Ritual Entertainment started out in 1996 as Hipnotic Entertainment, formed by five employees of 3D Realms in Garland, Texas -- a suburb northeast of Dallas -- who quit their jobs working on the game Prey. Working out of a house in Dallas, they put together Scourge of Armagon, a highly acclaimed Quake mod which was officially sanctioned by id Software.

Today, Ritual has about 20 employees and its offices are located in a restored loft in the Dallas West End Market. It's a tourist trap of bars, restaurants and nightclubs in a historic warehouse district that's a few blocks from the site of the Kennedy assassination. The Ritual guys work literally over a bar -- you have to enter and walk through the bar in order to board onto an elevator to go up to the Ritual offices.

When I first visit Ritual in early July during a scorching Texas summer afternoon that was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, there's a relatively laid-back vibe among the Ritual guys -- even though F.A.K.K. 2 is scheduled to go gold by the end of the month. Two weeks later when I visit again in the evening, eyes are bleary as employees have been awake up to 20 hours a day, going through the arduous process of debugging F.A.K.K. 2. This is, after all, the second standalone game from Ritual, and this time they want to be sure history doesn't repeat itself.

Ritual wound up with the job of turning F.A.K.K. 2 into a game back when they were in the middle of working on SiN. In early 1998, they got a call from an artist who used to work for them. His agent was looking for a game company to do a video game based on the second Heavy Metal animated movie. Ritual quickly took it on, despite the iffy appeal of licensed properties in video games.

"Well, Heavy Metal was really attractive to us because we were huge fans, though we were concerned about taking on a property that wasn't ours," says Atkins. "But Kevin Eastman [the creator of the series] said we could do anything we wanted to make the game. That right there was the reason we decided to take it on -- we had total freedom."

Mark Dochtermann, Ritual’s president, agrees with Akin’s sentiments: "I couldn't have asked for a better licensing partner because they weren't restrictive at all in how we used the license. They totally saw our creative vision and let us go with it."

It’s important to note that Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2 isn't a direct sequel to the original film.  The new movie, which wasn’t given a theatrical release, has an entirely different storyline that showcases the same surrealistic style and freaky attitude of the Heavy Metal comic magazine. What both movies and the game do share is the artistic style of Kevin Eastman, one of the creators of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  Keeping it in the family, Eastman’s wife, B-movie actress Julie Strain, also lends her likeness to the game and the movie.  Getting back to the whole cult thing, Strain has a cult following herself, and F.A.K.K. 2., the movie and game, serve as a star vehicle for a fantasy alter-ego version of her.