Insider Info

by Kenn Hoekstra

History Of Soldier of Fortune’s Development

originally published in the Official SoF Strategy Guide from Brady Games

Soldier of Fortune began development in early 1998. The game started out as a one level demo aimed at landing Raven Software a high profile contract and game license. When that deal fell through, the development team was at a loss. The demo was a real-world action game and it was really good! The team decided that they liked the direction the demo was going and that they should expand on it. After talking to Activision and weighing the options, the Soldier of Fortune license was acquired and a new game was born.

Early on, the game looked very much like Quake II in its scale. The level architecture was large and so were the 3D models. Things were looking pretty good, but something just didn’t feel right. One day, quite by accident, one of the level designers discovered that if you shrank the textures and architecture to ½ size, the world looked a lot more detailed and realistic in scale. After some debate, all of the game levels were scrapped and new ones (with the new scale) were started in their place.

It was decided that the overall feel of Soldier of Fortune would be similar to id Software’s original DOOM. The team wanted action and lots of it! They also wanted the game to be really fast with a lot of enemies on the screen. The only way to do that, however, was to make low-polygon characters and models. The art department formed a plan to make three different body types for the enemies and worked painstakingly to keep the models, weapons and all 3-D artwork as simple as possible without sacrificing its physical appearance.

At one point, the focus of the game switched from action to strategy. The success of games like Rainbow Six gave the development team pause. We wanted to emulate the success of Tom Clancy’s blockbuster title, but it was decided that it would be next to impossible to use the Quake II engine to make a predominantly strategy-based title. After a month-long diversion, Soldier of Fortune was back on the fast action track.

Around this time period, Raven technology programmer Gil Gribb was working on writing his own game engine. SPECTRE, as the engine came to be known, was deemed financially risky by Activision and it had to be shelved. Parts of the SPECTRE engine were nearly complete, so Gil fused the new technology with the Quake II code base and the GHOUL rendering system was born. GHOUL soon became the backbone of Soldier of Fortune.

While GHOUL technology was putting 26 gore zones on every enemy model and adding tons of features to the game engine, lead artist Scott Rice and lead animator Eric Turman set up sessions with House of Moves, a professional motion-capture studio out in Los Angeles, California. House of Moves provided tons of raw data for the animators to mold into lifelike animations for the enemies and player characters in the game. The quality animation in Soldier of Fortune is a combination of motion-capture data and the expert tweaking and modifications made by the animation team.

The level design team, meanwhile, was undergoing a number of changes. One of the designers, Bobby Duncanson, left the design team to join the art department as a 3-D modeler and another (me) became Raven Software’s project administrator. Eric Biessman was, at this point, the project leader and the lead level designer for the game. In the midst of these changes, the lead level design for the game was turned over to Jim “Jersey” Hughes while Eric remained the project lead.

For nearly a year, Soldier of Fortune was slowly forming into a loosely knit pile of technology that was basically a puzzle that needed to be put together. The game did have GHOUL, some pretty motion capture and special effects, nice levels, cool weapon animations and a lot of gore. With that in hand, Raven and Activision took Soldier of Fortune to E3 (Electronics Entertainment Expo) in May of 1999. Soldier of Fortune was shown behind closed doors, but the response was tremendous! Soldier of Fortune walked away from the show with three best of show awards and a nomination for a fourth. The accolades and positive response provided a boost of energy to a weary SoF development team.

After the success of E3, the team decided to bring in a professional author (Gonzalo Lira) and a real-life mercenary consultant (John F. Mullins) to help out on the game. It turned out to be the defining moment of the project! The author’s story ideas and John Mullins’ no-nonsense input pushed the project in a bold new direction. Before long, the story was fleshed out completely, the design document was finalized and the game’s heroes were born in the form of a fictionalized version of John Mullins and his new partners, Hawk and Sam.

Basing the game on a real-life mercenary piqued the interest of the gaming media. Soon John F. Mullins was the talk of the industry and a series of pictures, screenshots, interviews and public appearances followed. John Mullins’ face was everywhere. Mr. Mullins answered many combat and military-oriented questions for the Raven team and even went on press tours to coincide with game showings and Soldier of Fortune conventions. It was an ideal partnership.

From May to December of 1999, the team pushed forward in the game’s development while the accolades and anticipation for the game were steadily building. Activision’s Activate Conference in Scotland showed Soldier of Fortune to the European press for the first time. The show was a smashing success and soon Soldier of Fortune became a European drive title for Activision.

After Activate, several OEM deals were signed and a five level version of Soldier of Fortune was bundled with several hardware peripherals. People could get a single player or multiplayer version of Soldier of Fortune with the Razer Mouse, the 3Com Gaming Modem or the Playtronics Headset. The world at large got its first taste of Soldier of Fortune...and they wanted more!

The new millennium arrived and, because Raven survived the Y2k bug, they soon found themselves knee deep in developing a public demo. Feedback from OEM users helped the team fix problems with the game play, sort out bugs and more fully develop the game to the target audience’s liking. After a month (or more) of hard work, the demo was released to the public on January 24th, 2000. One day and 100,000 downloads later, Soldier of Fortune had arrived!

The full version was released soon afterwards followed by Soldier of Fortune Gold. The rest, as they say, is history.

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