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Sprites are expensive. Rendered 3D objects even moreso. As a result, there is a tendency to keep the number of distinct enemy types small. In an RPG or similar game where the player is expected to become more powerful over the course of the game, this is a problem, as the monsters stop being challenging about the time you Get On The Boat.

The solution many games go for is to have a small set of monster types, but have them appear in different colors. Often, this change of hue will be accompanied by a new adjective to go with their name. Typically, all such monsters will be vulnerable to the same strategy, or a variation thereupon, but later colors will tend to be more powerful. One of the colors might be invisible.

Results in the somewhat strange phenomenon that as you travel a diverse world, rather than seeing a diversity of creature types, you see the same creature types, in a diversity of colors: in The Lost Woods, you find the Wolf, the Giant Rat, and the Forest Dragon; in the Slippy Slidey Ice World, you find the Arctic Wolf, the Snow Rat, and the White Dragon; in the Temple Of Doom, you'll face the Dire Wolf, Plague Rat, and Zombie Dragon.

The most common Underground Monkeys are those whose names begin with one of fire, ice or lightning. In games which play Elemental Rock Paper Scissors, the colors may also indicate elemental weakness.

Named for a Running Gag in RPGWorld, wherein the Underground Monkey is suspected of being attracted by Genre Savvy characters.

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Examples:

