Gatling Good - Television Tropes & Idioms

A man with a Gatling gun killed several powerful villains (in fact, practically every villain besides himself) early on in Rurouni Kenshin. It was actually a very primitive design, was operated manually, and jammed after one of the villains stuck a metal bit in the ammo bandoleer.
- Only in the anime. In the manga, the only reason the guy didn't shoot Kenshin with it was because he used up all his ammo killing the other guys.
- Since the series takes place in the 19th Century, a hand-cranked Gatling gun was cutting edge at the time.
  - The scene also handily depicted why such weapons were illegal in Japan at the time. No matter how badass a samurai is, he can't survive a gatling gun to the chest.
For a while, a Vulcan cannon was the primary "weapon" (hard to explain) of Bungo Takano's "shadow dragon" Hainekuwele in Narutaru.
Gundam has been known to use these from time to time:
- Almost all Gundams have these in their head or torso as secondary/point-defence weapons, starting with the original RX-78.
- An early variant design, the 5th Gundam (later remade as the Gundam G05 for the video game Encounters in Space) wields a giant Gatling as its unique weapon.
- In Gundam0080, The Gundam NT-1 "Alex" carries a pair of triple-barreled rotary guns hidden in its forearms.
  - Where its ammo come from, however, is a matter of interest.
- The Gundam Heavyarms is the poster boy for Gatling-armed Humongous Mecha. Aside from the Beam Gatling fitted on the arm, it also carries a pair hidden in its chest. Later in the series, it gets upgraded to a double beam Gatling. In Endless Waltz it was retconned into having two double Gatlings, and four in the chest. Even the Mecha Mooks bit that one, carrying a double Gatling of their own as their standard weapon.
  - The whole thing is made more impressive (or ridiculous, depending on your tastes) by the fact that Heavyarms' pilot Trowa Barton is good enough with those Gatlings to disable enemy mecha without harming the pilots or triggering accidental explosions. Oh, and he shoots missiles out of the air with them too.
  - Despite his evident skill, Trowa nevertheless has the tendency to be rather blase about ammunition, leading to him running out of ammo for all of his guns and missiles nearly every battle. Endless Waltz sums up the reason nicely with a single scene:
    Duo: (pinned down by a Serpent MS that is ceaselessly unloading gatling ammo in his direction despite the fact that he's hiding behind cover) Hey, I know this. I know this style of combat! Trowa's in that mobile suit!
- The Gundam Leopard in Gundam X soon followed suit a year later, with its Inner Arm Gatling.
- The08th MS Team gives us Norris Packard's legendary Gouf Custom, with its huge 75mm Gatling.
- The Blue Frame in Gundam SEED Astray has a flight pack that can detach and reveal a Gatling gun (Then comes together to form a BFS}.
- Of course, most of the ships had "close-in weapon systems"—see under Real Life section below—for point defense.
Macross (and Robotech) both feature gattling cannons. the gun pods used by hte mecha are 3-barreled versions tough.
Gargomon in Digimon Tamers had a Gatling gun on both arms, making him dangerous to the humans as well as the Digimon early on—he was a bit drunk with the Champion level power.
Zoids had the Hibilt Vulcan cannon, a massive six-barreled beam Gatling weapon. Oddly enough, the anime would often inconsitently depict it as a projectile wepaon instead. There are too many Zoids that can equip it to list here, but we will mention Karl Shuvaltz in Chaotic Century, who was known for having all his Ace Custom units being armed with one.
Guu has a gatling gun arm.
In episode 21 of Zettai Karen Children when Oboro Kashiwagi the otherwise ordinary secretary lays eyes on a life sized doll of herself created by The Mole Takashi Kugutsu NOT for himself; he was blackmailed into doing it by Kaoru, her response is to whip out a minigun out of NOWHERE and shoot it to dust. Any Ork Warboss would be proud to have her on the team.
Appleseed has large tanks that have stupidly large six-barreled rotary cannons in place of the main gun. And the monstrous mobile gun platforms have four of the same... each.
Chao's robot army in Mahou Sensei Negima used these against Mahora's mage army. They were loaded with bullets that could send the victim into a future in which they'd already lost without any possible defense aside from dodging as a functional One Hit Kill.
Novic from Priest carries around a gatling gun. He doesn't seem to have any trouble firing it from the hip.
One villain from Black Lagoon wields one in "The Hunt for Greenback Jane"/"Roanapur Freak Show".

