In SiN Reloaded, players enter a near-future dystopian city gripped by chaos as the sinister SinTEK Industries floods the streets with a DNA-altering drug. As bio-engineered mutants and ruthless mob henchmen overrun the metropolis, players must assume the role of security consultant Colonel John R. Blade, hacking computer terminals, piloting heavy machinery and using precision locational damage to turn the tide of battle. Only by exploiting dynamic environmental choices and mastering their weaponry will they stand a chance of dismantling SinTEK Industries and bringing CEO Dr. Elexis Sinclaire to justice.

INTERVIEW WITH Stephen Kick of Nightdive 

Q: What made now the right time to bring SiN back with SiN Reloaded, and how did the project first come together?

A: SiN has always felt like unfinished business for us. We originally re-released the game as SiN Gold back in 2014, and over the years our technology and experience have evolved to the point where we felt we could finally give it the treatment it deserved. It’s a game that has lived in the shadow of some of its contemporaries for far too long, and Reloaded is our opportunity to remind people just how ambitious SiN really was.

Q: How do you balance modernizing the graphics, controls, and overall presentation while preserving the feel of a late-1990s first-person shooter?

A: We want to remove the limitations of the era without removing its character. Higher resolutions, better controls, improved models and modern rendering can make the experience more accessible, but the movement, level design, combat and personality are what make SiN feel like SiN. Whenever we’re faced with a choice between changing something because it’s old and preserving something because it’s part of the game’s identity, we tend to err on the side of preservation.

Q: What were some of the biggest technical challenges involved in taking a game built around technology from the Quake II era and adapting it for modern hardware?

A: One misconception about this kind of work is that you simply drop an old game into KEX and everything starts working. Every title has its own assumptions, quirks and modifications to the original technology, and SiN pushed the Quake II engine particularly hard. A tremendous amount of work goes into understanding those systems, recreating their behavior accurately, and then getting them to operate reliably across modern PCs and consoles without losing the characteristics of the original game.

Q: The original SiN has developed a cult following since 1998. What elements of the original game were considered untouchable when developing Reloaded?

A: The personality of SiN was absolutely untouchable. The characters, humor, level design, interactivity, weapons and that slightly exaggerated late-’90s attitude are all fundamental to what makes the game memorable. We never wanted to sanitize those qualities or reinterpret SiN through a modern lens—we wanted to preserve what Ritual created and present it in the best possible way.

Q: For someone who has never played SiN, what do you think separates SiN Reloaded from both modern shooters and the growing number of other remastered 1990s FPS games?

A: SiN comes from this wonderful period where developers were discovering just how much more an FPS could be than running through corridors shooting enemies. There are interactive environments, alternate routes, objectives, consequences to your actions and an incredible amount of variety from one level to the next. It has this ambitious, experimental quality that can still surprise you today, even if you’ve played hundreds of shooters since.

Q: John Blade, Elexis Sinclaire, and JC are memorable characters from the original game. Did you make any changes to their presentation, dialogue, models, or characterization for SiN Reloaded?

A: One of the mandates I proposed to the team was bringing the in-game character models closer to their appearance in the cinematics. There was a dramatic difference between the two in the original game, largely because of the technical limitations of the time, so this felt like an area where we could make a meaningful improvement without changing the characters themselves. I think the new models make a huge difference to the overall presentation while still looking unmistakably like the characters people remember.

Q: How much attention has been given to the game’s AI, enemy behavior, weapon handling, and environmental interaction? Were these areas preserved closely or substantially improved?

A: Our starting point is always preservation, particularly with systems like enemy behavior and weapon handling where seemingly small changes can dramatically alter how a game feels. We’ve fixed issues and made improvements where appropriate, but we aren’t trying to redesign SiN’s combat to behave like a modern shooter. The environmental interaction in particular is one of the things that made SiN remarkable in 1998, so preserving all of those little details and making sure they work correctly was incredibly important to us.

Q: What is your favorite part of this game that you were involved with?

A: My favorite part was reaching out to the original developers and hearing their stories about making SiN—their inspirations, their ambitions, what went right, what went wrong, and everything in between. These people were trailblazers, and I don’t believe they’ve received enough credit for the artistry and influence they left behind. That’s become one of the most rewarding parts of what we do at Nightdive: not simply preserving the games, but shining a light on the people who created them during an extraordinary period of passion, experimentation and creativity in this industry.