The untold story of …
Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
Anybody who is as hopelessly obsessed with Source engine games as I am will probably remember SiN Episodes: Emergence. Released in 2006, Emergence was the first part of Ritual Entertainment’s massively ambitious plan to follow-up its 1998 FPS SiN. This plan, which dwarfed the aspirations of Half-Life 2’s episodic expansions, would have told the sequel’s story across a total of nine episodes, representing three games’ worth of experiences developed over a decade.
In the end, only one of these episodes ever saw the light of day. But I’ve always been curious about how SiN: Episodes would have proceeded, had Ritual been able to see these grand plans through. Where might subsequent episodes have taken players? What would have happened in the story? What new weapons, enemies, and experiences would they encounter?
Recently, I spoke to someone who knows. Michael Russell was the QA manager at Ritual Entertainment during the development of Emergence. While only employed at Ritual for two years, Russell was present for most of Emergence’s development, privy to both the studio’s plans for the future of the series, and why those plans never came to fruition. “A lot of the story was fairly public knowledge within the company,” Russell says. “Shawn Ketcherside was the writer for the game, and he was there on site.”
Russell explains that there was a grand plan for Sin: Episodes’ story. But understanding how Ritual planned to achieve it requires an important clarification. Russell says that SiN: Episodes was not conceived as a single, nine-episode series, but as a “trilogy of trilogies”—basically a trio of stories, each roughly the length of a full game, split into three episodes apiece.
This is important for several reasons. But from a narrative perspective, this thinking guided how Ritual structured the overarching story. Each of the trilogies would frame its story around a different character, giving them a three-act arc that would provide some form of narrative resolution in each trilogy.
Original sin
The arc of the first trilogy (which includes Emergence) would have focussed on the character Viktor Radek. Like the 1998 original, Emergence sees players resume the role of John Blade, leader of the law enforcement agency HardCORPS. Emergence opens with Blade captured by his nemesis Elexis Sinclaire, a genius geneticist, CEO of SinTEK Corporation, and a transhumanism obsessive. After Elexis injects Blade with a strange substance, he is rescued by HardCORPS teammate Jessica Cannon, whereupon the pair investigate a secret research facility hidden in the dockyard of SiN’s fictional metropolis Freeport City. The episode culminates in a HardCORPS assault on SinTEK’s headquarters, Supremacy Tower.
Radek is a drug lord and a close associate of Sinclaire, whose trail Blade and Cannon follow to discover the secret lab. Emergence ends with Blade boarding a helicopter at the summit of Supremacy Tower, having shot down a military VTOL piloted by Radek. According to Russell, Episode Two would have commenced with Blade searching for Radek’s downed aircraft, before being captured by a gang holed up in an abandoned aquarium, holding him alongside Radek who was also kidnapped by the gang.
From here, Blade and Radek would have sprung themselves from captivity, with the pair forming an uneasy alliance. “It would have been an ‘enemy of my enemy’ type thing'” where he would be your compatriot during Episode Two for about two thirds of the episode,” he says.
Russell says the abandoned aquarium was an idea adopted from Ritual’s plans for SiN 2, a more traditional sequel that was considered before Ritual opted for an episodic model. Blade and Radek would have fought through the aquarium, with Blade acquiring a new weapon called the Capacitance Cannon. “[This] could pull electricity from various sources around the [environment] and be able to inject energy into other areas,” Russell says. “Basically, it’s a way of being able to use the guns for puzzle solutions.”
After escaping the aquarium, Blade and Radek would have made for a nearby dam that was under construction, complete with a temporary force field holding back the water. The final third of the episode would have seen Blade leave Radek behind in a tunnel behind the dam. Upon returning, Blade would have discovered that Radek had absconded. “He managed to escape during that window, and [the episode] would end with the force field holding the water back being deactivated, and you getting flushed out the dam and partially flooding Freeport City.”
Cannon fodder
From here, Ritual’s plan becomes much more vague. Russell can’t recall much detail about what was in store for us in episode three, but says it would have concluded Radek’s storyline. The second trilogy, meanwhile, would have centred around Jessica Cannon, your companion for much of Emergence, playing a role similar to Half-Life 2’s Alyx Vance.
According to Russell, Ritual’s plans for Cannon extended beyond this core set of episodes. “She was designed to be distinct and likeable enough that she could essentially be a character in spinoffs,” he explains. As such, the second trilogy was intended to “explore her story, how she [became] part of HardCORPS.”
Little in the way of player experiences was set in stone for the second trilogy. But it likely would have included one or several vehicle driving sequences. The opening section of Emergence sees you being driven through a section of Freeport by Cannon in a HardCORPS patrol car. Russell says this section was originally much longer, and would have involved Blade driving the car at some point.
“The car was actually fully drivable,” he says. “You can pop the hood, you can pop the trunk … you can actually pop out of the roof and shoot vehicles next to you, stuff like that.” The driving section was cut to get players to combat quicker. But Ritual planned to reinstate the driving mechanic for later episodes, likely including at least one freeway chase sequence.
In addition to driving, later episodes would have further explored the effects of the mutagenic canisters you can shoot in Emergence. In that episode, entering a mutagenic cloud from a broken container slows down time for Blade, while staying in one too long can result in death. But Ritual planned for players to experience more dramatic effects as the episodes progressed.
“The general idea was that, as the game went on, the more mutagen you were exposed to, the more you would actually mutate,” Russell says. “As the stuff you got injected with by Elexis was taking hold in your system, you would have more of an immunity to the toxicity, but it could lead to more feral behaviour.”