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Rocket Racoon's preferred weapon in the recent Anihillation: Conquest miniseries and new Guardians of the Galaxy ongoing is a gatling gun bigger than he is. Opinions are divided on whether to call it proof of super-procyonid strength on Rocket's part or chalk it up to Rule Of Cool.
War Machine typically carries one of these on his left shoulder. With his current ability to integrate external technology into his armor, he can (and often does) add more. If he punches an A-10 Thunderbolt and takes its components, whoever he is facing is totally screwed.
Minor Marvel Universe villain Gattling wears a battlesuit with twin Gatling-style machineguns mounted on each forearm. Why yes, he was created during the 90s. Why do you ask?

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Terminator 2. And it was reported that Schwarzenegger was the only man in the set strong enough to carry it on his own.
- Terminator Salvation. The main enemy grunts, the T-600s have Gatling guns strapped to their arms.
The Matrix features a helicopter-mounted minigun.
Predator features that famous minigun 'Old Painless' wielded by former Navy SEAL, former Pro Wrestler and (then-future) Minnesota Governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura, and may very well effectively be the Trope Maker. It should be noted, however, that the actors firing that thing had to be braced just offscreen, lest the recoil knock them on their ass. And that was just firing blanks. They also had to connect it to an external power source offscreen, by a wire that went down his pants.
- Jesse himself has stated that while the gun was suspended from an offscreen crane in early takes, later he actually managed to fire it without. According to him: 'You just had to grit your teeth and hold on. It's like firing a chainsaw. It's fucking ridiculous. Why the fuck would anyone want to use something like that?'
- Predator's minigun is actually the very same model that was later used for the aforementioned Terminator II.
A criminal uses one in Superman Returns, to no effect.
The Big Bad's suit in the Iron Man film has, in addition to a rocket launcher, a huge wrist-mounted Gatling gun.
- The War Machine armor of comics' fame also sports a Gatling gun
In the epilogue of Grindhouse: Planet Terror, Cherry Darling has replaced her rifle-leg with a minigun.
- Let's not forget the motorbike-mounted chaingun in the Machete trailer.
All robots seem to have rotary guns in the Transformers movie. Including ones made from mobile phones.
- And the one made from a soda machine! It fires Mountain Dew cans with lethal velocity from a rotary grenade launcher-style weapon. (And the entry on the Ensemble Darkhorse seems befuddled at how "Dispensor" became so popular.)
- Also in the first movie you actually see the infamous A-10 firing its GAU-8 Avenger at Scorponok.
3:10 To Yuma (the remake) features a hand-cranked Gatling gun.
- For the record: the original Gatling gun always was hand-cranked; there was no other feasible rapid-fire technology available until Hiram Maxim invented the first true machine gun in 1884.
  - More for the record: Gatling did draw up plans for and produced at least one prototype electronically driven Gatling, which used an array of wet cell batteries carried underneath the carriage, to power the simple motor armature used in place of a crank. Its propensity to become fouled and vastly increased weight (do to the cells) led to its obscurity and failure. Adding a layer of electrical complexity to an already unusual weapon that required four men to operate in the field didn't help, either.
  - What part of "feasible" didn't you get, know-it-all?
A hand cranked Gatling Gun is also seen in Zulu (supposedly the first ever used by the British army)
One of the more awesome scenes in Black Hawk Down involved one of the titular Black Hawks obliterating a group of Somali soldiers with RPG launchers using one of the the mounted miniguns on the side of the chopper.
In The Last Samurai, the Japanese government purchases a battery of Civil War-era Gatling Guns from the United States. These weapons quickly and efficiently wipe out the remnants of the Samurai during their final Desperation Attack.
- By most accounts, this is actually something resembling Truth In Television—the cavalry charge was still a viable battle tactic right up until the moment the Gat turned up on the fields.
  - A viable tactic somewhere with precious few firearms, perhaps. The Crimean War highlighted the general superiority of artillery over cavalry with the slaughter of the Light Brigade, a good twenty years before the events of the Last Samurai would have taken place.
  - Only if you charge the artillery in the front. Old-school cavalry played a major part in the Franco-Prussian War and in various minor conflicts in the late 19th century as well as on the Eastern Front in WW 1.
The Wild Bunch, anyone?
- It must be mounted on a tripod!
During a car scene in Last Action Hero a door on a van suddenly opens, and a goon steps out with a mounted short-barreled minigun and proceeds to fire it at Arnie's car. Which, of course, remains untouched, but the premise of the movie means this actually makes sense.
