Video Game / Rise of the Triad

EAT LEAD!

Rise of the Triad is a First-Person Shooter released by Apogee Software in 1994^note The Shareware episode was released in late 1994, with the full release coming out in early 1995. There's a story, involving a United Nations special operations team sent to investigate suspicious cult activity on a remote island, but you wouldn't know it unless you read the manual. Like most early FPSs, it's all about shooting anything that moves and picking up anything that doesn't. Rise of the Triad introduced many gameplay innovations, some of which have become common in the FPS genre: elevated platforms, jumping, sneaky enemies that play dead and steal your weapons, areas full of poison gas, a plethora of different missile weapons, adjustable violence levels with a password lockout, breakable windows, bullet damage to walls, selectable player characters with varying abilities, and extensive multiplayer support.

In an era where "online gaming" meant two people playing head-to-head over a direct modem link, Rise of the Triad offered 11-way multiplayer games over a local area network (a dedicated server is required for more than eight players.) The game supports several multiplayer variants, including basic deathmatch, several variations of "tag", a race to collect the most treasure in the least amount of time, and "Capture the Triad" - the first implementation of Capture the Flag in a first-person shooter. Each mode offered many adjustable options to further customize gameplay. The game didn't support this newfangled Internet thing, just Novell NetWare, so the only way most people could enjoy an 11-player fragfest was to take over an office or academic computer lab after hours.

The adjustable violence setting allows the player to select from four levels of gore: the self-explanatory None, small spurts of blood on Some, big damage causing enemies to turn into a little pile of mush on A Lot, and the default setting of Excessive, which can occasionally result in Ludicrous Gibs. An "engine killing gibs" cheat existed which when enabled, would cause exploded enemies to spew hundreds of pounds of gibs that would fly across the room.

Interestingly, the shareware and "registered" (full retail) releases of the game feature two different single-player episodes with no levels in common; the former's level set titled The HUNT Begins and the latter's Dark War (the retail version did include the multiplayer levels from the shareware version). Apogee sold three different versions of the game: a basic floppy-disk version, a CD version that included additional levels and other bonus material, and a Site License CD version. The Site License version allowed for installation on up to 11 computers and included multiplayer levels designed for big games, a signed license certificate "suitable for framing", and 11 individual license cards. Apogee also sold a bonus pack that added some of the CD bonus content to the floppy-disk version of the game. The full version of ROTT supports user-made levels. Additionally, the bonus pack includes the RANDROTT random level generator which can generate a set of up to 100 levels for either single-player or multiplayer.

Unfortunately for Apogee, Rise of the Triad hit the streets over a year after Id Software (who formerly used Apogee as a publisher) had rewritten the PC gaming rulebook with Doom. Originally pitched as a sequel to Wolfenstein 3-D, ROTT was built using its Game Engine and, like its progenitor, only supported walls laid out on a square grid at 90-degree angles to each other. Although staircases and bridges could be built using floating platforms (and players could go both under and over a bridge, which you could not do in Doom), the floor and ceiling heights throughout each level were fixed. Jumping was only possible through the use of fixed jump-pads. Next to Doom, which featured walls at any angle, variable floor and ceiling heights, and dynamic lighting effects, ROTT looked dated. However, despite being graphically behind the times, it was still a damn fun game.

Apogee/3D Realms have since released the source code to the game and there is at least one enhanced Win32 port of the game available. You will need the original data files (which remain copyrighted) to play it, though. (The data files for the shareware version are still available for free.)

A reboot, developed by Interceptor Entertainment (who also made Duke Nukem 3D Reloaded), was released July 31st, 2013. Trailer here. Multiplayer footage showcasing the weapons, levels and soundtrack here. Preorders for the new game were rewarded with the Apogee Throwback bundle, which included the original Rise of the Triad titles, as well as both of the Blake Stone titles.

During 3D Realms' "Realms Deep" event in September 2020, a remastered source port of the original ROTT by 3D Realms and Destructive Creations was announced for a 2021 release on Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, only for the remaster to be delayed without a release date. After two years of radio silence, the remaster was announced again during "Realms Deep 2022" as Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, this time being handled by Nightdive Studios and New Blood Interactive. A Shareware Demo of the remaster was released on June 19, 2023, as part of Steam Next Fest, with the full game eventually being released a bit later on July 31 on PC. Much like Nightdive's other ports, Ludicrous Edition features all commercially-released episodes for the game, including The HUNT Begins, Dark War and Extreme Rise of the Triad, alongside a brand new episode titled The HUNT Continues and Doom mod Return of the Triad. Other notable additions include 4K and ultrawide support, restored cut content (including alternate female versions of most basic enemy types), assorted optional quality-of-life improvements (reduced self-damage from explosives, adjusted MP40 drop rate by high guards, and reduced health on Monks), a sound test with the option to switch between the original game's soundtrack and the 2013 remake, revamped online multiplayer and a new level editor.

