It’s always an understatement to describe just how much Valve’s Half-Life changed the games industry. Valve’s debut first-person shooter told a proper narrative through gameplay sequences, which immediately made rival titles feel outdated by design.
Half-Life’s release not only completely overtook PC gaming on launch, but immediately knocked other games out of the limelight. One such game is SiN, Ritual Entertainment’s bold, story-driven FPS game that pushed the Quake II engine way past its assumed limits.
Soon to be remastered in the form of Nightdive Studios’ SiN Reloaded, design and marketing lead Robert Atkins. Speaking to Nightdive Studios CEO Stephen Kick on the Nightdive Deep Dive series, Atkins explains that Half-Life immediately took the wind out of SiN’s sales.
“This somewhat famous game Half-Life comes out, and we ship our product a few weeks before Half-Life,” Atkins recalled. “Half-Life just crushed the market. It completely changed the first-person shooter narratives.”
Some context for younger readers, prior to Half-Life, SiN was seen as a technological marvel. While Valve’s release was still generating a lot of buzz, SiN was seen as the game’s biggest competitor with grandiose cutscenes, immersive gameplay (such as having to use a DOS terminal to hack computers within the game world), and action-packed combat.
However, the release of Valve’s masterpiece wasn’t the only issue SiN was facing, Atkins explained that Activision somewhat sabotaged the game’s release. The design lead explained that it joined the Gathering of Developers, a short-lived published that aimed to give studios better deals than publishers such as EA and Activision were giving, although Activision had already given Ritual a fairly good deal for the time.
“That pi**ed off Activision because they had given us an outrageously fair deal,” Atkins told Kick. “We had a 50/50 royalty deal with Activision. We were the new kids, but it [began] looking like we were [the] problem child because we were bigger than our britches.”
In response, Atkins says Acticvision pushed a busted version of the game’s gold master which still major issues to the gaming press which resulted in poor reviews. “Activision took the gold master and they didn’t test the game,” he continued. “Out first boss was turned off! We got trashed in the press because of bugs.”
Needless to say, reviews were mixed and Half-Life was the golden child of PC gaming. Valve’s debut launched to stellar reviews. GameSpot’s still available review from the time called it the “closest thing to a revolutionary step the genre has ever taken”, and they were right. Half-Life’s sales continued for months, dominating most of the PC gaming market outside of major releases. As we already know, SiN did not do so well by comparison.
The last Half-Life game to release is 2020’s VR game Half-Life: Alyx. While also a prequel, the game sets the stage for Half-Life 3, which is currently in some form of development, although it’s probably not finished like some leaks have claimed.
