(MUSIC RISES – pulsating sounds emit excitement and… danger!)
VIDEO: Camera flying quickly through office spaces, swinging sideways down hallways, crashing through a set of double-doors that hide a critical game secret…
VOICE: This is Raven Software. Taking gaming into the future and beyond…
Raven Software is a place where the quintessential gamer (94% of the staff is male) develops, designs, and tests video games for a living. It offers a low-light work environment encouraging think-tank discussions and state-of-the-art animation. Raven is designed around monitoring the creative pulse of the video gaming industry and promising to take gamers on cutting edge, surreal experiences. It has a rich history of producing games like Hexen, Soldier of Fortune II, Star Trek: Voyager; and X-Men Legends. Here, employees, some sitting on yoga balls rather than chairs, get paid to turn video games into retail blockbusters.
Now a $4 million-plus company, Raven was founded in 1990 by two Verona-area brothers who simply believed they could create a better game.
Brian Raffel, 48, Studio Head [then a teacher at Middleton High School], and his brother Steve [former silk-screener], Raven’s creative director, were Dungeons & Dragons fans who had earlier discovered video games and soon began developing their own artistic talents using basic art programs available on their Amiga computers.
Believing their creativity was as good as any game on the market, the brothers fabricated their own video game prototype, made 10 copies, and sent them off to their favorite video game publishers. They’d been cautioned not to expect a response for at least three to four months.
Three days later, they were sitting on six offers.
In short order, the brothers were flown out to California, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Raven has come a long way since the early 1990s, when five employees spent two years and $40,000 creating Black Crypt, their first video game as an independent producer. While games still take years to produce, today’s technological complexities require dozens of employees per title, and cost between $15 million and $25 million to produce. Purchased by Activision (now Activision Blizzard, Inc.) in 1997, Raven is now one of 16 studios producing video games for the $4 billion publishing giant.
The Middleton company specializes in “third-person” action games and “first-person shooter” formats of various genres, creating the sense that the player is physically part of the action. “You will never see us doing a Barbie video,” laughed Chad Riggleman, Raven Recruiter.
This year, Raven will release three such titles: X-Box Origins: Wolverine (in conjunction with the May 1 movie premiere), a sequel to Wolfenstein, and its original sci-fi game, Singularity. Games retail between $59 and $79 for about 10 hours of entertainment and have a shelf life about six to 12 months, “and that’s being generous,” said Riggleman.
For each game copy sold, hardware manufacturers such as Microsoft (X-Box) or Sony (PlayStation) receive about $15 off the top. Riggleman said Raven, by contrast, might earn between $10 and $20 per game, depending upon licensing (the company splits revenues with Wolverine’s Marvel Comics, for example). For that reason, developing an original IP such as Singularity, which will cost about $20 million and has been in development since 2006, offers full creative control, reduced or no royalty payments, and a bigger piece of the gaming pie.
Raven employees are therefore encouraged to submit new game ideas. The best might earn a prototype – a 15-to-20 minute rough version that eventually gets submitted to Activision. It can take up to three months and 10 staff members to develop a prototype, said Riggleman, in hopes that Activision will green light a project. “We have at least 10 ideas already being considered,” Raffel said.
The game creation process is similar to the development of a motion picture. There are writers, producers, artists, sound effects, and musical scores to consider, and each game has a timeline, a budget, a dedicated management team and a staff of about 60 employees (typically 25% programmers, 25% designers, and 50% artists).
Artists first create detailed 2-D drawings of the game’s characters and its virtual world, down to the the smallest of objects, such as a heating grate on a wall, or a bench that will later interact with a character in a cyber-room.
Artwork is portioned-out. For example, one employee may design the first-person hand that creates the illusion of the player being in the scene, another designs the weapon the hand holds, still another, the walls in a room.
Singularity game developers Rob Gee and Chris Foster transform the 2-D drawings into 3-D animation, placing objects and characters into the virtual world. Gee says the creation of an original game poses special challenges: “There is no road map for a brand new IP,” he said. “What can we do? What can’t we do? How do we educate players on what to expect from the game?”
The duo constantly tries to predict and out-think the activities of future game-players, he said, then correct any shortcomings found along the way. “Much of our time is spent problem-solving.”
Game music and sound effects and voice-overs are created in one of Raven’s four sound studios, though a game’s dramatic opening and closing musical scores are usually contracted out.
Elsewhere in the building, human actors audition in the “MoCap” (motion-capture) suite where they don body suits wired with 53 infrared ‘markers.’ As the actor moves, 32 digital video cameras encircling the room collect data that will electronically correlate to the movement of the video game characters. Human actors are also used for “cinematics,” – video shorts designed to advance game plots forward, a tactic used to ensure that game players do not skip through or miss critical elements in a game.
Once Raven completes a game, it is sent to Activision where it is tested (24-hours-a-day, six-days a week for up to three-months) for system crashes, proper spelling, and anything else a game might encounter. Activision also handles game PR and creates customized versions in various languages.
Other cultural restrictions are also taken into account. For instance, before Wolfenstein, a game involving Nazi characters, can be released into the German market, Raven must first remove all swastikas.