Trope Namer for Ludicrous Gibs.

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Looks like the only way out is tropes:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: "Monk Meal", "Priest Porridge". Picking up explosive weapons will give you messages like "You Have a Heat-Seeker!" or "You Bagged a Bazooka!". Also, "You Discovered a Developer Ball!"
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: The game's Holiday Mode is every bit as bloody as the normal mode, and its Autobots, Rock Out! adaptation of "Carol of the Bells" is named "God Rest Ye, Deadly Gentlemen".
• Anti-Frustration Features: The Ludicrous Edition allows the player to adjust the MP-40's drop rate, as well as the Monk's health, making certain parts of the game less of a chore to play.
• The Artifact: The Engine-Killing Gibs cheat is still present in the Ludicrous Edition, despite that version running on a far stronger engine and playable on far stronger hardware. The storm of enemy giblets that once could potentially crash CPUs of the day can now run at 120fps with absolutely no issue.
• Attackable Pickup: The Priest Porridge, which can be turned into a more effective Priest Porridge Hot with a carefully aimed explosion.
• Bandit Mook: The Lightning Guards can snatch away your missile weapons with a terse "Gimme that!" if you get too close; a whole lot worse than the usual item-stealing baddies, since they'll immediately start using it against you.
• Batter Up!: The magical Excalibat weapon, which knocks enemies you hit with it in the air. Its name is shared with a multiplayer map that resembles a baseball field.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: The titular Triad, consisting of General John Darian, Sebastian Kryst and El Oscuro. There's also the boss NME, but it's just a robot and Big John in the remaster.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The stuff El Oscuro says when you fight him is actual Latin; phrases include "Deus tuus sum" ("I am your god") and "Mundus tuus morietur" ("Your world will die").
  • "El Oscuro" itself is Spanish for "The dark"
  • A sound clip that was cut from the game (you can find it on the game CD or the downloadable ROTT Goodies Pack), intended to have been played when Snake Oscuro sees you, apparently translates to "Eat Your Veggies".
• Bloody Hilarious:
  • Even the violence isn't taken very seriously - look closely when you blow up an enemy soldier and you can see his severed hand fly by wagging its middle finger at you.
  • Also, the smiley face on the charred skeletons of baddies toasted by the Flamewall weapon.
• Bottomless Magazines: The pistols and MP40 have unlimited ammo, and never need to be reloaded.
• Capture the Flag: The "Capture the Triad" multiplayer mode.
• Catchphrase: Each player character has one in both the original (in which they're simple one- or two-syllable interjections) and several in the remake (in which they're lengthy phrases or even complete sentences).
• Color-Coded Multiplayer: Players are identified by their shirt color.
• Cool Chair: Sebastian Krist. His chair shoots rockets and mines.
• Death by Cameo: Tom Hall plays El Oscuro, the final boss of the game. Also, all of the digitized sprites are made from 360-degree photos of Apogee staff in costume, most of whom worked on the game.
• Destroyable Items: The Ankh coins.
• Die, Chair, Die!: ROTT is quite possibly the first First-Person Shooter to have environmental objects that could be destroyed, featuring breakable glass, barrels that randomly contained weapons and other goodies, and stuff like torches and coins getting shot out. One of the end-of-level bonuses is for destroying all the plants on a level.
• Digitized Sprites: All of the actor sprites are scanned in images of Apogee staff in costume. The turrets and robots, including the NME, are scanned in images of steel models.
• Disintegrator Ray: The energy balls you can shoot from your hands when you have the God Mode invulnerability. On top of that, it has seeking capabilities and can go on to another nearby enemy after erasing the previous one from existence.
• Dual Boss: The level "Krist Cross" in Extreme Rise Of The Triad makes you fight two Krists at once, although you only need to defeat one to finish the level. This applies to any other custom level with multiple bosses.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The Bad Ending, obtained if you didn't destroy all of El Oscuro's larvae in the final stage before taking him down. More like "A Bunch Of Small Kabooms Over the Picture of Earth Used for the Apogee Logo", seeing as the planet never actually shatters on screen, but it's implied. Fortunately, the game immediately warps you back to the final level to rectify your oversight.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: The game insults you for the two lowest difficulty settings. One of the possible names for the lowest one is "I am a chew toy" with a picture of a doll in a dog's mouth, while the second-lowest is "Will of iron, knees of Jell-O (TM)," with a picture depicting a dollop of smelted iron on a cube of Jell-O.
• Eldritch Abomination: El Oscuro's true form, which is a snake made out of giant humanoid heads. In the remake, his true form instead looks like a human-spider centaur thing.
• Elite Mooks/Heavily Armored Mook: The heavily armored Triad Enforcers; they have a heavily damaging, lead-spewing M60 and can toss grenades as well. They can take several dozen bullets before dying and won't be stunlocked by gunfire, but a few rockets to the face will deal with them quite nicely.
• Evil Laugh: General Darian does this constantly, along with saying "They'll bury you in a lunchbox"
• Environmental Symbolism: Lights in walls may mean different things, according to the manual of the shareware:
  • Some Triad walls near switches have 1-4 lights in them. The number of lights indicates how many walls will move when the switch is flipped.