• It all started with Pac Man, where the color coding of ghosts let the designers get away with only having one enemy type — the colors indicated different AI strategies in how they pursued the heroic circle.
  • Many early arcade games did this, due to the hardware limitations of the day. Some examples include Berzerk, Missile Command, and Pengo.
• Likewise, in Super Mario Bros, red-shelled Koopas were implied to be "more powerful", at least in that they had enough sense to not stroll off of cliffs.
• The Legend Of Zelda also produced several colors of its major enemies, indicating their strength. Versus Books' Strategy Guide for Majora's Mask characterized the White Wolfos as being "like regular Wolfos, only, um, whiter."
  • The Wind Waker and '"Twilight Princess'' avoid this with every enemy except for Darknuts, whose armour changes colour to indicate different levels of strength. There are some minor palette swaps as well, but these take the form of giving the enemies extra armour and better resistance to the player's special attacks.
• In Dragon Warrior, one of the first common enemies you encounter is the blue slime. Then, you meet the red slime. And the green slime. Then the Metal Slime. All the way up to the exceptionally powerful gold slime. It also featured color-coded dragons.
• Metroid Prime featured a set of color-coded pirates, each of which was weak only against the matching color weapon.
• Final Fantasy uses this in most incarnations, especially with the Elemental Rock Paper Scissors aspect: the blue monster casts water spells and is weak against thunder, the white monster casts ice spells and is weak against fire, etc. Final Fantasy X made some extra use of this, as a side quest rewarded players for capturing entire "species" of monsters.
  • Final Fantasy XII manages to subvert the spirit of this trope without subverting the letter of it, by making slight differences in the meshes of any given group of monsters (i.e. some toads have claws, others have webbed feet).
    • Final Fantasy XII also justified it to some extent, as many of the monsters who share a given sprite are in fact related to one another, as the Beastiary implies.
• "Color-coded dragons" predate most video games, as they appeared in the Tabletop Games Dungeons And Dragons, which was first published in 1974. Evil ("Chromatic") dragons have scales of a particular solid color reflecting their place in the Elemental Rock Paper Scissors spectrum, and good ("Metallic") dragons have scales of precious metal. Interestingly, though, these aren't quite "palette swaps", and it is possible to readily identify different species of dragons in greyscale artwork (for example, white dragons have a peculiar vertical crest on their head, while silver dragons have backward-pointing horns and a ribbed frill along their necks).
  • On one occasion, the color-coding is used as the basis of a truly heartbreaking Monster Is A Mommy story, when a noble silver dragon is born with albinism, and is hunted down and killed by an adventurer who thinks it's a white dragon.
  • This was parodied in the webcomic Order Of The Stick: in one comic, a paladin discovers the titular party has killed a dragon. She then accuses them of possibly killing a creature of benevolence and wisdom, and asks why they thought it deserved death, to which Roy Greenhilt replies, "Erm... its scales weren't shiny?" which placates the paladin. Elan then breaks the Fourth Wall by winking at the reader and saying, "Dragons - now Colour Coded For Your Convenience!"
  • The third edition of Dungeons And Dragons features templates, giving uncreative GMs the opportunity to color-code any monster into a water monster, a fire monster or a slime monster.
• Gameboy games had the lack of memory needed to justify Underground Monkeys, but, being monochrome, had no way of switching palettes. Generally, this led to enemies either never improving or simply gaining more hit points, though turn-based RPGs (Such as the SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend series) were able to circumvent this by... giving the sprites new names. (Say, isn't that Master Dragon the exact same size as the Baby Dragon from the start of the game?)
  • Interestingly, this hardware limitation led to an inversion in Metroid 2. In the original, getting Samus's Varia armor made the sprite change color, which wasn't possible on the Gameboy. To compensate, gaining the upgrade gave the Varia suit the huge shoulders that are now the character's trademark look.
    • Metroid: Zero Mission, which is a remake of Metroid 1, lacks the round shoulders on the Varia Suit. However, near the end of the game, Samus's Power Suit is destroyed, and she obtains a new one. The new one has the large shoulders. The end of Zero Mission takes place in the immediate aftermath of the ending of Metroid 1, and as such explains how Samus came to possess the Metroid 2-style Varia suit.
• Legend of Mana notably had Underground Crabs in the very first dungeon.
• In the Fallout games, a common practice was to have different individuals represented by a sprite of the same person (usually the male and female sprite used for the Player Character, no less) stuck in a different suit of armour or clothing. The second game in the series contained a couple of self-conscious Lampshade Hanging jokes on this theme, including the henchman of a crime boss confiding that he suspects there must have been a big cloning accident at some point in the past, and an Easter Egg location in which a pair of sprites originally intended to be player characters but retooled to only fill NPC duties lament over their fate.
• FPS games regularily do this with at least one of the more basic enemies (but tougher opponents sometimes get the same treatment). In the older era, this was done by changing the colouring of otherwise identical sprites, in 3D games it takes the somewhat more advanced and differentiating form of using different skins for the same model (or even different models for the same enemy). Common expressions of this includes;
  • Different weaponry and/or levels of toughness of the opponents (e.g. the processed humans of Quake II, the Cabal followers of Blood, Barons of Hell and Hellknights in Doom and Doom II).
  • Somewhat different abilities between the enemy types (e.g. the semi-invisibility of Spectres in the Doom series, the personal teleporters of Alien captains in Duke Nukem 3 D)
  • Just plain diversity, especially common in regards to enemies meant to be more or less regular human beings. This in order to avoid the effect of feeling that the enemies faced are the same invidiual cloned countless times, usally to the effect of creating the impression that such cloning rather took place on three to five different individuals instead.
• In Brave Story: New Traveler, the exact same enemy can come in multiple different colors, so the difference between genuinely different enemies is at least slightly greater, with a few exceptions. This editor isn't quite sure how to label this.
• Guild Wars Eye of the North has plenty of enemies recycled from the three previous campaigns, but the most egregious example is re-using a species of monsters called "Mandragors". These insect/plant hybrids are found in the deserts of Nightfall, burrowing under the sand. In Eye of the North, identical monsters with the same name live in cold climate and burrow under snow, without as much as a Lampshade Hanging to explain it.
• Nethack and other Roguelike games employ this device to a fare-thee-well, since all of the monsters are represented by ASCII symbols, color coding is often the only easy way to tell them apart. Of course sometimes two monsters share the same letter and color. A master mindflayer and a dwarf lord LOOK the same...
  • Which leads many NetHackers to use alternate graphical "tile sets" which offer more information. Whether or not you should do this is one of the major fault-lines in Net Hack fan circles. This editor went so far as to create his own.
  • Dwarf Fortress inherits this particular version, including the tileset option. For example, color is usually the only way to differentiate between rocks of different ores (which can be very important when you need to smelt metals).
• Double Dragon did this. While it certainly wasn't unusual or unexpected for a game of the arcade era, the fact that all of your opponents were human meant that different coloured characters got rather stupid toward the end. Whilst a man with brown or pink skin made sense, the same character with better fighting skills and blue, grey or green skin later in the game was cause for raised eyebrows.
• Diablo I and II were full of this. Every single enemy in the games, apart from quest specific bosses, came in various levels of strength denoted by colour and had otherwise identical sprites as others of its type.
  • Diablo III will probably be the same. Trailers indicate that it will also allow monster subtypes to vary in size.
• Persona 3 is another good example of this trope—practically every enemy inside Tartarus, the game's sole real dungeon, uses one of a select number of sprites, and most sprite-sharers are vulnerable to the same kinds of tactics (if not necessarily always sharing elemental weaknesses).
• World of Warcraft changes the colour and increases the size of a monster to indicate that it is a higher level. Nearly every zone has some version of a wolf or boar to kill.
  • Played extra-straight with the monster (and quest) Terokkarantula. Tougher than the smaller spiders nearby, as would be expected by it's named nature and elite status, the player who hasn't been there before is probably STILL not expecting a spider that's larger than a good-sized HOUSE.
  • It is found already with the creeps in Warcraft III
• Okami has the same set of tactics with occasional additional attacks for the successive areas of enemies. Difficulty is achieived late in the optional extras with nigh-endless waves of enemies.
• The Monster Hunter series uses this repeatedly. A prime example is the Kut Ku, one of the easiest wyverns in the game, which appears later on as the Blue Kut Ku, a stronger (and blue) version identical in every other way. Not only does the game do this with the enemies, but the armour then made from the enemies looks exactly the same apart from a colour swap to fit with the wyverns colour.
• Grandia II does this, about halfway through the game the monsters start repeating just with different colour tones. Perhaps lampshading some of the tougher monsters in the game are those you defeated at the start of the game.
• Final Fantasy XI has tons of instances of monsters that look exactly the same, only stronger and with a different name, including several Notorious Monsters.
• Averted in Pokémon, in which there are no palette-swapped sprites of Pokémon (aside from "shiny" Pokémon, which are simply extremely rare versions of the exact same Pokémon that sparkle when the appear and are colored differently, though these don't serve the same purpose as other palette-swapped sprites listed here), with later ares instead having evolved forms of Pokémon encountered earlier in the game or Pokémon from previous ares at higher levels.
• Taken to a more extreme level by the Wizardry games, particularly VI and VII, wherein enemies were given graphics by type-all slimes use the same graphics, as do all demons, all bugs, etc, including non-hostile npc's and bosses. Further complicating matters is that unless a party member has a high mythology skill, all you'll see attacking you is generic "birds" or "crawling wastes". Experienced players can usually determine what particular monster is attacking them by the area they're in or the attacks the monster uses. Occasionally leads to party kills when the player mistakes a very nasty enemy for an easy one.
• Gets parodied in the Sluggy Freelance "Years of Yarncraft" (spoofing World Of Warcraft, of course) here, here and here.
• In the first two Halo games, the Elites got different-colored armor based on their military rank (Authority Equals Asskicking by the way). In Halo 3, the Brutes got the same treatment.

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