Ritual released the original SiN in '98, bringing its unique take on the FPS genre with a game that brought comic book style violence and villains to the CRT screens of FPS addicts everywhere. It was packed with great levels that were as much fun to explore and manipulate as they were to destroy, allowing players to occasionally take different approaches to certain situations without leading them by the hand. Ritual also brought in a great deal of interactivity with SiN, rewarding curious players with little extras such as being able to access bank account screens to give Blade, the hero, an early raise. Players with a steady hand and quick trigger finger were also able to take advantage of its positional damage system, using headshots to thin the ranks of their foes or disarm them with a well placed bullet, things that they could also carry over to some extent in its multiplayer.

SiN's innovation would come at a price. The game suffered a legion of problems, including various bugs and frustrating load times. It also had to compete with Half-Life, which had come out at roughly the same time and was generally regarded as the better game. Still, it's bloody take on action violence held a place in FPS history. When Ritual announced that they were going to follow up on what had happened in SiN with episodic content using Valve's Source engine, quite a few people wanted to see what new tricks the blokes at Ritual had up their twisted sleeves.