THE HISTORY OF HERETIC
Raven Software is synonymous with big shooters like Soldier Of Fortune, Quake 4, Wolfenstein and Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered, but that wasn’t always the case. The studio started out specialising in RPGs, until in 1991 when the team discovered that just down the street from its tiny office in Madison, Wisconsin, a studio called id Software was working on something special. It was complete serendipity. In a city not renowned for its games development community (at a time when such communities barely existed), two talented studios were working side by side, completely unaware of each other.
Though for some of that time, Raven Software was only just scraping the definition of a ‘studio’. Officially formed in 1990, the developer began as something of a passion project for brothers Brian and Steve Raffel. Enamoured with Dungeons & Dragons, Raven’s first game was an RPG for Electronic Arts called Black Crypt.
Brian Raffel recalls these fledgling days at Raven. “We were working on the Amiga at that time because that’s what we played on, but EA wanted Black Crypt to be a PC game,” he tells us. “So we put out an ad for a games programmer who knows PCs, and that’s when id Software got in touch. Little did we know, they were a mile away from us.”
id Software hadn’t yet earned its reputation as a groundbreaking developer, but the Raffel brothers were some of the first people to have peeked into the engine room of its impending innovations. Brian laughs at the retrospective absurdity of meeting the id team – the Carmacks, Romero, Kevin Cloud and Tom Hall – for the first time, and hosting them in Raven’s $200/month office in a drywall company. “They saw our ad, came over, and really liked what we were doing”, Brian says. “They also showed us what they were working on at the time, which was Wolfenstein 3D. We were pretty amazed.”
The Raven and id Software teams soon became friendly, going out to dinner and movies, and of course exchanging ideas about videogames. There
