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Rise of the Triad is a first person shooter computer game, first released on December 21 1994 by Apogee Software.
It featured vertical dimensions, enhanced weaponry, trampolines and more. The level design was characterized by very high, straight walls, outdoor scenes, and digitized sprite-based enemies.
Although Rise of the Triad was based on (a highly enhanced version of) the Wolfenstein 3D engine, it was supposed to compete with Doom. It did its best, but Doom went down in history for non-orthagonal, height-difference maps. It was actually originally intended to be a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D, but this idea was dropped early on. Some influences from this part of the development can still be seen though.
The weapon system was ahead of its time in complexity, brutality, and realism. You could carry one or two pistols, a machine gun, and one of several different rocket launchers, considered a realistic limitation. If you picked up another rocket weapon, you dropped the first. The Split Missile launcher sent out two rockets locked together, until the player releases the fire button, in which case they split up and heat-seek individually. The homing missile fired a single heat-seeking rocket. The Firebomb's rocket exploded on impact, sending a twenty-foot-wide chain explosion outward. The Flamewall was nearly impossible to escape from; it sent a wall of flame in one direction, and any player not wearing an Asbestos Vest was instantly incinerated.
In addition, you could wield a magic baseball bat, enter a literal God mode for a short time (complete with invulnerability and the Hand Of God instant-kill weapon), or in a dyslexic gag, enter Dog Mode, in which you were shorter, and bit other players. Dog Mode also allows you to use the devastating Barkblast.
A few other features were noteworthy, such as bullet weapons leaving marks on walls, digitally-captured actors serving as the enemies, and player-character height, health, speed and accuracy differences.
Rise of the Triad is somewhat well known for its most unrealistic feature, Ludicrous Gibs. Gibs, short for giblets, rained down from the sky whenever an enemy exploded. These included chunks of charred flesh, and eyeballs. This was a gamer favorite, and was later featured in 3D Realms' next first person shooter, Duke Nukem 3D. The Quake series cemented the use of gibs as the remains of exploded characters, as opposed to characters merely shot to death. (Doom introduced the idea, with separate "explosion death" corpses for the zombies and the imp; Rise of the Triad brought it to fruition.)
The source code to Rise of the Triad was released under the GPL on 20th of December 2002 and the first port to Linux was done on the 22nd of December, making it one of the quickest source ports ever (since the actual underlying Build engine was long ported).
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