Rise of the Triad is Five!
December 21, 1994. 2AM. Several of us were at Apogee HQ coding our first in house produced 3D game, entitled "Rise of the Triad". Things are going well in the final push to release the game. Then, in a move right out of some sort of Stephen King novel, the entire area suffered a power blackout. It was rather eerie, it really felt to us at the time like id Software was out at the power distribution boxes for our neighborhood with wire cutters. :)
During the hour or so delay, we lounged around in the programming room, some of us slept, and others went down to the lobby of our office building and shot off water rockets (All Hail "The Avenger").
Eventually, the power came back on, and the work commenced towards the final push towards v1.0 shareware was back on. Especially considering we thought the power would go out again at any second. It didn't, and somewhere around 4 or 5 in the morning, the upload of #1ROTT.ZIP began to Software Creations.
Today is the 5 year anniversary of Rise of the Triad, our 3D action shooter released on December 21, 1994. This game was groundbreaking, with several innovations that were copied in games that came after it. Some of the items that were used first in Rise of the Triad before any other game were:
* Parental Lock of objectionable content
* Random game enemies (the same enemy wouldn't always be in the same spot when you replayed the game)
* Non linear episode progression (ending one specific level wouldn't always take you to the next one)
* Jump pads (used most recently in Quake III)
* Bullet holes in walls
* Ability to jump on top of objects in a game
* Live Remote Ridicule (insult people in a LAN game using a microphone - forget those built in insults!)
* Enemies that play dead instead of just dying immediately.
* Rocket jumping
* Capture the Flag
There's a lot more than this, too. A lot of these don't seem like much, but at the time, most of these things hadn't yet been seen in a 3D action game. If you're into ROTT and game history, then you owe it to yourself to check out these pages:
1. "Rott in Hell" - The definitive history of the best deathmatch game of all time (by Kevin "Fragmaster" Bowen)
2. ROTT Worship Site - Up to date goings on with ROTT from a fan perspective.
Rise of the Triad was the game that had the largest amount of user level editors created for it (there were four that we're aware of - this remark refers to one of our games, not any game). Not only that, Rise of the Triad was the first game that we released the same level editor that we used to make the game to the public! Not all that long ago, we released six levels for Rise of the Triad that had never been released (well, freely) before. If you missed these levels (The Lasersoft levels), make sure to check 'em out.
If you've never played ROTT before, or you have played ROTT before, why not break out the game and give it a whirl again in honor of it's fifth birthday? The shareware episode (as well as all the other files mentioned above) are available from our Master Download page. Check it out, and get retro! If you're interested in more history of this sort, check out our Milestones & History page, as well as our Detailed Release History page.
Posted by Joe Siegler on December 21, 1999 at 1:28 PM | Permalink
News Categories: Rise of the Triad