One concrete detail regarding the second trilogy is how it would have ended. Episode Six would have culminated in a gigantic mutant assault on HardCORPS headquarters, one with fatal consequences. “There was going to be a major death within HardCORPS itself,” Russell says. “Exactly what it was going to be was still TBD within Ritual. But again, the hope was to explore Jessica and set it up so you have a real motivation to finally end things with Elexis Sinclaire.”
Sinclaire spectrum
The final trilogy was, unsurprisingly, the least fully formed. But it would have focused on Blade’s relationship with Elexis. At the end of the first SiN, Sinclaire escapes justice in a rocket that splits into four different parts. In SiN Episodes, these four parts would have been revealed to contain four different versions of Sinclaire. As is the case in Emergence, Blade would have encountered these different versions of Sinclaire throughout the story, believing them to be the same person for much of its duration.
“The Elexis that you’re dealing with in the game is one Elexis,” Russell says. “The Elexis that you are seeing in your head throughout—the Elexis in the swimsuit—was actually a second Elexis. And the shot that you were given by the physical Elexis was to make it easier for her to get that other part of her out of you.”
Going on, the holographic Elexis you see at two points in Emergence was “a third Elexis”. The fourth Elexis, meanwhile, was originally going to be Jessica Cannon, who had taken the form of Elexis’s “innocence turned manifest”. But this idea was scrapped. “I think that got abandoned around two thirds of the way through development of the first episode.”
Indeed, each version of Elexis would have emphasised a different aspect of her personality. The Elexis who appears to Blade in a hallucination wearing a swimsuit, for example, was a manifestation of Elexis’s sexuality. Ritual had initially planned for this scene to be much more explicit. “Originally in that little dream sequence after the U4 labs, where Elexis is there, she was not in a bikini,” Russell says. “But the fact that we had to have a retail release so shortly after [the] Hot Coffee [scandal] led to a lot of compromises.”
This isn’t the only area where Russell says Ritual had intended to “let their freak flag fly” in SiN Episodes. He says that if you look closely at the mutants you fight inside the wrecked oil tanker, you’ll notice that they are “literally penises on legs.” But this wasn’t sufficiently phallic for some members of the team, and these walking penises were originally planned to have their own visible genitalia.
“Two of our artists went in over the weekend and they added an 11-inch schlong onto the walking penises, just because they wanted it,” he says. “It took Walmart saying they would cancel their order in order to get that removed.”
Whatever scenarios players would have experienced in the third trilogy, it would have brought Blade and Elexis’ feud to a conclusion. [It] was meant to be [an] assault on Elexis to fully finish things at that point,” Russell explains. “Because at that point, Elexis would have been a major plot point [in] 10 games that had been developed by Ritual. It seemed like an appropriate point to end things.”
Aftershocks
This is, broadly, the trajectory SiN: Episodes would have taken. As for why Ritual never saw the project through, there are two explanations. The short one is that Ritual was purchased by MumboJumbo and had to pivot to making casual games. The longer one involves an unfortunate confluence of bad luck.
Crucially, it wasn’t because Emergence sold poorly. The first episode certainly didn’t sell as well as Ritual hoped, something Russell puts down to several factors. One was a bug related to Emergence’s dynamic difficulty setting which, for convoluted technical reasons, would massively inflate the difficulty if players stood in a particular spot in the game for more than a few seconds.
The other was Ritual’s failure to explain the trilogy of trilogies concept, which may have affected sales given each episode was priced at $20 for four hours of play. “People thought ‘Well, if it’s one game split into nine parts, that means we’re paying $180 for the whole game,” Russell says. “Had we actually come out as a trilogy of trilogies, [with] each three-episode chunk at about $45 to $60 for each chunk, I think that could have worked a lot more.”
But contrary to reports from the time, Russell states Emergence did sell well enough to warrant a second episode, and this was well into development by the time he left the studio. “Episode two was literally around 60% done when I was gone,” he says—hence why Russell can recall this episode in such detail.
However, SiN Episodes wasn’t the only project Ritual had up and running at the time. The studio was also working on two other games, and it was the fate of these which ultimately doomed SiN: Episodes.
The first project was an expansion pack for Quake 4, developed by Raven Software and published by Activision. But this was cancelled by Activision due to disappointing sales figures for the base game. Russell reckons Quake 4 underperformed in part due to Activision using the Stroggification scene in their marketing. “The Stroggification bit was supposed to be a surprise,” he says. “And they spoiled that like 10 weeks before release.”
Russell doesn’t go into detail about what the expansion contained, but says it was almost complete when Activision pulled the plug. “The expansion pack was 95% done, [but] because of the sales figures on Quake 4 that got cancelled,” he says.
The other project was a movie tie-in. Russell won’t specify which licence, but says Ritual was well into the preparation stages of the project. “We’d actually brought on a lot of extra staff at Ritual’s cost based on the contract. And then just before the final contract got signed, the production company demanded double their previously agreed upon cut,” he says. “That led to the project being cancelled … now all that money was basically out of our pocket.”
Had even one of these projects gone ahead, Ritual would have been in a much stronger position to continue with SiN Episodes. But with both projects collapsing, Ritual suddenly found itself struggling for cash. “Had we been able to go through and not have these other headwinds smack us in the face, we might have that second episode, and potentially even that third episode.”
Russell is no longer in game development, but he reflects fondly on the time he spent at Ritual, and is pleased to see so many of the team go on to work for studios like Bethesda and MachineGames. “I am proud of the work that was done in that time. I’ve been happy to see so many members of that team move onto greener pastures,” he says