At the start of Tremors 3, Burt Gummer demonstrates the proper way to deal a rampaging pack of Shriekers: a pair of anti-aircraft guns mounted on the back of a truck.
- And his milquetoast ancestor in Tremors 4 gets his first taste of proper Gummerhood at the end of that movie, when he receives a Gatling Gun. He turns the handle, it starts firing, and he starts giggling... he turns the handle faster and faster, firing off more and more rounds, and his shrieks of laughter reach a maniacal pitch...
The first car chase in Batman Forever: The Batmobile is chased by a pair of '50 Buick Roadmasters, each with two miniguns mounted on the hood. Not that they ever reach real Gatling fire rates, let alone do any halfway realistic damage to anything.
The War Wagon (1967) western starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, who plan to rob an armoured stagecoach (owmed by a villainous land baron) that is armed with a turret-mounted Gatling gun.
The 1983 movie Blue Thunder features a modified Aérospatiale SA-341G Gazelle helicopter with a 20mm Gatling cannon mounted in a turret attached to the nose. This cannon has such a high rate of fire that, during the movie, it is used to saw a police cruiser in half to facilitate the escape of one of the supporting cast. In a few seconds. To have the plot make some vague sense, the turret gets disabled during the Final Boss Fight, as is the chopper itself at the end of the movie, being Too Dangerous To Exist.
In Django, a Gatling gun turned out to be what Django kept in his coffin.
- That's not a Gatling gun, there are no rotating barrels.
Guess what's bolted to the port side of that black truck in Tango And Cash. Right, a 20mm Gatling.
Wiseguy. Hitman Roger Loccoco has a car with a gatling gun firing from the trunk, and twin machine-guns between the headlights.
In the Clint Eastwood vehicle The Outlaw Josey Wales the Redlegs used a Gatling mounted on the back of a wagon to kill all the bushwhackers that had just surrendered to them and turned their own guns in
G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra features a suit of powered armour with a Gatling gun built around the right arm.

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MythBusters used a Gatling gun as the last stage of the "shooting fish in a barrel" analogy. First, they tried more mundane guns, like a handgun and a shotgun (aside: they missed with the shotgun; the shockwave of the blast alone killed the fish). For the last stage, they busted out an army issue minigun and unleashed it on the barrel; by the time it was over, the barrel was in a million pieces and there was more lead in the fish than fish.
- They also used the minigun on at least two other occasions: Once, to see if incendiary rounds could blow up a gas tank (busted), see if you could chop down a tree with bullets (confirmed) and blow up a propane tank (confirmed).

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The "Reason" of Snow Crash ("I told you they'd listen to Reason") is a ridiculously powerful needlegun-type rail gun in the style of a Gatling gun that fires small fragments of depleted uranium. To drive the point home, at a certain point in the story the main character gets in a fight with two Phalanx CIWS carrier-mounted 20mm vulcan guns. Reason wins.
- To give an idea of the power of this gun. The hero of the book uses it to shoot his way into an aircraft carrier. Well, more accurately THROUGH it. Remember, everyone listens to Reason.
In the novelization of Rambo: First Blood Part II, one of these guns shows up on a helicopter. Every fourth bullet is a tracer bullet, leaving a column of fire from the weapon's mouth, leading to the weapon's nickname: "The Dragon".
- Not just Rule Of Cool, mind you. Aircraft guns use tracers to allow the gunner to easily track targets at night.
In the Armageddon Trilogy by Robert Rankin, this is Lampshaded with a running gag that characters going into a fight say they wish they had 'an amazing rotary machine gun like Blaine had in Predator'. This exact phrase is used consistently until Elvis (yes, that Elvis) correctly identifies it as the M134 General Electric mini-gun.
The Dresden Files. Small Favor. Hendricks, on the helicopter, with the gatling gun. Which happens to be blasting The Ride of the Valkyries. While being piloted by an actual Valkyrie.
The Western series Gatling by Jack Slade had as its hero an operative for the Maxim Gun Company named Gatling. The series hook was the character used period automatic weapons, including gatling guns.
The Dragon, a modified Hind helicopter, is equipped with quad gattling guns, all pointing forward for use by the pilot (or gunner), in John Ringo's Unto the Breach. Another Hind owned by the Kildar uses the more conventional miniguns to port and starboard for defense, when used as a troop transport, as noted below in the Real Life section.

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Warhammer 40000 loves these, from the "assault cannon" on Space Marine Terminators and Dreadnoughts, the Tau's Energy Weapon Burst Cannon, through the tank-shredding Vulcan Mega Bolter and Gatling Blaster, and right up to the Imperator Titan's Hellstorm cannon (a Gatling Energy Weapon the size of a skyscraper.)
