History of Ritual Entertainment. Part 1: Sin
In the fall of 1996, something bad was happening in one of the houses on the outskirts of Dallas. Some people of very dubious appearance constantly came and left, and inside the incessant activity reigned. Alarmed neighbors did not yet know that in this brothel, clogged with quite harmless programmers, artists and Leoles-designers, one of the most successful unsuccessful game studios was born- Ritual Entertainment.
So, 1996. Two programmers from 3D Realms Mark Dochermann and Jim Dose, who stuffed their hands on Rise of the Triad And Duke Nukem 3D, They decide that they are already experienced enough to work for themselves, and not for uncle. Having cooled with four more studio staff (including all Level-designer Richard Levelord, Greg, who was seduced by a calm atmosphere), in August they open their company Hipnotic Interactive.
Having settled in his new office, which became the house of Jim, the representative of the newly made studio went to the publishing house Activision knock out the first project for her. The publisher gave good, while not resisting the desire to throw it on the fan: immediately after the conclusion of the Activision transaction, a press release was released in which they announced that they signed a studio “consisting of key developers Duke Nukem 3D”. And while the 3D Realms leadership underminedly indignant from such statements, supporting the name Hipnotic by ear, the studio itself was engaged in the creation of its debut project – a set of missions for the first Quake called Scourge of Armagon.
Replenishing their ranks with a couple of people, in the 90s, the dog ate in the creation of levels for Doom‘OV, the studio finished work on the Addon in early 1997, and at the end of February it was released on sale. Soa, although a simple set of missions for someone else’s game, as it turns out later, was already inherent in the features that are characteristic of almost all of the work of Ritual’ovites, for which additions and fell in love. Having pleased critics and players with a good addon, as well as the publisher with good sales, Hipnotic Interactive:
a) changed the name to the final Ritual Entertainment, T.To. It suddenly became clear that the initial violated someone’s rights;
b) retreated to a normal office, t.To. The neighbors nevertheless sniffed that in that strange house it was happening, and quickly stinted, where it should be;
c) most importantly, they presented the Activision idea of a new, full -fledged game, for which, perhaps, everything was started. The publisher, who remained more than pleased with the first experience of cooperation with the studio, approved the concept, and the process went.
Developed: Ritual Entertainment
From afar: Activision
When it came out: November 4, 1998
What to play: Windows, Mac OS, Linux
Where you can join: Steam (it includes with Sin Episodes: Emergence), GOG (includes a WAGES of SIN supplement)
In its concept Sin was supposed to enter the line of the new generation of shooters, in which the emphasis was on those elements that had previously paid little attention or even ignored. And among their brothers, it seems Half-Life, Unreal, Kingpin And almost ready Duke Nukem Forever, The brainchild of Ritual Entertainment looked the most ambitious, yielding only Prey.
First of all, Sin was conceived by a plot-oriented game. And although the story itself was at the level of the “B” film with everything that arises (like the main character, whose only feature is sarcasticity, and the main villain, as if who who had come down from the pages of the Playboy BDSM version), its presentation was at a decent level: a bunch of Katsen, dialogues, secondary characters-everything is as it should, in general, in general, in general.
In addition, Ritual was also going to bring the interactivity of the world around the world to a new level.
We were always upset when we saw how the tester passes the game, sees a telephone booth, runs to it, presses “use”, and … nothing happens. And so every time. And in the end, he does not use anything, why then this key?
-Tom Mustain, Level-Designer
The https://rush-casino.co.uk/bonus/ result of such a grief: with very, very many things in the game, you can interact. With some it is made at the basic level: you poke into the subject, it responds to you, for example, by clicking on the keyboard, you can hear the retaliatory squeak of the system unit. Some things are more interesting with some: so at the first level in the fountain you can find a coin and use it in a taxophone, calling the random number and hearing the reaction from the other side. And you can hold a coin to another level and buy soda in the machine.
And some interactions are directly woven into the gaming process: there are computers on many locations with which you can unlock the doors, receive hints on the passage, turn off the worked-out alarm and engage in other plot and not very things. Communication with technology is implemented through DOS’O -like interface, in which you can navigate both using the menu and playing with available console teams.
And those items that cannot be poked into, as a rule, can be broken. Almost everything that is not nailed to the floor is destroyed, so that if you wish, you can enter into an unequal fist fight with a dwarf palmas and spread it into chips. So, suddenly you want.
