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2008-07-25
Hexen has been around on this site pretty much from the beginning. It got its own page in December 2002, when I had only 36 gamepages in total (hard to imagine for me now). Previously, it had shared one with Heretic, which in turn had been a paragraph on the Doom page till August. It was also one of the first games to get a screenshot, in May 2005, but when I started to add more and more downloads in 2006 I left Hexen out.
The reason was mainly that while Heretic was labeled as shareware, the distributable version of Hexen is called a demo. And while I'm always happy to put up shareware, I'm far more reserved with demos, unless they are of historical interest in themselves. Shareware usually means that you can play a few levels, than buy the full game if you like it, and continue playing. Demos are often seperate programs, a lot like cinematic teasers that contain all the good parts while the rest of the movie is boring. Sometimes they don't let you save at all, and if you do, the savegame is not compatible with the full version.
But now it seems that by these standards the Hexen demo is far more a shareware version than a demo. Maybe they just labeled it as such because shareware had by 1995 already become associated with mediocre or homebrew games, I don't know. Anyway I've relaxed my standards, since a few megabytes are nothing to fuzz about nowadays, so you can now download both the DOS and the Macintosh demos for Hexen from the page. And the 1.1 patch, more about that below.
Heretic was not Raven Software's first game. Not even the lesser known
Shadowcaster, an action-RPG using the
Wolfenstein 3D engine, was
Raven Software's first game. The first game was
Black Crypt, an
RPG in the style of
Dungeon Master for the
Amiga. Interesting in itself,
since none of the subsequent Raven games was available for this
platform, except far later as an open source port (there was an Amiga
Heretic/Hexen CD in 1999, I don't know much about it).
Sega Genesis and Windows versions of Black Crypt were planned. The Windows version was even more or less finished in 1998, but for some reason never released, commercially that is. The developers released the first two levels as freeware. You can see it as the unique case of a Windows demo for an Amiga game. If you can get it to run, you will notice the spiritual relationship with Hexen, even the Ettins make their first appearance there.
After id released the source code for most of their games under the GPL, several replacement engines were written. The Korax Mod goes a step further, for it adds some RPG elements to Hexen, looking at Raven's history a fitting idea. For those that are confused now: Raven Software was the developer of Hexen, id the publisher. Besides, the Hexen engine was a modified Doom engine, its last and most advanced instance in fact.
I had already written about the Korax Mod on the Hexen page, now I've given it a seperate page with a screenshot, more quotes from the website, and put up the file for download. The Korax Mod needs the 1.1 version of Hexen, that's the main reason I put the patch up for download too.
The Dingdong download proved to be quite popular, so now you can download Maze-Man too, another Commodore 64 game by Frédéric Thiesse, inspired by but in the end quite different from Pac-Man.
There's an update for Targhan. When I added a page for Quake II, I noticed how similar the graphics of these two games, seperated by nine years, were. Now I noticed the same crimson skies in Doom and Hexen. That still doesn't change that I can't remember having seen anything similar before Targhan.
Previous entry: 2008-07-21
