About Black Crypt

Black Crypt was the first game title produced by Raven Software. Raven founders Brian and Steve Raffel had an idea for a Role Playing Game in the late 80's and set out to make it a reality. By April 1990, the brothers had brought two programmers aboard to assist them in the development of the game. The four produced a demo of Black Crypt and sent it out to several publishing companies. Electronic Arts (EA) saw the demo and agreed to publish the game in 1990. Black Crypt was released on March 20th, 1992.

Black Crypt was originally designed to run on a Commodore Amiga with 1 MB of RAM. The graphic mode used was called Extra Half-Bright, which allowed for a user-defined palette of 32 colors (out of 4096 color choices). The mode then provided an additional 32 colors, which were half the brightness of the chosen colors. 'Copper' effects were used to do special effects, such as the teleport or water ripples. Black Crypt supported 4 channels of sound and was "hard drive installable." It was distributed on three 880k disks.

In 1998, Raven Software programmer Rick Johnson released the first two levels of Black Crypt for the PC as Freeware.