The video game industry has grown by leaps and bounds in the recent years and these games have caught the fancy of both the young and old alike. Soldier of fortune is a video game created by Raven software and published by Activision for Microsoft Windows. This first-person shooter game became an instant hit among all gaming enthusiasts ever since its launch on March 27th, 2000. Children spent hours altogether glued to their gaming consoles to play this hugely popular game series.

Soldier of fortune uses a modified id Tech 2 game engine but it can also be played on PlayStation 2, Dreamcast and Linux. Owing to its huge fan following, two sequels of the game were also released in the recent years. The main plot of this game is the robbery of nuclear weapons by a German-based Afrikaner Neo-Nazi group headed by the notorious Sergei Dekker. The game begins with terrorists stealing four weapons from a Russian storage unit and selling them to other third world countries for a huge sum of money.

This theft is carried out to provide funding to acquire advanced weapons for the group to carry out acts of mass destruction in many parts of the world. The hero is John Mullins who works for the US based ‘soldier of fortune’ organization ‘The Shop’ along with his partner Aaron ‘Hawk’ Parsons. John is assigned with the task of protecting these nuclear weapons and prevents them from falling into the terrorists hands. This game became hugely popular especially after the spate of terrorist attacks that were carried out in different parts of the world.

The game is based out of various locations like New York City, Soroti (Uganda), Kosovo, Baghdad, Kordofan, Tokyo and Hamburg. At the time of release, this video game was built around an advanced version of Quake II engine and used the GHOUL damage model engine. It gained huge recognition for its graphics and animations which were life-like and realistic. The updated version of this GHOUL engine was used in the later two sequels of this game also. Another famous video game which used this system was Star Wars.

Though Soldier of fortune was praised for its highly gripping and entertaining plot, it also received a lot of flak for its graphical representations of firearms dismembering the human body. This seemed to be a little crude and violet for young minds and many parents were apprehensive about buying the game. But since nonviolence is a possibility if the player is good enough, most of the criticism dropped and the game once again became hugely popular among the masses. Later, creators came up with an option which can disable all the gore featured in the game and also a low violence version was created especially for the young minds.

The success of Soldier of fortune is still evident today as copies of this game still sell like hot cakes and is played with much gusto and enthusiasm all across the world.

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Category: Computers and Technology
Keywords: soldier, soldier of fortune, soldier of fortune video game, soldier of fortune story, soldier game,