The story
Foundation and Black Crypt (1986–1992)
In 1986, Brian Raffel was an art teacher at University of Wisconsin–Madison and cross country-track coach at Middleton High School and his brother, Steve, worked in a screen-print shop. Their late father, Don, was an influence on the two growing up playing Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules such as Palace of the Silver Princess, Tomb of Horrors, Lost Tomb of Martek, and Castle Amber, who inspired Brian to draw a concept by the end of 1988 called The Well — a paper-and-pen role-playing game originally conceived as a D&D module until Steve came up and reworked it with Brian to be its own thing.
After seeing some of the recent games released to the Amiga, Brian decided that their art was "as good as and in some cases better" than what was coming and chose to move The Well to the Amiga for taking advantage of its computing power. Brian brothers retooled the project from scratch while opening their own company to work on the now-called Black Crypt. Raven Software was officially incorporated on May 23, 1990.
Shortly after establishing Raven, Brian got together with programmers Rick Johnson and Ben Gokey, and musician Kevin Schilder to join the company. Johnson was the youngest crew member at 18 years old. Black Crypt production started in April 1990 and lasted nearly two years, with Raffel brothers and the team moving to a $200 per month office, which sat under a workshop in Madison. The game's budget was $40,000. Described as an "Age of Darkness first-person tile-based real-time combat dungeon simulator", Black Crypt draws inspirations from FTL Games' Dungeon Master 3D realtime style and consists of twelve interconnected dungeons rendered in 64-colour extra half-brite graphics, which allowed players to define a palette customization of sixty-four colours—unlike Dungeon Master and its clones.
id Software
Raven Software was founded in 1990 by brothers Brian and Steve Raffel. Originally a three-person company, it was discovered by John Romero, co-founder of id Software, who collaborated with Raven to make games using its game engine beginning with ShadowCaster. Raven then started making games with id Software; the company even briefly moved to the same street as id Software. They used id's engines for many of its games, such as Heretic, Hexen: Beyond Heretic and Hexen II.
In 2005 and 2009, Raven developed two games from id's catalog: Quake 4 and Wolfenstein respectively.
Activision
The company was independent until 1997, when it was acquired by Activision for $12 million. They were still collaborating with id Software but at the same time developed other titles as well such as Soldier of Fortune in 2000, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy in 2003, X-Men Legends in 2004 and many more.
In August 2009, following poor performance and a possible over-budget of Wolfenstein, the company made a major layoff of 30 to 35 staff, leaving two development teams. This was reduced to one after more layoffs in October 2010, after delays with Singularity; as many as 40 staff were released. Following the layoffs and after id Software was bought over by ZeniMax Media, Raven has since become a primary developer for the Call of Duty series. By July 2021, Raven Software had grown to roughly 350 employees.
In December 2021, Activision did not renew the contract of several members of the quality assurance (QA) department that were contract employees. One of the associate managers said that "valuable members" were fired although they "were promised, for months, that Activision was working towards a pay restructure to increase their wages". Following these firings as well as other controversies involving Activision Blizzard, a strike was initiated. On January 21, 2022, Raven's QA team formed a union named the Game Workers Alliance with Communications Workers of America.
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In May 2022, workers of the Raven QA team voted to unionize with a count of 19 – 2 in favor. In June 2022 Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick stated that the company would recognize the union and begin negotiations with it. Following the Raven QA team's successful unionization, the 20-member QA team of Blizzard Albany announced a unionization drive in July 2022 as GWA Albany. The vote passed (14–0), forming the second union at an Activision Blizzard subsidiary.
On March 8, 2024, 600 QA testers at three Activision studios in Austin, Texas, Eden Prairie, Minnesota and El Segundo, California joined Raven and Blizzard's unionizations to form the union "Activision Quality Assurance United-CWA" and voted to unionize (390–8) in favor, making it the largest video game union in the United States. Following Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which included Raven Software, the company voluntarily recognized the union.
In April 2026, Brian Raffel retired from Raven Software after more than 36 years with the studio, having served as its vice president since its founding and as studio head since 1997, a role he shared with David Pellas from 2024.
From Wikipedia’s article on Raven Software, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4