  • Some walls have big X lights which means a nearby area is very dangerous but visiting it is not necessary to finish the game.
• Excuse Plot: Retooling the game from a sequel to Wolfenstein 3-D into an original IP meant that a new plot had to be cooked up in a hurry... and it most definitely was:
  • An evil cult being funded by a movie company (!?) is going to blow up L.A. and you have to kill all of them to prevent it. And then the expansion's plot is that when you killed the Big Bad, he rewound time so that the events of the main game never happened and you get to do the whole thing again, only now they sure know you're coming.
  • The new episode "The HUNT Continues" included in the Ludicrous Edition once again has time reverse so that El Oscuro's death in Extreme never happened, except that El Oscuro wakes up in his bed with the HUNT already at his door and has to take his snake form to flee..
• Expansion Pack: Extreme Rise of the Triad, with 42 new Nintendo Hard levels exploiting various engine tricks to add new features like teleporters and "Ballistitowers".
• Expressive Health Bar: Not in the original game, but the Updated Re-release, the Ludicrous Edition, has, among its HUD options, a numerical health counter with a progressively bloodier character portrait, as seen in this Civvie 11 review.
  • However, in Comm-Bat mode in the original game, there is an expressive score counter, where your character portrait will change to look stupid if you kill yourself enough to send your score into negative figures - see Take That, Audience! below.
• Fate Worse than Death: At the end of "The Hunt Continues", El Oscuro is permanently stuck in a sort of a "Groundhog Day" Loop where he will fail in stopping the H.U.N.T. Team, constantly dying and repeating the events of the episode over and over again in every universe.
• Follow the Money: Played straight with the Ankh symbols.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: Flamejets shoot out of the ground. Also, computers with low memory will replace some other hazards with these flamespewers, which can allow some shortcuts compared to having obstructive spinblades.
• Fragile Speedster: Lorelei Ni is the fastest of the playable characters but also the weakest physically.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • Look at Ian Paul Freely (one of the playable characters), and think about his name for a minute.
  • There are Gravitational Anomaly Disks, which are floating platforms. Some elevate up and down, turning them into Elevator Gravitational Anomaly Disks.
  • All of the player characters are members of the High-risk United Nations Taskforce.
  • Episode 3's boss is the Nasty Metal Enforcer.
• Gangsta Style: Typing "imgangsta" into the console as of patch 1.4 enables gangsta mode, where all weapons are held hilariously askew. Yes, even the Excalibat.
• Gas Chamber: You'll occasionally stumble into one, where you'll suffocate to death unless you quickly find a gas mask. There will be enemies inside trying to kill you anyway. They can't wear gas masks and tend to die in pretty short order.
• God Mode:
  • Accessible through an in-game powerup as well as the usual cheat code, God Mode doesn't just make you invincible, it also makes you ten feet tall and capable of firing blasts of energy from your bare hands that can disintegrate everything in the room, all while your character keeps making bellowing "God-like" noises (based on the ones John Romero would make while fooling around in Doom with cheats on).
  • There's also a Dog Mode that transforms you into an invincible, two-foot-tall dog capable of firing a deadly supersonic bark.
• Goomba Stomp: You can kill any non-boss character this way, including other players. They (even NPCs) can do the same to you.
• Gratuitous Latin: El Oscuro in the original spat out angry, nonsensical Latin at you ("eat your veggies", among them).
• Guide Dang It!: The "Bonus Bonus" End-of-stage bonus, which can only be obtained on very few specific stages, including exactly ONE stage in The HUNT Begins. Getting it requires getting every other end-of-level bonus in the game (not just the ones "possible" in the level, EVERY single one), which means the level must have a powerup, health item, pushwall, plant, firewall (one from an earlier level can be brought), life item, healing basin... The game was released in 1994. The only Bonus Bonus obtained on video to date went up in 2009. Even with the guide, it's still difficult to obtain, and thus it was never noticed that the game would crash if you got that bonus.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Try and quit, and it will throw up a picture of a syringe, cyanide tablet, electric chair, etc, and say "Press Y to inject, swallow, throw the switch..."
• Guns Akimbo: John Woo Style, as the game puts it. The dual pistols are still functionally treated as one weapon by the game, though. Coincidentally, this game is tied with Marathon as being the first to have this feature - they both released on the same day - though Marathon had a much more sophisticated implementation.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Excluding the NME, the bosses are very basic and easy to beat. Getting there, on the other hand...
• Healing Spring: The healing basin.
• Heavily Armored Mook: One of the earliest FPS examples in the form of the Triad Enforcer, a rotund, black-clad soldier armed with a heavy machine gun who isn't stunlocked by gunfire and has about 10-12 times the health of a regular enemy, meaning he can soak several dozen bullets before dropping.
• Hey, Catch!: Triad Enforcers will humorously punctuate each thrown grenade by yelling "Here, catch!"
• Hitscan: The bullet weapons.
