed by Hypnos Entertainment and published by Activision for Microsoft Windows. It is part of a series of golfing games named after golfer Jack Nicklaus, and is the first in the series to feature him as a playable golfer. Producer and designer Mike Franco, who produced previous games in the series, began working on the game in November 1997, when Jack Nicklaus 5 was released.
↑ Ward, Trent C. (November 25, 1998). "SiN". IGN. Ziff Davis. Retrieved December 7, 2017.
1 2 "Sin". Next Generation. No.50. Imagine Media. February 1999. p.106. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
↑ Lee, Ed (January 1999). "Sin". PC Accelerator. No.5. Imagine Media. pp.76–77. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
↑ PCA staff (May 1999). "The Test of Time". PC Accelerator. No.9. Imagine Media. p.96. Retrieved April 18, 2021.
↑ Harms, William (January 1999). "Sin". PC Gamer. Vol.6, no.1. Imagine Media. Archived from the original on March 12, 2000. Retrieved December 7, 2017.
↑ Hill, Steve (December 1998). "Sin". PC Zone. No.70. Dennis Publishing. pp.90–93. Archived from the original on October 12, 2007. Retrieved April 17, 2021.
↑ Thresh; Kenn (December 3, 1998). "SiN Review". FiringSquad. Archived from the original on June 6, 2011. Retrieved April 4, 2010.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