- In case you were wondering about that caption, DAKKA DAKKA is the onomatopoeic sound effect commonly used in Warhammer 40000 comics and graphic novels for rapid-firing weapons. In fact, for Dawn Of War, the Orks' ranged weapons upgrades are labelled "More Dakka" and "Even More Dakka".
  - This coming from the original tabletop upgrade, Kustom Job: More Dakka. "Dakka" is actually a normal (and very good) word in the Ork language.
  - It can be noted that in many, many of the pieces of artwork depicting a supposedly rotary multibarrel weapon firing, all barrels have muzzleflashes. Possibly because they Did Not Do The Research, or possibly because having only one flash from all those barrels just wasn't cool enough.
- The Imperial Guard's newest tank, the Leman Russ Punisher has a massive gatling gun that does 20 hits (the assault cannon does four and the Vulcan Mega Bolter does 15) and only lacks armour penetration (but when you unload 20 shots into anything it's going to die)
Battletech commonly depicts many machineguns and Autocannons as rotary-style guns, and recently introduced the separate Rotary Autocannon as its own class of weapon.
Many mecha and vehicles in Rifts are adopting rotary railguns as antipersonel weapons.
Shadowrun has, in addition to its more ordinary miniguns, a vehicle mounted weapon called the "Victory Rotary Assault Cannon", which is Exactly What It Says On The Tin: a rotary gun that fires artillery rounds.
The evil rat-like Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy Battle, ever on the cutting edge of technological development, have... wait for it... ratling guns.
GURPS: Ultratech has gatling versions of just about everything which are at the low end of the high power weapons but have four times the rate of fire and about twice as many shots.
Gammarauders, a game about giant mutant cyborg animals fighting in the radioactive wastes after an apocalyptic nuclear war, features the Macrotechnic Popgun, so called because though it is of little use against the bioborgs it can still waste a lot of regular human soldiers, called popcorn because the bioborgs eat them like snacks.

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The pioneers of First Person Shooters, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, used these, the former as the player character's most powerful weapon, and the latter as his default automatic weapon. (It's also used by bosses, Hans/Gretel Grosse and Hitler in the former, and Spider Mastermind in the latter). It's become a standard weapon in First Person Shooter games since, from the minigun in just about every incarnation of Unreal to the rotary riot gun from Shadow Warrior. These games also started the tradition of misidentifying the weapon in question as a "chaingun".
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein has a Gatling-like gun, the Venom, that charges for a bit before opening fire. And if an enemy (except the really strong ones) takes too many bullets, it explodes into Ludicrous Gibs.
- Outlaws, the Wild West Themed FPS from the good old days of Lucasarts, had a gatling gun as a weapons. However, due to it being mounted on a tripod, you had to be stationary to use it.
Command And Conquer makes fair use of these. The First Person Shooter Renegade had mini-Gatling armed foot soldier for both GDI and Nod, with a few more scattered here or there on various weapons. In Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge Gatlings became their own weapon, and fired a steady stream of bullets that sped up the longer the gun fired on a single target (or another nearby). These were later given to the Chinese in Generals.
- One of the chinese subfactions in Zero Hour gives them to the standard infantry, making them incredibly powerful.
- Tiberium Wars continues the proud tradition of gatling weapons, now in the hands of the Forgotten mercenaries. GDI also had gatling weapons mounted on the Hammerhead gunship in the Kane's Wrath expansion.
Grand Theft Auto occasionally features the absurd hand-held minigun.
Heavy Weapons Guy in Team Fortress 2 one-ups this by lugging around something distinctly resembling a dismounted GAU-8. He does get slowed down considerably when firing it though.
"She weighs one hundred fifty kilograms and fires two hundred dollar custom-tooled cartridges at ten thousand rounds per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to fire this weapon for twelve seconds."
- Judging by looks and his spec description, it's a GAU-12 Equalizer.
  - Her name is Sasha!
- In addition, the Engineers Sentry Gun sports dual miniguns after the first upgrade.
In Resident Evil 4, one of the most powerful enemies is J.J, a huge guy with a belt-fed minigun, a later-stage counterpart to Dr. Salvador, the earlier "huge guy with a chainsaw."
