Sin Reloaded is coming out this year because Nightdive refused to break a promise

Nightdive Studios is finally making good on its promise to remaster 1998's Sin

In 2020, Nightdive Studios made a promise: It was going to remaster Sin, a 1998 shooter by Ritual Entertainment. Things didn’t go according to plan. In 2023, the studio put out a transparent message to its community noting that the project was delayed due to other projects taking priority. It asserted that the game was not dead, but three years of radio silence had fans of the classic game losing hope.

Well, Nightdive wasn’t lying: Sin Reloaded is indeed alive, and coming to consoles and Windows PC this year. I can confirm its pulse because I went hands-on with it this week at the Game Developers Conference and spoke to the team at Nightdive about why it took so long to release it. Some big gigs got in the way, but for Nightdive, a promise is a promise.

Sin Reloaded is a faithful recreation of 1998’s Sin, a cult classic boomer shooter that’s very much of its time. It stars a wise-cracking, macho hero in the vein of Duke Nukem. In the demo, I blasted my way through a few classic levels, shooting through a bank and gunning down bad guys from a helicopter’s chain gun. As is the case with so many Nightdive remasters, it plays pretty much exactly like you remember it, but with 4K textures, reworked control options, map tweaks, and tons of archival material. The neatest trick is that you can press a button to toggle between the art from Sin Gold (Nightdive’s 2020 PC port of the original game) and a smoother remaster, complete with more detailed character portraits during dialogue.

Sin is a bit of a personal passion project for Nightdive. Larry Kuperman, VP of business development at the studio, told me that he loves the game because it brings him back to “one of the most fun periods” of games. He sees it as a pivotal part of the boomer shooter genre, which still has a strong following today, so Sin deserved just as much of a comeback as more popular genre games like Doom. Kuperman isn’t the only one who feels so strongly about those games.

“Whenever we do a remaster, we always find out that there’s an audience of people who have an immediate personal reaction,” Kuperman told Polygon. “‘I played this game with my father, he passed away years ago’ or something along those lines. There’s something that goes beyond the game itself. That’s one of the joys of working at Nightdive and doing what we do.”

Having a dedicated audience for an old game is great for a studio that specializes in remasters, but there’s a flipside to that coin. If you tell a particularly passionate fanbase that you’re going to do something, they’re going to hold you to your word. Producer Grover Wimberly learned that the hard way after Nightdive announced the project’s delay in 2023.

“I read social media comments every Friday, for better or for worse. Some weeks are better than others!” Wimberly said. “No matter what post, no matter what game it’s about, it’s like ‘Oh that’s nice. When’s Sin Reloaded coming? You said you were going to come back to it. Is this game cancelled?’”

Nightdive tried to be transparent over the last three years, repeatedly telling players that the game was still coming, but fans were understandably skeptical. Six years is a long time to wait for a remaster. But there was never a point where Sin Reloaded was in danger of not coming out. It’s just that Nightdive was a victim of its own success, getting the keys to bigger and bigger projects as it found success as a go-to remaster studio.

“There were two games that we had that we felt were obligations,” Kuperman said. “One was System Shock 2. The remaster on that had to come because that was something we had promised that to people who had early backed on the System Shock remake. Sin was the other one. Because we owned the rights to Sin, we always put it on the backburner when we had other time-critical projects. I don’t feel the need to defend why we did Doom or Quake! But we said we were going to do it, and now we’ve done it.”

Nightdive did indeed have a lot of big name games on its plate over the past few years. Doom + Doom 2, Heretic + Hexen, and Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster were just a few of the games it has churned out recently. At some point, it was just a waiting game with Sin. Wimberly said that once the team wrapped up Killing Time, The Thing Remastered, and a batch of Turok next-gen updates, the runway was finally clear.

Giving Sin the time it deserved was crucial to Nightdive. As a studio that works exclusively with beloved games, it knows that you can’t crap out a low-effort port and call it a day. Pulling it off right means listening to the community and knowing what kinds of changes it is and isn’t comfortable with. Wimberly noted that speedrunners, for instance, want to make sure that all their old tricks work in a new game. Nightdive has a formula for getting that right.

“In many cases when we go to remaster a title, there’s an existing community that has kept it alive,” Kuperman said. “The question comes up: How can you satisfy that community? How do you know what they want? And the answer that we’ve come up with a couple of times is, we hire them!”

The team working on Sin Reloaded includes Matthew Tropiano, a map designer who also worked on Doom + Doom 2 and the Vestiges of Grandeur content in the Hexen remaster. Tropiano said that he started working with the Doom engine when he was 10 years old. That’s the kind of person Nightdive looks for when it wants to do right by a game like Sin.

That community-driven approach seems to work for Nightdive. It has worked hard to build trust with a very protective audience over the years. Finally delivering on its promise to finish Sin Reloaded might just keep that good will intact for a while longer.

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Sin Reloaded will be released in 2026 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.