• Holiday Mode: For Christmas, has a notable 'portrayal', with music replacement.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: There are three lists of four names used by the game (only one of which is present in the shareware version) and which list is used is randomly selected every time the difficulty selection screen shows up.
  • "I am a Chew Toy."/"Will of Iron, Knees of Jell-O (TM)."/"I'm in my Element: Lead."/"Two Words: Reaper Man."
  • "The Enemy Will Devour Me."/"Which Part is the Trigger?"/"I Have Pet Names For My Grenades."/"No One Shall Live."
  • "Dig My Grave. Now."/"I Think I Left the Stove On."/"I'm a Freight Train O' Death."/"They Call Me 'The Cleaner.'"
• I Surrender, Suckers: If you damage Lightning Guards enough, they'll sometimes drop to their knees and start begging for you not to shoot them (despite the gore, this is what got the game a higher RSAC rating for violence than Doom). It's a trick, though; if you choose not to kill one, he'll play possum for a little while, and then get back up and keep attacking you.
• Interface Screw: Several:
  • If you get trapped by an Overpatrol, your view is partially blocked by a net and you can't do anything before you get out. That can be done by either rapidly hitting the left and right arrow keys several times or using a knife if you have one.
  • The Elasto Mode makes you move even when you don't press any keys and bounce off walls and objects.
  • The Shrooms Mode makes your view move up, down and sides, while all the enemies, traps, and movable columns will oscillate between various colours.
• Joke Level: Several, which can generally only be reached with the level warp cheat:
  • "The Vomitorium", consisting of a couple of huge rooms chock-full of Shroom and Elasto items and a bunch of glowing walls with "YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE" written on them. If you manage to find the flying GAD that takes out of the main room, you'll find a boss fight against the NME in extremely close quarters, which is impossible to win without cheating.
  • "This Causes An Error!", a tiny room with a moving wall that moves off the edge of the map, crashing the game (after showing a drawing of the wall leaping out of the level and shouting "I'M FREE!").
  • "The Grand Vomitorium" from Extreme Rise of the Triad, which starts like the original Vomitorium, but instead of an NME fight, it has a series of outdoor areas where you have to avoid various obstacles trying to push you off the map. It's theoretically winnable without cheating, but one area has a series of GADs which spell out the not-too-subtle message "CHEAT NOW".
• Jump Physics: You literally walk in the air.
• Kaizo Trap: When a boss dies, he blows up (justified because bullet weapons and melee attacks don't do anything - you have to use missiles, magic, or some combination of the two). If you happen to die in the explosion, you get a Game Over. Even with maxed-out lives.
• Kill It with Fire: One of your weapons is a Flamewall. And, for good measure, if an enemy dies to a Flamewall, he becomes a charred skeleton that collapses to the ground with a xylophone sound.
• Level Editor: A random level generator named RandROTT was shipped with the CD version of the original game. There are also third-party editors for it. The Ludicrous Edition includes a very robust level editor, which is relatively simple to learn due to the game's grid-based single-level maps.
• Level-Map Display: One that shows every wall and actor in the map and can be zoomed, and looking at it pauses the game.
• Limited Loadout: the player can hold at one time any number of the infinite-ammo bullet weapons (of which there are three: single pistol, dual pistols, and machine gun) and only one of the limited-ammo missile/magic weapons.
• Loading Screen: A still portrait of the HUNT team accompanied by the level name.
• Locked Door; several variations:
  • Some doors require a gold, silver, iron, or Oscuro key.
  • Others are switch- or touch-plate-operated.
  • A few are unlocked/opened and locked/closed after a predefined amount of time has passed since entering the level. These doors are usually in secret areas.
• Ludicrous Gibs: As mentioned above, this game is the Trope Namer, and for good reason. Exaggerated with Engine-Killing Gibs mode.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Drunk Missile weapon fires five missiles at once that initially are unguided, but can home in on one poor sucker. The results in a room full of bad guys can be quite messy. Somewhat less in number is the Split Missile, which, if charged, homes in on enemies.
• Malevolent Architecture: Count how many kinds of booby traps there are in Rise of the Triad. Pushwalls, flaming pushwalls, shrooms in a jar, boulders, lava pits, shredders, up-'n-down shredders, ceiling shredders, flamethrowers, floor flamethrowers...
• The Many Deaths of You: Get crushed by a flaming wall, get set on fire (as the camera spins around you before you explode), jump off the map or impale yourself on an iron-wrought fence, get shot to death, gassed, accidentally blow yourself up...
• Meaningless Lives: Spending a life just sends you back to the beginning of the level - when you can just load up your last save.
• Mirror Boss: El Oscuro returns your projectiles.
• Morale Mechanic: Subverted. One enemy unit type, when reduced to low hit points, would sometimes drop to their knees and beg for their lives. If you didn't kill them within a few seconds, they would collapse... then jump up when your back is turned and keep attacking.
• Mushroom Samba: SHROOMS MODE!!!
• Musical Gameplay:
  • Awakening the boss will change the music to the boss theme.
  • If you exit the level in Dog Mode, an unusual level completion music is played.
• Musical Spoiler: Once a boss is awakened the level music will change from a normal level track to the boss theme.
• Nintendo Hard: 84% of all levels in the original ROTT and 98% in Extreme. The Ludicrous Edition even gives you a warning if you try to play Extreme.

