Raven Software

Raven Software Corporation

Headquarters at Greenway Station Center
Trade name	Raven
Formerly	Raven Software, Inc. (1990–1997)
Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Video games
Founded	May 23, 1990; 34 years ago (1990-05-23) in Madison, Wisconsin, US
Founder	Brian Raffel Steve Raffel
Headquarters	8496 Greenway Blvd, Middleton, Wisconsin , US
Key people	Brian Raffel (studio head) David Pellas (COO) Dan Vondrak (creative director)
Products	Heretic/Hexen series (1994–1998) Soldier of Fortune series (2000–2002) Jedi Knight series (2002–2003) X-Men series (2004–2009) Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006) Call of Duty series (2011–present)
Number of employees	350 (2022)[1][2]
Parent	Activision (1997–present)
Subsidiaries	Raven Shanghai
Website	ravensoftware.com

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 work on Call of Duty Online with Tencent Games.^[3][4] 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.