Heretic gets an impressive Game Boy Advance port decades after its PC debut

Heretic on a Game Boy Advance sounds like the sort of thing that should’ve happened 20 years ago. It didn’t. Now an unofficial port is finally showing what Raven Software’s 1994 fantasy shooter looks like running on Nintendo’s handheld, and the interesting part is how little has been stripped away. This isn’t a tiny remake built around shorter levels or simplified encounters. The project aims to bring over the original Heretic experience, including its maps, weapons, enemies and inventory system. The first three episodes are already playable, although the port is still under development and has a few obvious technical problems to work through.

Heretic skipped Nintendo’s handheld the first time around

Heretic originally arrived on PC in 1994, developed by Raven Software using technology based on the Doom engine. Instead of shotguns, demons and military bases, it went for fantasy weapons, magical artefacts, medieval environments and monsters. That wasn’t the only difference.

Heretic added features that helped it stand apart from Doom, including an inventory system and the ability to look up and down. Items could be carried and activated when needed, while weapons such as the Elven Wand, Ethereal Crossbow and Dragon Claw gave the combat its own identity.

Doom eventually made it to Game Boy Advance. So did Doom II and Wolfenstein 3D. Heretic never did. This new conversion changes that, although unofficially. It’s being developed by Bazooka_Face, who has already worked on Game Boy Advance versions of Doom, Doom II, Final Doom and Wolfenstein 3D.

The original Heretic levels are still here

The big surprise is the level design. It hasn’t been rebuilt around the limitations of the Game Boy Advance. The maps remain largely intact.

That’s significant because handheld ports from this period often made heavy compromises. Levels could be redesigned, simplified or replaced completely when the original game was too demanding. Here, the aim is much closer to putting Heretic itself onto the hardware. The first three episodes are currently playable, and the full weapon selection is included. The Tome of Power works too, so weapons can still switch to their stronger powered-up attacks.

Controls obviously need some adjustment. A Game Boy Advance doesn’t have a PC keyboard sitting underneath it, so weapon and inventory selection use combinations of the L and R shoulder buttons and the directional pad. It takes some getting used to, but it keeps the inventory system without turning the controls into a mess.

Visually, everything has been squeezed into the GBA’s 240 × 160 resolution. Textures lose detail and distant objects can look rough, but enemies, rooms, weapons and projectiles remain readable. The port also keeps lighting and shadow effects instead of flattening the whole game.

Performance is surprisingly close to 30 fps

Heretic isn’t locked at 30 frames per second on the Game Boy Advance, but it gets fairly close during normal play. Larger areas are another story. Rooms with more enemies, bigger sightlines and complicated vertical layouts can drag the frame rate down, especially during the second and third episodes. That’s where the limits of the hardware become easier to spot.

The game doesn’t suddenly become a slideshow, though. Most of the time, combat remains playable even when performance drops. There are other unfinished parts. Some items can’t currently be collected. Objects can flicker in and out visually. Switches work, but don’t always change appearance after they’ve been activated.

The Wings of Wrath aren’t fully working either. You can move vertically after activating them, but normal movement can become unreliable. Audio has its own limitations. Heretic’s original music uses more channels than the current GBA sound implementation can comfortably reproduce, so some tracks sound noticeably different. Crashes can happen too. This is still development code.

The GBA is doing more work than you’d expect

Heretic makes an interesting fit for the Game Boy Advance because there’s more going on than its Doom-style graphics might suggest. Levels contain height changes, moving enemies, projectiles, inventory items, lighting and large spaces that were designed for PCs rather than a handheld from 2001. Yet the original maps are running. That’s the important part here. The port isn’t hiding the hardware’s limitations by replacing Heretic with something smaller. It’s trying to make the actual game work within them.

The current build can run on real Game Boy Advance hardware as well as through emulation. Getting it running involves patching a compatible Heretic 1.3 WAD and preparing the resulting file as a GBA ROM, so this isn’t a plug-and-play release.

There’s still work left. Stability needs attention, some items don’t behave correctly, flight isn’t finished and performance can fall in demanding areas. But the basic game is already there. Three episodes, the original levels, the weapons and most of Heretic’s core systems are running on a Game Boy Advance. For a shooter that never received an official GBA release, that’s a technically interesting result on its own.

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