Raven Software

Raven Software Corporation (trade name: Raven; formerly Raven Software, Inc.) is an American video game developer based in Middleton, Wisconsin, and part of Activision. Founded in May 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel, the company is most known for the dark fantasy franchise Heretic/Hexen, the first two Soldier of Fortune games, as well as licensed titles based in the Star Wars: Jedi Knight series and Marvel Comics's X-Men characters, including 2006's Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Since 2011, Raven has been working on multiple Call of Duty games as both lead and support developer.

Raven's first game, Black Crypt (1992), was conceived in the late 1980s by Raffel brothers to be a paper-and-pen role-playing game, until the two retooled the project from scratch to become a video game. While it did not perform well commercially, its positive reception by critics and technology efforts led to John Romero approaching Raven to develop new titles for the personal computer starting with ShadowCaster (1993), which was powered by Raven Engine, a modified Wolfenstein 3D engine designed by John Carmack. The game's success impressed id Software and Strategic Simulations, who signed a deal to publish the company's next titles, which had grown to two teams to work on 1994's CyClones and Heretic. The latter, inspired by Brian Raffel's interest in making a Dungeons & Dragons–inspired game, was critically acclaimed, spawned several sequels, and helped Raven grow to three development teams.

In August 1997, Activision announced it had agreed to acquire Raven and took over the distribution to Hexen II, while the other two Raven teams continued production on the previously announced titles Take No Prisoners and MageSlayer. After 1998's Heretic II, Raven aimed to expand its games to a broader audience, acquiring Soldier of Fortune magazine name rights to develop a game of the same name while also working on its first licensed title, Star Trek: Voyager – Elite Force. The latter achieved universal acclaim by critics and has since gained a cult following, encouraging LucasArts to collaborate with Raven on Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. The company also continued partnering with id Software, working on Quake 4 and the 2009 Wolfenstein, and becoming one of the first studios to license id Tech 4.

In the 2000s, Raven worked with Marvel Entertainment on some of its superhero properties, developing X-Men Legends (2004), X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse (2005), Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). This lasted until Raven announced a new intellectual property, Singularity, which was released in 2010 to positive reception. In 2011, Raven shifted to work on several Call of Duty titles as support developer, and in 2014, the company opened a Chinese studio in Shanghai to collaborate with Tencent Games on Call of Duty Online, although this studio is no longer active today. Raven worked with Infinity Ward and Treyarch on 2020's Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, leading production on the latter's single-player campaign. It developed Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which was released on October 24, 2024.

In 1986, Brian Raffel was an art teacher at University of Wisconsin–Madison and cross country-track coach at Middleton High School and his brother, Steve, worked in a screen-print shop. Their late father, Don, was an influence on the two growing up playing Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules such as Palace of the Silver Princess, Tomb of Horrors, Lost Tomb of Martek, and Castle Amber, who inspired Brian to draw a concept by the end of 1988 called "The Well"— a paper-and-pen role-playing game originally conceived as a D&D module until Steve came up and reworked it with Brian to be its own thing.

After seeing some of the recent games released to the Amiga, Brian decided that their art was "as good as and in some cases better" than what was coming and chose to move The Well to the Amiga for taking advantage of its computing power. Brian brothers retooled the project from scratch while opening their own company to work on the now called Black Crypt. Raven Software was officially incorporated on May 23, 1990.

Shortly after established Raven, Brian got together programmers Rick Johnson and Ben Gokey, and musician Kevin Schilder to join the company. Johnson was the youngest crew member at 18 years old. Black Crypt production started in April 1990 and lasted nearly two years, with Raffel brothers and the team moving to a $200 per month office, which sat under a workshop in Madison. The game's budget was $40,000. Described as an "Age of Darkness first-person tile-based real-time combat dungeon simulator", Black Crypt draws inspirations from FTL Games' Dungeon Master 3D realtime style and consists of twelve interconnected dungeons rendered in 64-colour extra half-brite graphics, which allowed players to define a palette customization of sixty-four colours—unlike Dungeon Master and its clones.

Raven Software was founded in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel. Originally a three-person company, they were discovered by John Romero, co-founder of id Software, who collaborated with Raven to make games using their game engine beginning with ShadowCaster. Raven then started making games with id Software; the company even briefly moved to the same street as id Software. They used id's engines for many of their games, such as Heretic, Hexen: Beyond Heretic and Hexen II.