I have a good deal of fondness for Singularity for one easy reason: I'm an uncredited intern on the game!
It's been long enough (fifteen years) that I think my NDA's expired and I'm free to talk about all this. My high school had a work study program where we were required to go on a two-week internship somewhere between Junior and Senior years. I wanted to get into game design, as did a buddy of mine. My home state of Wisconsin has historically hosted some fairly prominent game dev studios (there's a reason Commander Keen wears a Packers helmet!), but one of the biggest is Raven Software. The studio naturally fell into my buddy's crosshairs as he was looking for places to intern. I sorta tagged along on it opportunistically, not realizing until after I'd committed to it that Raven Software developed my beloved Jedi Outcast. Actually, discovering this made me re-examine the Jedi Knight series for the first time in seven or so years and is a huge contributing factor to why Jedi Outcast makes my top four all-time favorite video games. It also turns out that having foundational memories for a somewhat specific release in a small studio's history is a great way of making a big first impression and getting your foot in the door.
It's long been public knowledge that Singularity had a pretty troubled development cycle. My buddy and I didn't have context on this going in, but in retrospect, it explains the situation we encountered when we got there. Raven Software had agreed to host us two high school kids for an internship, and yet everyone seemed to have forgotten about us by the time we suddenly showed up at their front door May 10th of 2010. Already revived from cancellation and with less than two months to go before launch, the team was hard at work on shoving Sing (the abbreviation most developers used to refer to the game internally, which I'll use affectionately as well) out the door and getting ready for their next project. They simply didn't have time for a couple snot nosed brats. While they were good sports about it and did the best they could to cobble together a program for us, the unpreparedness showed. We spent most of the first week of our internship talking to different devs in different departments about some of their design philosophies, then spent that first Friday and the whole second week sitting in a corner cubicle unsupervised screwing around in the Unreal engine.
Now, at the time, I felt a little funny at the time about the whole operation. I kept seeing "hard at work" developers playing Call of Duty and wondered why they didn't have time for us. History has since shown that Sing was the last title Raven put out before Activision fully converted them into a support studio for Call of Duty, initially in a pure multiplayer capacity. One of the first things you want to do when developing a video game is to play stuff similar to your idea so you can compare and contrast. For example, my senior project in college was based on Diddy Kong Racing, so the project director spent a lot of time early on driving around Timber Island trying to get the right gamefeel. Or, for a more recent example, when LizardCube started work on Streets of Rage 4, a big part of early development involved playing through the first three games, down to the point of tracing over gameplay footage just so they could perfectly emulate the Genesis games' movement. So as much as it didn't look it to me, developers screwing around in CoD deathmatches actually was important research.
By definition, what I had with Sing was an internship, but a more accurate picture is painted if I refer to it as a "backstage tour". I didn't have a lot of context to appreciate it at the time, but I got to see quite a lot of the operation, and the developers we talked to were open with a lot of their tricks or the things they really value in game development. For example, this is where I first learned about the process of texture mapping. All of the monsters in this game actually use considerably lower-res models than you'd think just by looking at 'em. See, you CAN make a highly-detailed character model and shove it into a video game, but the issue is that this requires a ridiculous amount of processing power to animate in real-time. It's instead easier to make a single high-definition model, scan it to create an image of the texture, then apply that onto a lower-definition model to give it the illusion of having more texture than it actually does. To paraphrase the guy who explained this all to my buddy and me - processing power and muscle is cool, but it's more impressive to find clever ways of saving processing power.
Likewise, there's that section in the Worker's District where you're walking through the rain. When you step under an awning, you appear to step out of the rain, with the rain appearing far away. When you step out into the street, the rain appears close up. The only thing the game's changing here is a filter on the first-person camera that animates rain - the game isn't actually rendering rain, just playing an animation. But because it's a very subtle detail and the animation is consistently timed, you probably don't notice unless it's pointed out to you. Clever stuff like that goes a long way.
Now, I’ve long been quite fond of the game for all this, but I’d resolved myself years ago never to play it. One, that backstage pass basically exposed me to everything I’d want to know about it, and I’ve historically been pretty disinterested in replaying games I’ve played before. All the replays I’ve recorded on Backloggd is a reflection of Backloggd first and foremost.
Second, this game features dead children. Specifically, an early section of the game takes the player through an abandoned school, and the player’s seeing the aftermath of a disaster 55 years after the fact. One flashback cutscene explicitly shows a classroom of kids ducking and covering under desks, only to flash to the present where a buncha little corpses still lie curled under the desks. It’s a powerful example of the game’s storytelling, but like man, I didn’t wanna deal with that. After getting my backstage pass, I decided I was good and would content myself with pitching the game to people, never playing it.
Well, I’ve reneged on that, clearly. But I can at least say that that’s as bad as it gets. If you were able to get through my description of that last paragraph, you can probably deal okay with this game’s content. Well, there is a 55-year-old corpse of a dude who hanged himself, too - but you don’t see it happen, it’s mostly an environmental set piece. Also there’s some body horror, and…
…you know what? Let’s start this over from the top.
Singularity is a 2010 horror game/first-person shooter put out by the good folks at Raven Software, the studio’s swan song before becoming a dedicated Call of Duty developer. The game draws a lot of very obvious influence from BioShock, between it being an exploration of a long-devastated site of a facility built in the height of socio-cultural hubris within the 1950s and all the audio logs and junk all over the place. In fact, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that level designer/AI developer Jason Mojica went from working on this to working on Battleship Bay and the Opening/Baptism sequence in BioShock Infinite!