- Resident Evil 2 and 3 featured an unlockable gatling gun. In the second game (aside from the first PS1 version), it was available in the easy mode (and the New Game Plus). In the third game, it could be purchased once you acquire enough money by playing the Mercenaries Mini Game. Needless to say, it's pretty damn awesome, with two exceptions — it has a huge warmup time and inexplicably low stopping power, making it all but worthless against some enemies.
- In Resident Evil 5, you can unlock a gatling gun for Chris once you fully upgrade the first machinegun.
An alien "chaingun" appears in Perfect Dark.
Vulcan Raven from Metal Gear Solid (and, by extension, The Last Days Of Foxhound) wields not only a full sized M61 Vulcan cannon (the source of his codename) the kind of weapon mounted on to military jet fighters (and the weapon displayed at the top of this page), but he also carries its power supply, a giant battery the size of a fridge, on his back.
- Not to mention the titular model of Metal Gear, which is armed with twin vulcan cannons for the purpose of surface-to-air defense.
Universe At War has the minigun-wielding Colonel Moore as a hero.
Maya Schroedinger of Wild ARMs 3 manages to keep a Gatling gun hidden under her skirts.
Final Fantasy VII's Barret has a gatling gun arm.
In Xenosaga, one of KOS-MOS' signature weapons was a triple set of tri-barreled Gatlings... That she could carry one-handed. A bit of a subversion in that they were actually one of her weakest special weapons.
Makai Kingdom has gatling guns as equippable weapons.
In Disgaea 2, one of Rozalin's special attacks was pulling a Gatling out of Hammerspace and opening up.
Serious Sam can use a ~~chaingun~~ rotary gun while running and not lose any accuracy. He's just that good. The model in question is one from the future, though, Handwaving the issue of its accuracy. The Arachnoid enemies also have an Arm Cannon version.
One of the purchasable weapons in Army Of Two is an M134 Minigun.
The now-obligatory Super Robot Wars reference: When Kyosuke Nanbu findshis Super Prototype Alt Eisen wasn't super enough for the battles ahead, he gets it upgraded to the Alt Eisen Riese. Among the upgrades is to replace the tri-barreled Autocannon on the right arm to a gatling gun (misnomered as a Chaingun in the localization).
- Suzuka from Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier controls the Jyaki-GUN-Oh (Devil Gun King), which carries eight gatling guns: two on the shoulders, two in the arms, two in the waist and two in the legs. All of them are fired at once at the end of her Limit Break, making for a large wall of lead. Impressive for a two meter tall mech.
  - In the same game, the Alt Eisen Nacht carries a right-arm mounted five-barreled gatling gun.
The Fallout games have several models of personal-scale gatling-style guns, all of them future-designed weapons and so presumably not insane. Most playthroughs of the first game have the player first encountering them wielded by eight-foot-tall, muscle-bound Super Mutants. They also have a somewhat ridiculously low rate of fire for a minigun; the Vindicator from Fallout 2 goes through 25 rounds in about two seconds, which depending on the gun in question is as much as 8 times slower than a "real" gatling gun. This does, however, cut down on the need for ammunition. The game does, however, have a laser minigun.
- Ah, the famous Gatling Laser. Unlike every other 'big' weapon it can be used with the Energy Weapons skill which is almost ridiculously easy to get. This means a character can be very effective with it as soon as they find one. And it is definitely ''MORE DAKKA''.
  - And just to up the ante, the third game in this series, Fallout: Tactics, takes the Gatling Good factor up to the next level by combining the previous game's uber-weapon of choice, the Gauss Rifle, with the six-barrelled fury we all know and love, in the form of the Gauss Minigun.
- Sadly, the series also semi-averts the trope: basic miniguns (and automatic weapons in general) are in fact pretty ineffective against endgame enemies because of how armour works in the game. The Gatling Laser is especially pathetic in the second game because advanced armours have very strong resistance to laser weaponry. And the Gauss Minigun suffers from a severe shortage of ammunition.
The relatively obscure FPS games Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter and Alpha Prime both feature assault rifles with 6 rotary barrels. This doesn't seem to be so much for practical functionality as it is for Rule Of Cool.
- Indeed, Alpha Prime's rotary assault rifle-thingy has a pathetically low rate of fire and sounds like a cross between a blender and an air compressor. This negates the Rule Of Cool, on account of the item in question not actually being cool at all.
Halo featured the Warthog, which was essentially a jeep with a gatling gun mounted on the back. In Halo 3, the player could fire a stationary turret-version of the gun, and then rip that gun off its stand and carry it.
