{"id":1588859,"date":"2026-05-24T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/i7nAmHTEhwSpZpre78eMvB"},"modified":"2026-05-24T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T14:00:00","slug":"the-design-lead-of-half-lifes-biggest-competitor-says-that-its-publisher-was-so-pissed-off-by-the-time-the-game-launched-that-it-didnt-bother-testing-it-properly-we-got-trashed-in-the-press-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/the-design-lead-of-half-lifes-biggest-competitor-says-that-its-publisher-was-so-pissed-off-by-the-time-the-game-launched-that-it-didnt-bother-testing-it-properly-we-got-trashed-in-the-press-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The design lead of Half-Life’s biggest competitor says that its publisher was so ‘pissed off’ by the time the game launched that it didn’t bother testing it properly: ‘We got trashed in the press because of bugs’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Back in the halcyon days of 1998, Ritual Entertainment’s Sin<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

But it didn’t quite happen that way. A month after Sin’s launch, Valve released Half-Life<\/a>, which sucked up all the FPS oxygen with its revolutionary approach to storytelling and environment design. But it turns out it wasn’t just <\/em>Half-Life that caused problems for developer Ritual Entertainment. The studio had also accidentally put itself in the bad books of its own publisher.<\/p>\n

The story was told by Sin’s design and marketing lead Robert M. Atkins, on Nightdive Studios’ Deep Dive podcast<\/a>. Speaking to Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick, Atkins explained how Ritual inadvertently became the black sheep of its publishing family.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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\u2014not necessarily from Ritual, but from people who were at the Gathering leadership\u2014were basically shit-talking publishers.”<\/p>\n

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