Welcome to Cover Art! A section of the site where we look at a retro video game’s box cover art and briefly discuss it’s gameplay and legacy.
“From the Publisher of DOOM” and a rating of “Violence“. Those were selling points in 1994. While those things were both true, the Raven Software developed Heretic certainly didn’t need to rely on those things.
Heretic is a fantasy adventure game and FPS. It’s based on a modified version of id Software’s Doom engine, which added things like transparency, looking up and down, gibbing, and more. It also featured a pretty revolutionary inventory system which has become a standard format since then. Heretic still lives on today via Steam and Doom source ports. It later got an indirect sequel called Hexen and a sequel of its own, Heretic II.