  Are you sure? This episode isn't exactly fair. You have been warned...

• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Fireball-shooting zombie death cultist monks that speak in Ominous Latin Chanting and a robot boss that engages in Macross Missile Massacres.
• No Animals Were Harmed: "...during the creation of this video game, although one dog did get its butt spanked when it peed on the carpet.", according to the credits of the shareware version of the original game.
• Nonstandard Game Over:
  • If you fail to destroy all the larvae in the final level before killing the boss, you destroy El Oscuro... but decades later, one of his spawn comes to power and explodes the Earth. But, nice job, anyway. You are also treated to a charming snippet:
    Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu suuuuuuuuuuuck.
• Non-Indicative Name: The track "Mist Ache" has a Punny Name but is a rather sad and sombre tune.
• Optional Boss: The remaster adds Big John as a secret boss in the level "If It Bleeds, Kill It".
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Engine Killing Gibs mode causes enemies killed with missiles to spew gallons of blood in all directions.
• Palette Swap: In the remaster, Big John is represented by a green Triad Enforcer instead of his usual design.
• Pressure Plate: Lots of pressure plates in the original game. They can open doors, cause walls to move, or set off Booby Traps.
• Product Displacement: The "Will of Iron, Knees of Jell-O (TM)." difficulty became "Will of Iron, Knees of Gelatin." in the 2023 release.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: One of the tracks is a techno remix of "Adagio for Organ and Strings in G Minor" by Tomaso Albinoni. Another track is a remix of "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary" by Henry Purcell. There's also a remix of "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen" by Anonymous, see the Holiday Mode example above.
• Punny Name:
  • "Taradino Cassat", for Spanish speakers, if you consider that tarado is a slang word for idiot and even retard.
  • Ian Paul Freeley hangs his own Lampshade in the ending wherein he complains about how he saved the damn world, but people only care about making fun of his name. Making Freeley's situation even worse, according to the manual he wrote a novel called The Yellow River.
  • Dog Mode, which is a pun on, well, God Mode.
• Putting on the Reich: Outfits worn by the enemies allude to Nazi Germany (a holdover from the initial plan to make the game a sequel to Wolfenstein 3-D). Bizarrely enough, the manual says they're surplus Korean uniforms, presumably North Korean. They also have MP-40s.
• Randomly Generated Levels: The game bundles a program with the registered version called RANDROTT for generating random levels. Pick different parameters and a different seed value for a different set of levels. Quite a few user-made levels available online are, in truth, modified RANDROTT levels.
• Rocket Jump: The Trope Maker. The first game that allowed you both to look up and down and fire a rocket that won't instantly destroy you utterly, as long as you're wearing Asbestos Armor.
• Score Screen: At the end of each level, the game tallies up your score, based on how many enemies you killed, your health at the end, how many secret walls you opened, and various other bonuses. Notable for the incredibly catchy tune that plays over it, "How'd I Do?"
• Secondary Fire: The Excalibat and Dog Mode in the original game have this. The former launches explosive baseballs in a horizontal line in front of the player, while the latter charges up a barking attack that gibs most enemies.
• Secret Level: There's at least one in each episode.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There's one made by the ROTT community, which makes the entire game Nintendo Bloody Impossible (think of I Wanna Be the Guy) instead of just Nintendo Hard. All you need to do is 1: Go get WinROTT, 2: Look for the config.rot file and set the SuperHard option to 1, 3: Open WinROTT itself and set 'TIMELIMIT 36000; MAXTIMELIMIT 36000; WARP (fully optional) [number of levels you wish to play]' in the command line, without quotes. TIMELIMIT gives you the possibility to have infinite lives during those 10 hours of play. 4: Select the hardest difficulty. Never use savegames. The basic purpose of this challenge is to polish your missile-dodging skills SO thoroughly you couldn't even imagine. The catch is: every Lightning Guard wields one of the many lootable rocket launchers (or, considering there are no sprites of them carrying a RL, rocket pistols). Should you only be unstrafeful for a split second, you'll be thrown back to square one. Considering Low Guards and Lightning Guards tend to change between each other randomly, the challenge will become purely luck-based. Have fun dying!
• Shareware: The original game has this and the commercial, full version. The shareware has different levels from the full game. Its title is Rise of the Triad: The HUNT Begins and the full version is named Rise of the Triad: The Dark War.
• Sheathe Your Sword: The first form of El Oscuro. Attacking him causes him to eat your missiles and regain energy. You're supposed to run away and allow him to wear himself out, causing him to revert to his snake form, which you chase down and kill. Every other challenge in this game had essentially boiled down to shoot first, shoot later, shoot some more, and then when everyone's dead, try to ask a question or two, making this fight a bit counterintuitive.
• Shout-Out: Now has its own page.
• Sound-Only Death: When you tell the game to exit, it will put up a message suggesting that you get killed. Confirm the quit out, and it plays an appropriate soundbite before exiting. The complete list is as follows:
  • Press Y to pull your plug (sound of a heart monitor flatlining)
  • Press Y to open trap door (someone falls, then a twisting/creaking of a rope)
  • Press Y to release cyanide gas (a splash of liquid, then the hiss of gas rising)
  • Press Y to activate the electric chair (the sound of electricity crackling)
  • Press Y to drive your car off the cliff (a car skids and crashes)
  • Press Y to activate guillotine (the blade falls, then the thump of a head landing in a pan)
  • Press Y to signal firing squad ("Ready, aim, fire!" BOOM)
• Smoldering Shoes: A flaming pair of boots covered with the Ludicrous Gibs of presumably your character are present on the Game Over screen should you lose all your lives, or even quit the game session to the main menu.
• Springs, Springs Everywhere: The jump-pads; some can only be used once, but most work infinitely.
• Standard FPS Enemies: Some examples include...
  • The Grunt: Low Guards, armed with pistols and are pretty much everywhere.
  • The Rocketeer: Lightning Guards, which sometimes carry rocket launchers.
  • The Heavy: Triad Enforcers, armed with M60s and grenades that eat health like candy, and Robot Guards, robots that deal a LOT of damage, and are immune to bullets and the Flamewall. There's also the Ballistikraft, robots that are invulnerable to everything, requiring you to run past them.
• Standard FPS Guns: Played with. You've got your pistol and machine gun, both of which have unlimited ammo, but from there the game offers several rocket launchers with different functions, a magical baseball bat, a literal God Mode, and an alternate Dog Mode.
• The Stinger: After the credits roll, you see the HUNT portrait with the text "The HUNT is victorious. The End", but if you wait long enough, they all get various holiday-themed items at the same time and the text changes to "Now go and celebrate! The Real End".
• Take That!: The Democrat and Republican Bonuses are obtained by doing things like not using handguns and ingesting all the Shrooms in a level (D), or collecting all the weapons and destroying all the plants on a map (R).
  • E4L3's mission briefing tells you that hiding behind a wall will not make your health regenerate, and then asks you where you got that idea.
• Take That, Audience!: During a Comm-Bat game in the original, if you went into negative scoring by killing yourself, your player's portrait would change to poke fun at you (in addition to serving as a negative score symbol):
  • Taradino would have wide goofy eyes looking in different directions and an open mouth with only one tooth.
  • Doug would have a propeller hat and an open mouth with a gap between his front teeth.
  • Lorelei would cover her face with her hands.
  • Thi would go wide-eyed and pucker her lips.
  • Ian Paul would go wide-eyed, stick his tongue out, and wear a clown nose.
• Tennis Boss... No. Tennis Player. Let's face it: you had a lot of trouble while dodging your own projectiles that Snake Oscuro mirrors.
  • In addition, the alternate fire on the Dark Staff in the reboot will catch enemy projectiles, and releasing the button fires them in the way you're facing.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: According to the game's opening, it takes place "one year in the future".
• Two Words: Added Emphasis: One of the difficulty levels in the game is "Two Words: Reaper Man".
• The Walls Are Closing In: In early versions, even touching an approaching wall causes instant death. While walls usually were independent movers, there are some places where sections of walls move back and forth to crush the player and one level where it appears the walls are closing in when you hit a touch plate but stop at the last second.
• Truly Single Parent: The final level, "In the Dark Nest" reveals that El Oscuro's true form has left "his" embryos everywhere, which all need to be destroyed lest you receive the Downer Ending where one grows up to destroy the world a few decades later.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: "Getting the Drop" in the Extreme expansion, which is already a difficult level, to begin with, is nearly impossible to complete with any character other than Thi Barrett - there's a puzzle at the end of the level that involves making a maze out of pillars and running across them to get to the end of the level. The problem is, Barrett is the only character that can make it across without falling in between - any other character simply falls through the pillars, making it impossible to finish the level. It's thankfully possible to bypass it by using the Excalibat to Rocket Jump, but the Excalibat is easy to pass up, and the level prior does a good job of making you use up as much of the ammo as possible.
• Updated Re Release: The 2023 Ludicrous Edition is a modern source port of the original 1995 game by Night Dive Studios. It features the shareware campaign, the main game, the expansion pack, and a new campaign made for the re-release, as well as a popular Doom mod that runs a fan-made Rise of the Triad campaign on the Doom engine. In addition to the expected technological improvements (modern resolutions and framerates, etc) it also has optional previously Dummied Out content such as alternative female enemy variants and some optional quality-of-life improvements such as reduced self-damage from explosives, adjusted MP40 drop rate from high guards, and reduced health on Monks.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The half-crazed escapee who informs the HUNT of what the Triad is up to in the intro disappears. In the remake, the question's answered: he joined the HUNT strike team on their mission, though he only shows up in multiplayer.

