Rise of the Triad: Dark War

Digitized actors

Rise of the Triad: Dark War's bad guys are the developers dressed up and digitized. For instance, Sebastian "Doyle" Krist's (the second boss in the game) chair is actually just an office chair, and the controls he uses are staplers. The actor who played Krist, Rise of the Triad: Dark War Level Designer Joe Siegler, admitted that he almost stapled his hands a couple times during filming.

Easter eggs

ROTT has a huge number of easter eggs. Some of which include:

Holiday hats If you play ROTT when your system clock indicates that it's one of five different holidays, the "group picture" of the five main characters is changed slightly. In addition, on Christmas, the music for the first level is changed to a familiar Christmas tune. The holidays and effects are as follows:

Easter (date varies) - Lorelei Ni wears Easter Bunny ears.

Cinco de Mayo (May 5th) - Ian wears a sombrero.

Independence Day (July 4th) - Doug holds an American flag.

Halloween (October 31st) - Thi wears a witch's hat.

Christmas (December 24th) - Taradino wears a Santa Claus hat, on December 25th, new music plays in the first level the first level.

There's a way to get all five "holiday hats" in Rise Of The Triad to show up on the screen at the same time. If you finish the game the right way, and destroy all the larvae in the last level, watch ALL the credits (takes several minutes). You'll get to a screen that says "The HUNT is victorious. The End." Do nothing. Let it sit there for about a minute or two, and you'll get another "The End" screen where all five "holiday hats" are shown at once.

Dopefish mode: Start up ROTT using: "rott dopefish"

It will bring you into "Dopefish" mode, where instead of getting the level name at the loading screen you get a smart-ass comment, and a special Dopefish death cam for when you're hit by enemy missile fire. The bottom of the ROTT digital help file also contains a reference to the Dopefish.

Cheeky message: If you make the screen-size really small a message appears. It says: "Buy a 486 :)"

Quit messages: When you exit the game, the game asks you "Yes or No?" in a variety of ways. This in itself is not special, but with each question you get a different sound byte. Here are some examples:

Press Y to pull your plug (makes a that notorious long beep as if your heart stopped)

Press Y to open trap door (sound of someone falling and a rope twisting)

Press Y to release cyanide gas (sound of liquid spilling and gas rising)

Press Y to activate the electric chair (electric snap and sizzle)

Press Y to drive your car off the cliff (car skidding and crashing)

Press Y to activate guillotine (sound of blade falling and thump of head spilling into a pan)

Press Y to signal firing squad ("Ready, aim, fire!")

German index

On 31 March 1995, Rise of the Triad: Dark War was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS / BPjM indexed games.

Multiple character classes in all game modes

ROTT was the first game to have different characters to play as in both single player and multiplayer (Corridor 7: Alien Invasion predated ROTT with multiple character classes in MP, even if the classes were nearly identical in that game) and they all have different voices (only things like death, grunt sounds… they didn't talk like Duke Nukem) and abilities. Incidentally, some of the level traps were designed so you could only get by them with certain players.

RSAC rating

It was the first game to get an RSAC rating of 4 (the highest) with wanton and gratuitous violence. Once you blew up somebody, their head might hurtle towards you, their eyeballs might fall in front of your face, their blood might linger in the air or stick on the walls for a few minutes. If that's not enough, there is also an EKG mode (Engine Killing Gibs) that's accessible with a cheat code. Though cautious parents and people who aren't fans of the gore can disable using the games inbuilt parental lock feature, believed to be the first game with such a feature.

On another note, upon gibbing an enemy, depending on how quick your eyes are, you can sometimes spot a severed arm flipping you off as it flies off the screen. A member of the ROTT development team said that this was almost impossible to capture in a screenshot. See the screenshots for the infamous hand.

Source code release

Apogee released the source code for Rise of the Triad on 20 December 2002 on the official website; almost 8 years to the day of the original release of the game.

Wolfenstein 3D engine

The game engine that Rise of the Triad: Dark War uses is actually a heavily modified version of the Wolf3D engine. In some ways it outperforms the Doom engine, though in many other ways, the limits of the Wolf3D engine are clearly visible. Later, Tom Hall admitted that he made a huge mistake by deciding to stick with the original Wolf3D engine rather than switching to the Build engine that the "team next door" was using for Duke Nukem 3D. He said that if he had switched ROTT to the Build engine, he could've gotten a technologically advanced game up and running in no time, as opposed to the hard time that Apogee had modifying the Wolf3D engine. (His statements about this can be found in the readme file included with the ROTT public source code that was released on 20 December 2002.)

Working title

Rise of the Triad: Dark War was originally Wolfenstein 3D: Part II - id Software licensed the Wolf3D engine to Apogee so Tom Hall could create another sequel to Wolfenstein a year after Spear of Destiny was released. Eventually id Software decided not to let another company handle their IP and cancelled the contract for Wolfenstein 3D: Part II but allowed them to continue licensing the Wolf3D engine.

Information also contributed by Brolin Empey, CaptainCanuck, John Romero, j. jones, Roger Wilco, Spartan_234, wossname, Xantheous, and Xoleras