Ritual added computers so that you can sit at the computer while sitting at the computer
The gameplay itself was quite diverse in comparison with the majority of the shooters: in addition to the already mentioned interaction with terminals, shooting diluted all sorts of puzzles of varying degrees of logical in the spirit of “You see, there are boxes? Sit down on the loader and ram of them, and then get out and get their fists ”and the not particularly pleasant elements of the platformer, with which the developers at times were too flirting (however, the opportunity to jump everywhere, raised stunning situations; to knock out the window, jump onto the ceiling fan, seized it into another room, breaking the glass and putting the head of the opponent in the opponent in the opponent jump – priceless). Plus, the game was attended by the mission -oriented mission, which could be held with a battle, but why?
But the most of all, the system of consequences worked for diversity and reigree, which was not new in itself, but on a scale like in SIN, it was not realized in shooters either before or after*. What actions you perform when passing the level can influence the passage of the following. This can manifest itself in the little things (if at the very beginning of the game to knock down an advertising shield, it will fall and break the windows on the roof; in the next location that you fall through these very windows, the shield will lie at the place of fall), and influence the gameplay; For example, if you shoot the pipe on one location, then some areas of the next will be flooded. Some levels as a result of certain actions of the player can generally miss. Of course, with a second passage, Sin will not become a completely different game, but the level of reiglabiness this system provides very high.
*I will be glad to find out that I am wrong; looming on the horizon Dying Light 2 Do not offer
Add to all of the above, which was not yet common at that time, the division of damage into zones (so that it was sure to kill the enemy, it was necessary to shoot in the head, otherwise they could recover and return to the battle); Good AI, thanks to which the bots reacted to what was happening and could fly to the next room if the player carried out their detachment, and, conversely, crush the number with obvious superiority; and dynamic music, which was not a new, but still pleasant feature, and as a result, a very powerful shooter was loomed from Sin, which was shining with the status of cult classics and which even was afraid of Valve.
Sin did not become a cult classic, because the release of the first boss of the game after a very long load when meeting with the player refused to move. While standing in complete silence. And at one of the prefinal levels the game generally flew out. How it happened?
M?
Well, the development of Sin began shortly after the release of the Scourge of Armagon and stretched for almost two years, which is a decent time by the standards of the 90s, but which was still too few. In words, everything sounded good: for her shooter, the studio licensed the engine at that time created Quake II, And while John Karmak and Ko bring their brainchild to mind, Ritual is playing on the basis of the already familiar Quake Engine, And as soon as Activision send sources ID Tech 2, Developers transplant all their achievements for new technology, and in this situation, Sin should have exit already in the spring of 1998.
Initially, everything went according to plan: having killed almost a month to detailed study of the concept and expanding its staff, Ritual began to work. By June, a fairly tasty prototype was ready, reflecting many chips of the game, which was successfully presented to E3 1997. In the second half of the year, however, the development process began to slow down. The promised source Quake II Engine No one was in a hurry to send, and if Level-designers and artists continued to work at the usual pace, then the programmers over time became terribly lazy to do work, which would then still have to remake, and even the screaming Levelord could not convince them. And the ChMS, when in December ID Tech 2 finally fell into the hands of the studio, it suddenly turned out that they were absolutely right, t.To. The engine, although the development of Quake Engine, was significantly different from the code of the ancestor, and a lot had to be rewritten from scratch, and not ported.
Prototype on the engine of the first quake
But the main source of problems was not a delay in the engine and not its incompatibility, but it
in e l and to about. Ritaal’ovs have already been enjoyed in the code of the first Quake while developing an addon (while delaying its release twice) and prototypes sin, but they fell in love with the second look at the first glance. Realizing how simple it is and what can be drunk on it, the developers began to think up and develop their ideas and actively introduce new, and most importantly – to try to realize them. And there were enough ideas with more than due to a non -standard managerial approach inside the studio.
Even at the stage of thinking through the concept of the project in the Ritual Entertainment, instead of the generally accepted Roman management (when important decisions are made by leaders and/or representatives of any groups, after which they transfer them to the rest of the participants) introduced a tribal system by which all members of the group (for example, Level-designers) take part in the discussion or decision of the decision, while the voice and opinion of everyone have the same weight. This approach provided a stormy stream of ideas and, which is much more important, their development and filtration.