In Dark Cloud 2, Max's final pistol/machinegun-type weapon (as opposed to beam and grenade-launcher guns) is the Last Resort, which is basically a short-barreled Gatling gun that is wielded one-handed. Also, Steve's Machine Gun Arm attachment actually IS an enormous Gatling gun, wider and longer than Max himself.
In Call Of Duty 4, the player gets to use the 25mm GAU-12 Equalizer and a M134 Minigun in different stages.
- And when you do, you can tell the developers were not scaling back the rate of fire. This Troper kept failing the levels where he got to use it simply because he didn't get off it and instead got flanked. (In-game cars take about a hundred bullets to blow up. This particular gat'ler accomplishes this goal nigh-instantly.)
The Ace Combat series uses a Gatling for many planes' guns, although This Troper has not seen any appreciable difference between them except that Attackers (or at least the A-10A) have a lower "point of aim," allowing strafing runs at slighter angles than Fighters or Multirole aircraft would need. The A-10A in particular gets the aforementioned GAU-8 Avenger! However, for gameplay reasons (650 rounds would quickly become "6 shots" if it were too realistic) the rate of fire is visibly slowed down, to the point that in AC04 This Troper can perform single shots.
- Most of the non-US planes actually use various types of single-barreled autocannon, not a gatling gun. For that matter, so did the F-5.
The Standard Weapons of the B, I, and M Gears in Ace Online include rotating-barreled energy weapons like the Bate, the Jin/Demon Hunter, and the Sprint (which incidentally resemble actual gatling guns).
The fighter you fly in After Burner was based on the F-14 Tomcat, complete with M61 Vulcan cannon.
The first X-COM game has the Autocannon, a decent early game heavy weapon that quite visibly has multiple barrels.
The titular tanks of the Metal Slug games use side-mounted gatling guns as their primary anti-infantry weapon. Many other vehicles in the series use similar weapons.
In the popular James Bond 007 game Nightfire, the PC version features a portable minigun, although it has been created by the weapons lab of the evil Pheonix group, as some sort of explanation of how someone could carry it. Although the recoil is not accounted for, the glare of the constant firing makes aiming niegh-impossible.
- Also, in both the console and PC versions you can aquire a remoted-controlled briefcase that unfolds into a minigun. The fact that many dedicated online PC multiplayer games disable the weapon just shows how awesome it is.
In the Matrix game Path of Neo, the player controls the helecopter's minigun for a level.
Total Annihilation's Expansion Pack, The Core Contingency, added Gatling artillery emplacements to each side. They wiped out your power reserves in a matter of seconds, but could erase an enemy base even faster. More Dakka, indeed.
In Armored Core For Answer, one can mount hand or back mounted gatlings onto your AC. Also of note is GA's arms fort great wall, possessing two sets of two gatlings THE SIZE OF AIRCRAFT CARRIERS.
Subverted in Escape Velocity, where the mass driver, described as "the modern-day equivalent of the ancient gatling gun," has only an average rate of fire and its shots travel far slower than the standard Frickin Laser Beams, which also have the advantage of being primary weapons.
- Escape Velocity:Nova's chaingun follows the trope straight, however, with a fire rate (while firing, as it fires in bursts of 20) of 1800 rounds per minute (the maximum allowed by the game per gun). Additionally, it has a longer range and tends to deal more damage than medium-range blasters (and can out-damage the heavy blasters).
In the game Syndicate, your remote-controlled cyborg agents will end up carting these around as their primary weapon after a while. In fact, because of ammo issues, they'll be carrying several. Each.
The Gatling Gun is one of the strongest weapons in Star Fox: Assault. Unlike the Machine Gun, it's strong enough to even tear up armored units.
The first Turok game, on the Nintendo 64, has a realistic-looking minigun in its arsenal. The sequel Turok 2 takes this trope up a notch with the Firestorm Cannon, essentially a minigun version of a plasma gun. Needless to say, it's one of the best weapons.
- Turok: Evolution took it to a more ridiculous level. Instead of being three or so spinning barrels, its three spinning groups of six barrels each (which also spin). And it mulches dinosaurs like nobody's business.
Although the quad, tri-barrel mass drivers of the Vengeance-class frigate in Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption don't actually spin in-game, the layout of the barrels hints at them doing so, thus making them ship-mounted bullet spam cannons that ignore shields.
Like their film counterparts, the T-600s in the game of Terminator Salvation carry these as standard. At a few points, you can find mounted ones, which usually means you're in for a siege.
Defense Grid: The Awakening's Gun towers start out with a wimpy chaingun, but can be upgraded to a tri-barreled gatling, then two tri-barreled gatlings. They're also Super Effective against Deflector Shields, and one of only three towers that can hit flying enemies.
