Geekboy here, your resident retrogaming-and-shooter mastermind. And let’s face it, you can’t say you know anything about retro PC gaming or First Person Shooters without having experienced Apogee’s 1995 cult classic, Rise Of The Triad, or to give it it’s full, official title, Rise Of The Triad: Dark War.

The game, known simply as ROTT to it’s fans, was revolutionary considering that it (the shareware demo, at least) was released only 1 year after DOOM, and yet it brought so many impressive new technologies to the genre. It had crazy particle effects like blood splats and fire, flamethrowers, sampled voices, multi-level platforms, the ability to look up and down, and of course the now-infamous LUDICROUS GIBS.

It also brought collectible powerups to the world of shooters, with everyting from the run-of-the-mill God and mercury modes (giving invincibility and flying ability, repsectively), to the rather insane-o Dog Mode, and of course, fan favourite Shrooms Mode. Let’s just say that it involves flashing lights and the screen moving around randomly..

The game also introduced some other interesting features to the FPS world, including multi-level gameplay, with jump pads (pictured), moving platforms, and food that could be cooked (using the ridiculously powerful and firey weapons) to make it give more health points. It also had environmental items that could be destroyed and often contained items, like the potted plants.

On the subject of those weapons… With the exception of the mundane pistol, dual pistols, and a machine gun, ROTT‘s arsenal also allowed the player to have fun with high powered rocket launchers and flamethrowers, and some slightly wackier fantasy weapons such as the dark staff and excalibat. In fact, in the very first level of the game, in the second room, the player could pick up a ridiculously powerful bazooka – a weapon not featured until much later on in the DOOM games.

Unfortunately, a lot of the bad guys also had these weapons, making parts of the game incredibly tough. Rise of the Triad was hardcore from the get-go.

It also had bosses, such as the bazooka-toting General Darian, Sebastian Krist and his rocket-firing wheelchair of death, an incredibly tough robot known as NME that fired heat seeking missiles, and the absolutely ridiculous El Oscuro, who would fire your own weapon back at you. That’s exactly as difficult as it sounds, and I remember spending many evenings trying to take him down with the weaker weapons (the heatseeker and flamewall were suicide missions in this situation, after all) before I finally managed it.

We also got multiplayer, something which had been done very successfully in DOOM, but which was expanded upon greatly in ROTT. As well as the standard deathmatch mode (called Comm-BAT) there were also modes that involved collecting the most tokens, a capture the flag mode (known as Capture The Triad), and the highly amusing “tag” mode, which was basically a more violent version of the child’s game “it”.

Unfortunately, the registered version of ROTT is still sold by 3D Realms, and so it is not available as abandonware, however, as the engine has been open sourced there have been lots of highly successful attempts to port it to other systems, such as Windows, Linux, the PSP, the GP32, the Nintendo DS, and even the Dreamcast. ROTT lives on!

If you want to know more about this great game or maybe reminisce some more, you can check out the excellent Wikipedia article or the Gamespy site, which has lots of behind-the-scenes coverage of the game’s development.

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