SiN Reloaded – Q&A With Nightdive Studios
SiN Reloaded is an ambitious and thorough remaster of SiN, a cult FPS from 1998. The original game was created on the Quake II engine, and separated itself from other shooters of the day because of its emphasis on narrative. SiN was remastered in 2020, by boomer shooter saviors Nightdive Studios, as SiN Gold. Six years later, they’ve decided to go back and re-remaster it. To celebrate the recent release of SiN Reloaded, COGconnected recently got the chance to have an AMA Q&A with Nightdive Studios head Stephen Kick.
Q: Why did you choose SiN as a game you wanted to remaster?
A: SiN is exactly the kind of game Nightdive was founded to preserve: ambitious, technically impressive, and hugely influential, but at risk of being overlooked by modern audiences. It was doing things with environmental interaction, player choice, and reactive level design in 1998 that were incredibly forward-thinking. We wanted to give people a reason to experience it again—or discover it for the first time.
Q: What made you feel SiN was worth revisiting when the Gold Edition already exists? What did you feel was still missing or could be improved?
A: The Gold Edition did a great job of keeping SiN accessible, but accessibility and preservation are only part of what we do. We saw an opportunity to create a definitive version that preserved the original experience while improving performance, presentation, controls, and compatibility with modern hardware. We wanted SiN to feel the way you remember it feeling in 1998, rather than simply running the game from 1998 on a modern PC.
Q: Do you have any personal memories of playing SiN when it originally released? Has revisiting the game for the remaster changed your perspective on it at all?
A: I remember being in awe of the screenshots in PC Gamer, particularly the underwater levels. Back then magazines were often all we had to go on—videos and trailers online were rare, and on my 14.4k connection anything substantial could take hours to download. Half-Life arrived around the same time and understandably stole a lot of the spotlight, but I still played SiN and found it incredibly fun and dynamic; revisiting it has only made me appreciate how ambitious it was and just how far it pushed the Quake II technology.
Q: A lot of Nightdive’s projects have been first-person shooters. Is that primarily because of the games you grew up playing, or is there something about the FPS genre that particularly appeals to the studio?
A: When I was younger I played many of the games we’ve since remastered, and the same can be said for much of the Nightdive staff—we genuinely love these games, and having the opportunity to work on them is an incredible privilege. I grew up playing a huge variety of genres, but FPS has always been my favorite. I think that genuine enthusiasm comes through in the work because in many cases we’re preserving games that helped shape us as players and developers.
Q: Of all the games Nightdive has worked on, is there one you feel is particularly underrated or didn’t get the attention it deserved?
A: Strife is probably one of the best examples because it was doing some remarkable things for an FPS in 1996—hub-based exploration, conversations, quests, inventory systems, and meaningful player choices. Unfortunately, it arrived during an incredibly competitive period and never received the recognition of Doom, Quake, or Duke Nukem 3D. It’s exactly the sort of game that reinforces why preservation is so important: there are incredible experiences buried throughout gaming history that deserve another opportunity to find an audience. Strife Veteran Edition was one of the very first games Nightdive truly remastered and it represents an important milestone for the studio.
Q: Are there any future remasters or projects you can share anything about yet?
A: I can’t speak to anything we haven’t announced, but after SiN: Reloaded we’ll be releasing Thief: The Dark Project Remastered, which is another extraordinary title that we’ve poured our hearts and souls into. Thief is one of the most important games we’ve ever had the privilege of working on, and I think fans of the franchise—and stealth games in general—are in for an exceptional experience.
Q: Are there any games you’d consider a “dream remaster”—something you’d love to tackle, but don’t think you’ll realistically be able to?
A: I don’t think any title is truly off the table. Every game presents its own complexities, whether that’s rights and licensing or technology, but after navigating so many unusual scenarios over the last 13+ years, we’ve become uniquely qualified to solve those problems. If I had to name three dream projects, though, they’d be Eternal Darkness, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, and the No One Lives Forever series.
Q: Finally, are there any games you’d like to recommend to your audience, whether or not Nightdive has any involvement with them?
A: I’d encourage people to dig into games they’ve heard about but never actually played, especially titles from the late ’90s and early 2000s. There’s an incredible amount of experimentation from that era that still feels fresh today, and projects like DUSK, HROT, and CULTIC demonstrate how much life those ideas still have. The great thing about where games are today is that you can experience the originals and then immediately see how a new generation of developers has taken those ideas somewhere completely different.
Thank you for keeping it locked on COGconnected.