Much like a certain fellow Source FPS that we were promised, SiN Episodes never got to the finish line.
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.