We noticed that the number of "three" is a magical. The best game finds appeared as a result of the original idea of the first person, which the second one somehow supplemented and brought to perfection the third. This third derivative is usually the final.
– Scott Olden, programmer
In addition, the simplicity and availability of the engine allowed Ritual programmers to make it simple and affordable to everyone else. Shortly after moving to the ID Tech 2 for Sin, they wrote a script system, which, in fact, was held by everything. Animations were described in scripts, artificial intelligence was described in scripts, levels of levels, the movement of heroes, the filling of locations – everything was described in text files, and in a rather understandable language. As a result, not only programmers could add some features to the game, but also Left-designers, and even artists. A fairly convenient solution that made it possible to better distribute the load between the team members: while the progers were engaged in complex tasks, the rest could embody their simple ideas and make small corrections without distracting those from work.
Council of the tribe
What went wrong? As often happens, a sense of proportion has failed. Sin, which at the beginning of 1998 was a fairly rich game, every day inflated more and more. Programmers dabbled with the engine, thinking that you can still add-scroll (like protocraceful animation, which in fact was still a vertexic one, but allowed the heroes to animate in detail). Level designers could have placed objects on one location for the sake of realism and play with their interactiveness-for the full completion of the level could take two to three months. Skilling teams were fruitful like cockroaches, and all innovations/corrections had to be kept in mind. Some interesting features tried to use to the maximum, despite the complexity and time of their implementation; So the game should have much more consoles and terminals, the creation and setting of which could go for several months, most of them were simply replaced by the buttons.
Ultimately, Sin turned into an overwhelmed mess, excluding any possibility of adequate testing, since even after one small change, it was necessary to re -test the whole game.
Additionally heated the situation and the aforementioned tribal system, in which there were as many advantages as the minuses. Когда голос каждого имеет одинаковый вес, но при этом решение приходится принимать только одно, обязательно будут возникать разногласия и недовольства, переходящие в обиды и конфликты; Often approved ideas were not ideas that the majority supported, but ideas that the majority of the least actively rejected.
The tribal approach can work perfectly when everyone is on the same wave and generally feel like a part of a large family, but the problem is that in 1998, Rital was not a family. The studio had very high staff turnover; People left, others came in their place, they also left, new ones appeared instead of them, and so in a circle. Despite the fact that the tribal system was preserved in Ritual until the very closed (and even had fruits with a more or less constant composition), during the development of Sin it was more likely to help than helped.
I believe there is a reason why the Roman system has existed for two thousand years, and they almost do not remember about the tribal.
-Richard "Levelord" Gray, Levl-designer
Not without the best girlfriends of games developers – processing. From local tremors, the eyes on the forehead climbed on everyone except Levelord, who was still used to them in the walls of 3D Realms (and he was tired). The last few months before the release in the studio, everyone was engaged in everyone: artists made models, animations, textures and not only; Level-designers manually created entire gaming scenes; Programmers fulfilled their tasks and especially complicated wishes of levets-designers and artists; And then all together the added together was tested, since the volumes of work were colossal, and the efforts of the testers were not enough. And in this game there was a multiplayer who also had to be engaged in!
… who seemed to be even good, on E3 1998 people liked
And Activision, meanwhile, could not forever wait for Ritual to do everything that they wanted, and persistently demanded that the game be finished and released before their main competitor Half-Life is released. The developers tried and hurried as they could, but the result turned out to be predictable: in the trash a funny release, which has spoiled both the final assessments among critics and the impressions of the players. And although the bugs were relatively quickly found and corrected, the patch that eliminated them, weighed as much as 18 MB, that there was indecent a lot in the Dialup era. Activision went on a desperate step and offered to send a disk with a patch by mail, but the first impression was already hopelessly spoiled. As a result: the game was bought well in the first week, but then the sales sharply came to naught, and when Half-Life was released at the end of November, the players were no longer up to sin.
The debut project of the studio fell victim to the ambitions and inexperience of its creators, and all the bright and innovative ideas laid down in it are on the backdrop of idiotic technical errors at the start. A few years later, critics and game journalists will begin to write in hindsight that the game, in general, is shocked, and everyone needs to touch it, but in 1998, unfortunately, it failed with a bang. I really want to write "rightly", but is it true?