Most of the levels in Left 4 Dead has a mini gun that is bolted to the ground and is found only in crescendo events and finales (but none are present in Blood Harvest). The gun can only be rotated 90 degrees to the sides from the neutral position, requiring the other players to cover the back of the gunner from enemies. The gun has infinite ammo and can shred common infected instantly, but firing it a long time without stopping makes it overheat and you have to wait for it to cool down. For some reason, getting on the mini gun makes any Tank in the area completely ignore any survivors near him and he will hunt down the person on the mini gun.
Hitman 47 uses this to kill the 48 clones in the final level. In Contracts, the gun is carried around by a mental patient
Crysis features Miniguns called "hurricane". It unfortunately fires slower than a sub-machinegun and has worse accuracy. The weapon can only be used by Nano-Suited personel, especially an Enemy General. Featured more prominently in the expansion where it's mounted on armoured vehicles and gun emplacements.
The second BattleTanx game introduced the Rattler, a small tank built around GAU-8 gatling cannon, giving it considerable punch for its size.
The boss of the Wild West chapter in Live A Live (O.Dio) uses a Gatling gun. If he hits with it, it's pretty much an instant KO, though its limited firing arc makes it easy to avoid.
Descent features a Gatling gun in the form of the Vulcan cannon, and the sequel up's the ante somewhat with the Gauss Cannon, a Gatling shotgun which uses the same ammo as the Vulcan cannon. The third game combines the two into (the much inferior to both weapons) Vauss cannon.

Close Videogames

In Sluggy Freelance Riff invents an anti-vampire gatling gun that fires 100 wooden stakes per second. Falls into Awesome But Impractical territory since it only holds 100 stakes and takes two days to reload.
- Hold on! Not so impractical, he actually used it once to save the day in this strip, delivering a Pre Ass Kicking One Liner in the process.
The Humongous Mecha Dr. Silas Merlot of Girl Genius used in Castle Heterodyne and attempted to kill Agatha with comes equipped with double gatling guns as its primary weapon.

Close Webcomics

In AH Dot Com The Series, Dave Howery's Canada-Destroying Mechs have Gatling gun arms, and enemy captain Ward has also been known to use a Gatling version of the standard plasma rifles (purely for Rule Of Cool).

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Rhinox of Transformers: Beast Wars had one for each hand, and they're often called "The Chainguns Of Doom".
- Animated Swindle actually has such a "chaingun" in his chest.
The Swat Kats' jet, the Turbokat, included among its many weapons a Gatling gun that fired balls of cement. One has to wonder how much the ammunition for that weapon must weigh.
- You know cement is less dense than steel, right? So, um...Not as much as it normally would.
  - True. However, most Gatling guns don't fire rounds the size of softballs, either.
  - Just admit you're wrong. Concrete weighs 2.3 grams per cubic centimetre while steel weighs 7-8. A typical 20mm projectile from an aircraft cannon weighs 100g. If we assume it's just a steel rod, the equivalant volume of concrete would weigh about 30 grams; in other words, a cement projectile would need to be three times the volume of a 20mm round to actually weigh more than it. A 20mm bullet from an M61 is about 75mm long and 20mm wide; in other words, a tennis ball [67mm sphere] or softball [89mm sphere] is not going to make a substantial difference; let alone a comparison to the 30 and 35mm projectiles the Russians like using in their aircraft cannons.
Both of the Clone Wars cartoons feature the Z6 rotary blaster cannon, a standard-issue laser gatling gun for the Clone Troopers. It's as awesome as it sounds.
Ed Edd N Eddy once had a gatling water gun made of ~~turkey basters~~ Canadian squirt guns. Edd got a little overexcited using it...
Edd: Oh yes, I feel it! I feel the adrenaline, Eddy-baby!!!
Eddy: Double-Dee! Relax, would ya? It's a toy, from Canada.
An Inspector Gadget episode featured a search for a potato-based one of these, in the old hand-cranked version.

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Richard Gatling invented the Gatling Gun in 1861, in time for occasional use in the American Civil War. It was a hand-cranked device on a small carriage, firing a rifle cartridge (models varied between six and ten barrels). Having the firepower of an infantry company controlled by a single artillery crew, it was one of the first machine guns.
- Fun Fact: Gatling was actually a committed pacifist, who hoped that with such a devastating weapon on the battlefield, nobody would dare go to war, and would solve all their problems through diplomacy instead. It didn't work.