A buncha people ragged on the BioShock similarities when this came out. As I’ve said before, I don’t think ‘rip-off’ is a dirty word. Genres come from people taking a core idea and experimenting with it, examining different ideas under a shared lens. At first this often looks pretty similar - consider Raven Software’s early successes in Hexen and Heretic being honest-to-goodness DOOM clones, authorized by rockstar-era id Software. All FPSes were ‘DOOM Clones’ for a couple years there, which is precisely what the industry needed to spin off the shooter genre from its first-person dungeon-crawling origins. In Sing’s case, the game subs out BioShock’s study of Objectivism and Ayn Rand and instead examines atomic power and Soviet science to tell a pretty fun time travel plot. To be honest, I have a lot more fun with Sing than BioShock, but then I don’t think much of BioShock.
Now, granted, Sing sorta starts to crumble the more seriously you try to take it. I have no idea what this business with E99, THE SECRET NINETY-NINTH ELEMENT ON THE PERIODIC TABLE THAT ONLY NATURALLY OCCURS ON THIS ISLAND, is all about. Like, we know what that is! That’s Einsteinium! Sure, a lot of elements were discovered in the 50s through research into atomic power, but we knew what Einsteinium was before 1955, even! I have no idea why Einsteinium was chosen to be the magical element that makes time travel and zombies happen, save for “E99” being kind of a cool-lookin’ initialism out of context.
Or, like, if you’re someone who actually reads Russian, this game would probably drive you bonkers, because this is one of those things that makes liberal use of the Cyrillic Я character in place of R to suggest Soviet Shenanigans. Sing goes one step further by substituting N with И, too! THIS ЯESULTS IN MAИY SENTEИCES THAT ЯEAD LIKE THIS - CEЯTAIИLY SOMETHIИG DISTЯACTIИG TO ИATIVE ЯEADEЯS OF CYЯILLIC-DEЯIVED LAИGUAGES! I have no idea if the game’s location of Katorga-12 is actually supposed to be pronounced “Ka-TOR-ga” or “KA-to-YA-ga” or something else. Like, sure, everyone says “Ka-TOR-ga”, but everyone also speaks English with Russian accents, and I’m reasonably sure we’re supposed to accept that everyone’s speaking and writing in Russian and the English is just a translation convention. Not sure how to reconcile that silliness!
I think we’re ultimately not meant to take Sing too seriously. The game wants to have fun playing with Soviet SCIENCE! for its horror and time travel plot, and fun it does have. The environmental storytelling is strong, as mentioned before, with the game doing lots of neat little moments where a temporal flashback will play out before player character Renko (ЯEИKO?) showing people dying horribly or waving a comrade off, then cut to a clear shot of blood trails and mangled corpses. I like being able to trace certain minor NPCs’ doomed adventures trying to survive the disaster, and being able to find bunkers with corpses playing chess or eating canned rations. There’s one where a body’s slumped on a couch next to a bottle of vodka and a pin-up mag - you gotta imagine that guy had a much better endtime than most of the other sad sacks on the island.
And the actual plot lends itself to some fun moments. The game isn’t able to play as much with paradoxes as I think it’d like given the constrained dev cycle, but the final result still has fun with invoking paradoxes and changing the landscape around Renko whenever he jumps back and forth between 1955 and 2010. The zombies are pretty wonky, but they have kinda nifty time-based abilities, and those Revert segments make for neat optional stealth challenges. Not to mention there’s that really rad sequence where the player’s scrambling through a freighter de-aged from a shipwreck, hustling as the ship re-ages and starts to crumble around Renko.
For that matter, Renko has a pretty fun ability set. I said before that BioShock’s Plasmids made me yearn for Kyle Katarn’s Force Powers in Jedi Outcast, so it’s fitting that the studio that made Jedi Outcast give the hero of its BioShock-clone Force Powers. The TMD lets you age and de-age stuff, physics stuff, and hurl around balls of time stasis - fun complements to a solid FPS core. Raven Software is a classic FPS studio at heart, so they managed to work in DOOM Secrets by littering the game world with goodies that can be used to upgrade Renko’s skillset, if you’re willing to explore and think outside the box with potential puzzles. Protip: not all upgrades are created equal. Iron Lung is completely superfluous, and you can probably avoid anything that boosts the amount of E99 Energy you can stockpile. Also, you can freely swap out guns at Weapon Upgrade stations, so don’t avoid ‘em just ‘cause you don’t have Weapon Tech on-hand.
Singularity is a game that I imagine most people won’t think much about. It didn’t do super well on-launch, and it’s very much not a game to catch your eye if you’re doing retrospectives for specific gaming eras. It’s a little bittersweet to look at because it’s very much just “some game”, and “some game” doesn’t make for a particularly glorious valediction for a key era in the lifespan of a studio I very much respect. Regardless, it’s still a nice enough game that I think it’s worth examining with an open mind and trying to learn from. There’s no point in pretending I’d have any affection whatsoever for the game if I hadn’t crossed paths with it in the manner I did. But I did. Sing is the game that taught me how video games are made, and I love that I get to attribute that lofty title to a game of otherwise little historical consequence.
One last piece of behind-the-scenes trivia. While walking through the school area, you can go poking around the children’s desks. Every desk is full of unique drawings - a surprising show of effort for such an inconsequential detail. This is because these drawings were actually drawn by the dev team’s kids, then placed in-game as a little easter egg. Note that this doesn’t extend to Oleg the Bear, the contest-winning mascot used to represent the island’s ice cream factory. Oleg was a little bear that one of the developers liked to doodle, so the team decided to immortalize him by giving him a Russian name and an ushanka, then placing him in-game as a featured extra. Just goes to show that even something as minor as a cartoon bear on a poster can have a backstory!