Tropes relating specifically to the 2013 remake:

• The Ahnold: Big John, a Boss in Mook Clothing Enforcer who speaks in a familiar Austrian accent and quotes Predator.
• Ass Shove: According to a loading screen, the Monk Crystal healing items are suppositories.
• Attackable Pickup: The ability to heat Priest Porridge with explosives is retained, though the functionality has also been expanded to Monk Meals as well.
• Blown Across the Room: The Doomstick shotgun does this to enemies, with added Ludicrous Gibs when they hit a wall.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Literally. One level in each of the first three episodes has a mini-boss that looks like a regular mook, but takes a lot more damage and has a health bar and unique name: episode 1 has a Strike Guard named Dirty Sanchez, episode 2 has a Triad Enforcer named Big John, and episode 3 has a Robot Guard named Mr Roboto. The episode 4 mini-boss, El Zee, is a giant El Oscuro statue rather than a mook.
• Bottomless Magazines: Even though this is still the case for bullet weapons as in the original, there's a reload button because the animations look cool.
• Breakout Character: Big John, the King Mook Enforcer boss, has become something of a popular meme thanks to his goofy dialogue, enough so that he's had cameo appearances in other games, including DUSK, AMID EVIL and Maximum Action.
• Camp Gay: Krist has a prissy lisp and threatens to sodomize you, man or woman.
• Checkpoint: A system exclusive to the remake.
• Cool Chair: Sebastian Krist once again. Now capable of flight and energy shield projection.
• Crossover: With the Shadow Warrior reboot. ROTT gets Lo Wang as a playable multiplayer character as of the 1.3 patch, while Shadow Warrior gets an Excalibat skin for the katana.
• Denser and Wackier: While the original was over-the-top, it was, at least, mildly serious. The remake features oodles of Borderlands 2-style humour, featuring smart-ass remarks upon death, various tasteless jokes from the prisoners, a buttload of pop culture references, Thi making suggestive noises each time she jumps, and much more.
• Downloadable Content: Patched into the game post-launch and all released for free.
• Elite Mook: A new one in the form of the Uberpatrol, which can roll like the Strike Team, throw nets like the Overpatrol, steal weapons like the Lightning Guard, and use a machine gun like the High Guard.
• Eye Scream: The Excalibat possesses an ominous-looking demonic eye that keeps fidgeting around as you hold it. The weapon's idle animation has your character try to poke it in the eye; they get shocked for their troubles.
• Fun with Acronyms: Retained from the original game. The Drunk Missile is even affixed with a backronym: Destructive Randomly Unguided Nullification Kit
• Ink-Suit Actor: Much like the original's use of Digitized Sprites, the characters are modelled after real people:
  • Taradino Cassatt is Interceptor Entertainment CEO Frederik Schreiber.
  • Thi Barrett is a former adult film star, Misti Dawn.
  • IP Freely is Interceptor executive producer/lead level designer Daniel Hedjazi.
  • Lorelei Ni is Vivian Nagy, wife of Apogee Software CCO Terry Nagy.
  • High Guards are based on Interceptor lead character artist Chris Pollitt.
  • Lightning Guards are based on Interceptor lead 3D artist Nick Quackenbush.
  • Triad Enforcers are Interceptor employee Stefan Madsen.
  • Monks are Interceptor employee Asle Høeg-Mikkelsen.
  • General Darian is Terry Nagy.
  • Sebastian Krist is Joe Siegler, reprising his role from the original.
  • The rest of the characters are a mix of different faces.
  • The sole exception is Doug Wendt, being the only character not modelled after a real person.
• Interface Spoiler: Any of the human enemies can play dead (not just the Lightning Guard like in the original, and they'll do it without begging for mercy first too). But since the HUD displays how many enemies you've killed in the last few seconds (for score multiplier purposes), you can tell when they're faking it because that number won't go up.