  - He was also motivated by the fact that the majority of war casualties at the time were from disease — a weapon that ended the war quickly would therefore be more merciful.
- In 1890, a Gatling was mated with a motor for the first time. This gave such promising results that Gatling himself patented a version with 10 barrels and a built-in electric motor in 1893. It fired 50 rounds per second, a rate that would go unsurpassed for 60 years. Interestingly enough, while it worked, it was probably a case of Before Its Time.
  - Another Fun Fact: The USAF had developed a replacement for the .50, but the action worked so fast that there was often two rounds in the barrel, simultaneously (bad for ~~accuracy and barrel life~~ not exploding), so it never went into service. Someone remembered the gatling gun, but not the motor driven one. They borrowed a hand cranked one from a museum, replaced the crank with an electric motor, and ground out 100 rounds a second for short bursts. Therefore, technically, it was not surpassed in rate of fire (see Ian V. Hogg's Air Defence).
The rotary gun experienced renewed popularity in the second half of the 20th century as anti-aircraft weapons. Where firing windows are measured in fractions of seconds, higher rates of fire are a massive advantage. The 20mm M61 Vulcan, developed in 1959, is still in use to this day on US fighter aircraft.
"Miniguns" (so called because they are miniaturized version of the Vulcan, otherwise this name is as complete of a misnomer as you can get), multiple-barrelled guns firing rifle-sized rounds, are used by helicopters and some vehicles as a more rapid-firing alternative to conventional machine guns. The huge ammunition stores required, power feeds and simple weight of the gun mean that hand-held miniguns seen in fiction are somewhat ridiculous.
- However, man-portable multi-barreled guns do exist, such as the XM214 Microgun. It was not supposed to be fired while hand-held, though.
Of particular note is the GAU-8 Avenger, a gun so enormous◊ that the A-10 Thunderbolt II (AKA "Tank-Killer" or "Warthog") was built around it. It fires seventy 30mm depleted uranium rounds per second, each capable of penetrating 69mm of armor at 500m. The gun can expend its entire magazine of 1,200 rounds in 17 seconds, and at maximum fire rate, the recoil force is a significant fraction of the engines' thrust. (The recoil is certainly not enough to stall the airplane or fly it backward.)
- I believe it's been calculated that the recoil is about 50% of the engine thrust, so while going backwards is pretty unlikely, it would slow the plane down significantly, and if the plane were at low throttle and/or speed it could be a stall danger. If you were nuts enough enough to fire it on the ground the plane would certainly go backwards, but I believe there are all sorts of safety measures to prevent that happening.
  - There is no technical order issued regarding risk of stalling when firing; like the barrels melting, it's a myth. Short bursts are used to increase barrel lifespan, not because of any physical danger to the aircraft. Also, the plane would not go backwards unless you decided to take the brakes off.
"Close-in weapon systems" such as the American Phalanx CIWS and the Russian AK-630 (now replaced by the Kashtan which has guns and missiles), a type of defensive weapon mainly used on warships, have ludicrous rates of fire even by Gatling standards. Designed to shred incoming missiles in a hail of bullets, they are employed by most navies as a last-ditch defensive system.
- And lest we forget, the Thales Nederland (formerly Signaal) Goalkeeper CIWS uses a GAU-8/A Avenger. An apropos name, indeed.
GSh-6-30, despite cool performance, turned out to be much more limited than its top-Dakka 23-mm predecessor, because recoil is too strong for most purposes. This gun wasn't made specifically as anti-tank, so it's much smaller than GAU-8 Avenger and doesn't need the aircraft to be built around it, but proves you cannot strap 30-mm gatling on a plane "just so": vibrations from bursts longer than 30-40 rounds are strong enough to shake the plane apart (see Explosive Overclocking). While average force of recoil sends light storm-boat or air cushion vehicle away, spinning. As its use on full power requires at least really good shock absorbers and proper barrel cooling, its variants are used mostly in air defence (ship CIWS, see above).
Airsoft understands this trope fully.
- But if Airsoft is still too dangerous for where you live, why not try one of these rubber-band Gatling Guns?
  - That sounds slightly more dangerous.
When President Obama was going on his procession to his inauguration, he had better protection than you probably realize; he was tailed by an Secret Service SUV with a ''popout gatling gun turret! Just check this baby out!
Rotary guns are legal in most states in the US.
- For the lazy: Cracked claims the reasoning behind this is that the guns are so expensive to own and fire that you might as well kill people by throwing gold bricks at them.

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