Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders

3D

Heretic had a little known feature that would let you see in true 3D perspective. If you ran Voiht.exe, it would let you use the I-glasses made by Vio technologies.

Controversy

The Steam download version of the game is listed as Windows platform because the executables are modified to use a DOSBox variant (v 0.70); additionally the traditional setup.exe is missing.

It is confirmed that neither Valve or id Software contacted the DOSBox project staff and initially the game didn't includes the TXT files that must be present under the GPL license (so they failed to fulfill 2 points of the GPL license).

Two days after the launch, there was an update that includes COPYING, AUTHORS and THANKS.txt of the DOSBox 0.71.

References

• The DOOM cheat codes IDKFA and IDDQD work in Heretic, sort of. If you type IDKFA (the all items cheat), the word "cheater" appears on the screen and you will find your inventory empty. Worse yet, just try to open up "God" mode with IDDQD. Your character is instantly pureed!
• The design of the Sabreclaw enemy species is similar to the one of the Aliens from the Alien movie series.

Speech

The enemy Disciple of D'Sparil (the one who looks like a black priest or wizard) sometimes whispers strange incantations. These are actually English sentences played backwards:

WIZSIT - "Destroy the Heretic"

WIZACT - "Succumb to us, Heretic"

When facing the last boss, D'Sparil, he sometimes shouts demonic incantations. These are actually English sentences recorded backwards:

SORSIT - This sound is hard to understand, but some possible interpretations are "Now ravens shall chew your flesh" and "I will torture your flesh"

SORACT - "Surrender to D'Sparil"

Technology

Heretic is commonly noted as the first DOOM-enhanced engine to perform looking up and down, but truthfully none of the DOOM-enhanced engines can truly look up and down due to the nature of the engine. Technically, yes, it's "looking" up and down, but no tilting of the head is involved -- rather, the viewpoint of the player is raised and lowered, much like a periscope. This is also why, at extreme heights or lows, the perspective gets wildly distorted.

Weapons

The weapons in Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders are loosely based on weapons from DOOM. It uses the exact same system:

There are 2 melee-only weapons (the Staff and the Gauntlets of the Necromancer), which clearly resemble the Fist and Chainsaw from DOOM respectively. The Gauntlets even function exactly the same.

The Elven Wand behaves exactly like the Pistol from DOOM.

The Ethereal Crossbow works in a similar manner as the Shotgun from DOOM - some of its arrows (pellets for the Shotgun) fly in different directions, and only some of them hit the enemy, mostly.

The Dragon Claw works pretty similar to the Chaingun from DOOM. Another interesting fact about it, is that you can see three claws on the weapon, just like you can see three barrels of the Chaingun at a time (though the claws don't rotate).

The Hellstaff shoots particles very similar to the Plasma Gun from DOOM.

The Phoenix Rod works exactly like DOOM's Rocket Launcher - it is very powerful, and does splash damage, which can also harm the player.

The final weapon, the Firemace, however, doesn't behave like the BFG 9000 from DOOM in any way, although in the beta versions of DOOM, the way the BFG shoots is quite similar to the way the Firemace does.

Information also contributed by DarkDante, Medicine Man; Scott Monster, Xoleras and Zaghadka