Sanity: Aiken’s Artifact, Downloadable Content Ten Years Early October 15, 2012

Back in Summer 2000 I was asked by GameSpy to be a part of a multiplayer beta test for a brand new game that was coming out later that year.  It was a third person 3D RPG for the PC which starred the famous rapper Ice T.  The game was called Sanity: Aiken’s Artifact and it was developed by Monolith Productions, which had previously worked on games like Shogo, and published by Fox Interactive, which was at the time branching out from simply publishing games that were based on 20th Century Fox properties.

The revolutionary aspect of Sanity: Aiken’s Artifact was that each of the powers and abilities that you used in the game was represented by playing cards that you would find in the game’s world.  This was just as the world was becoming accustomed to customizable card games like Magic: The Gathering, and it was integrated perfectly with the game’s style.  Pick up a card (which in the game were called talents), and all of a sudden you would be able to use that card’s abilities for real in the game.  The interface was similar to Diablo 2’s and it worked really well in a 3D game engine.  You could just simply drag your best cards into the lower menu and select which one you wanted to attack with in real-time.  You could also bring your card collection into multiplayer, and use them to battle online.

What was so revolutionary about the game was that the game wasn’t designed to just be limited to the 80 cards that was included in the retail package.  You could add more.  Monolith and Fox promised that a ton more cards would be coming, and they started by offering two different sets of unique cards which you could purchase in a bundle from Real.com (no that is not a typo, it was really being sold on the RealPlayer site) and would be fully compatible with the game’s official demo or the full retail version of the game.  The concept of downloadable content, free or paid, would not even be talked about until years later, and this game was doing it in the year 2000.  When the game released, a special mini CD-ROM was included with copies that were preordered online from EBgames, which included several more unique cards, and an issue of PC Gamer had a few more.  Only one card was ever released online for free, on their official website some time after release.

The problem was that the game somehow just didn’t stand out.  It had review scores ranging in the mid to high 80s, which was fantastic, but none of the reviewers really talked about the new features that the downloadable card system brought to the table.  In the end the game was quickly forgotten soon after its release.  Monolith and Fox Interactive had found a huge hit with their No One Lives Forever series, the first of which was released shortly after Sanity, and once that game was on track for release at the end of that year, they devoted most of their resources and advertizing focus to NOLF and away from Sanity. That meant that the extra cards that were promised never got released.

Unfortunately, Monolith never revisited the series.  After No One Lives Forever’s release, Monolith started working on Aliens Vs Predator 2 and its expansion, and when the next generation came about, they found hits with F.E.A.R. and Condemned: Criminal Origins.  Nowadays, no one even remembers the game, so its hard to find archived information about it.  It’s sad that we never got to learn just what Monolith or Fox had in mind for the Sanity series, or just what extra cards may have been coming.  I haven’t found a single site online which collected the game’s extra cards, however I did think ahead to store all the cards that I did obtain (which I think were all of them) on a floppy disk.  I haven’t had a floppy drive installed in my PC since Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for Vista.

Nowadays a game is pretty much expected to see post-release content in some form, be it patches, maps, levels, or new skins.  People like to say that paid downloadable content came to the mainstream with games like Halo 2 for the Xbox or Oblivion for the Xbox 360, but I would argue that it all started with a little game made for the PC where you could control a super powered Ice T and collect cards.  It really was a fun game, and I wish more people had played it.