Heretic was developed by Raven Software, published by id Software, and released on December 29, 1994. the partnership between the 2 companies began when id Software provided their Wolfenstein 3D engine for Raven’s next game ShadowCaster. after releasing Doom, id opted to give Raven a shot with their new game engine. strip away all the futuristic/sci-fi/marine aesthetics and replace them with a medieval fantasy world and you get Heretic.
so it’s probably worth noting before I delve deeper into this story to explain how I discovered Heretic. I didn’t get access to a legitimate PC until mid-1995, and I had no real context of PC gaming to speak of outside of a shareware collection that exposed me to the likes of Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, and Dangerous Dave. by that October I went with my grandma to Best Buy and she bought me The Ultimate Doom. even in my youth I had the tinker/explorer gene fully active. effectively hidden on the CD-ROM was a /HERETIC directory, and contained inside it was the shareware version of the game. I had no Sound Blaster 16 yet and there was no PC speaker option, so I had to play my new free game discovery in silence for about a month. Christmas rolled around and then I did have a Sound Blaster 16, and I was also armed with a Gravis Gamepad (I learned about 2 years later how much of a mistake this was for FPS games) and another new world opened up for me.
being able to truly enjoy the aesthetics of the game showed that it had several advances over Doom. the game had an inventory system and items you could activate like the Quartz Flask to restore health, Tome of Power to activate a stronger alternate fire for weapons, and the Morph Ovum to turn monsters into chickens(!) it also featured a rudimentary ability to look up and down (unfortunately not with MOUSELOOK, this was well before those times) and another item the Wings of Wrath enables the player the ability of flight. the weapons basically function like their Doom counterparts, the Elvenwand being the standard weapon is like the Pistol, the Ethereal Crossbow like the Shotgun, and Dragon’s Claw like the Chaingun. with a notable exception, the Firemace is definitely not equal to the BFG 9000, in fact it’s possibly the worst weapon ever.
the mail-order registered base game featured 3 episodes with 9 levels each (8 plus a hidden one) much like Doom: City of the Damned, Hell’s Maw, and The Dome of D’Sparil. there are a lot of undead and other unwieldy creatures to fight before the end boss battle with D’Sparil (one of 3 Serpent Rider brothers). I don’t wish to make it a competition between the Doom and Heretic/Hexen franchises to see which is better, but rather accept them as viable complements to one another in the irreplaceable era of the Doom engine games. Heretic was followed later by a pseudo sequel in Hexen (1995) and a direct sequel Heretic II (1998)
shameless plug to hear Kevin Schilder’s epic music here:
