THE MAKING OF: SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
The pitch for Soldier Of Fortune was bizarre. If you were told you were going to be making a game based on a licence, you might expect a superhero like Batman, or a well-known movie franchise like Terminator. Instead, Raven Software got a magazine. As if that wasn’t unusual enough, Soldier Of Fortune was a magazine about the niche subject of mercenaries and war, little known in the mainstream save perhaps for brief eruptions of notoriety during the instances it was taken to court for contract killings that had been arranged through advertisements in its pages in the Eighties.
Dan Kramer, who worked on as assistant programming director, reveals that he and many of his colleagues were bemused when they found out they would be making a game based on a mercenary magazine. “If I recall, Raven were wrapping up and were looking at what they were going to do next. One day, Brian Raffel [Raven cofounder] came in and told us that Activision had acquired the licence and that we were going to make a game. Quite honestly, I don’t think any of us really knew what to do