• Ironic Echo: During the fight with General Darian, one of his taunts is that he'll "bury you in a lunchbox". Guess what the name of the achievement you get for killing him is?
• Joke Level: "Escape from the Vomitorium", which starts like the original Vomitorium, but ends with a series of Platform Hell jumping puzzles...and Checkpoint Starvation is in full effect - you die, you start the whole level over. If you manage to reach the end, you get eaten by the Dopefish.
• Level Editor: An official one called the Ludicrous Development Kit.
• Limited Loadout: Retained from the original, though now you're allowed to carry both a missile and a magic weapon at the same time, and also gives you a knife for melee attacks and cutting through the Overpatrol's net (whereas in the original you had to find the knife and could only use it once before having to find another one).
• Loading Screen: Has the camera pan across levels, superimposed by hints and trivia.
• Meaningless Lives: Averted as lives have been done away with entirely; the ankh coins that counted towards extra lives in the original are still in the game but give you points instead.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: You can activate the missile launch during the final battle and kill everyone in Los Angeles, triggering the bad ending.
• Nonstandard Game Over:
  • One you'd have to go out of your way to obtain. When fighting El Oscuro's monstrous form, you can press the button on the console to blow up L.A. El Oscuro, of course, has some choice words for that.
    El Oscuro: Oh, no you didn't!
• Off Screen Start Bonus: The first level has a boarded-up passage behind where you start, with the message "Not A Secret" printed on the planks. Shooting through it leads you to an MP40.
• Power Floats: Implied: God Mode removes all view bobbing when you move.
• Putting on the Reich: Taken further compared to the original, where the Triad now has long red banners with white crosses, stahlhelms, missile launchers whose handles are based on those of the Panzerschreck, etc., while the surplus Korean uniform bit is implied with some televisions depicting actual real-life footage of Kim Jong-Un.
• Race Lift: The remake changes the nationalities of two HUNT members: Thi Barrett is changed from Scottish to Canadian, and Ian Paul Freely is changed from Greco-Spanish to British.
• Reckless Gun Usage: General Darian falls victim to this after you get his health to zero: he pins you down and points his gun at you, it fails to fire, he looks down the barrel, and it blows his head off.
• Secondary Fire: Most weapons possess one.
  • The Excalibat and Dog Mode retain their secondary fires from the original.
  • The Split Missile's primary fire is changed to fire a single missile at a time. Activating the secondary fire while the missile is in flight causes the two missiles to split apart.
  • Pressing secondary fire while a Firebomb missile is in flight causes it to rocket straight towards the ground.
• The Stinger: After the credits roll, the HUNT team sees one of El Oscuro's disembodied eyeballs come back to life and escape through the portal. Cue Sequel Hook as the heroes follow it into the unknown.
• Take That!:
  • A light-hearted one is thrown at the memetically popular "Call of Duty Dog" from Call of Duty: Ghosts, in the form of a teaser trailer showcasing dog mode, claiming it's modern.
  • The Mission Briefing for E4L1 states that the last thing they need is El Oscuro's parasites to get to Scientologists.
• Took a Level in Badass: General Darian goes from a bog standard King Mook to a cyborg with a shotgun arm. Krist turns into a Puzzle Boss with a laser-equipped jet chair.
• What the Hell, Player?: In E2L1, there's a room with a Dog Mode power-up and some dogs. If you shoot the dogs, you'll get the message, "WTF! Don't shoot the dogs." Keep shooting them and you'll be instantly killed.
  • Also, beat the game and stick around after the credits. You'll be told there's nothing to see. You'll be asked why you're still there. But you do get to see two development videos. The shareware version of the original does the same but without the videos.

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