Few DOS shooters were less interested in being taken seriously than Rise of the Triad. A drunk-mode power-up that makes the whole screen sway, a magic baseball bat called the Excalibat, five playable agents with wildly different stats — ROTT never lets up on the chaos for a single level.
From Wolfenstein 3D Sequel Prototype to Its Own Wild Thing
Rise of the Triad began life at Apogee as a pitch for a Wolfenstein 3D sequel before evolving into an entirely original property, released in 1994 on the studio’s own engine. Tom Hall, who had co-founded id Software and left the company in 1993, joined the team behind ROTT and helped push it toward the anarchic tone that ended up defining it — a fascinating bit of crossover history between two studios that shared so much DNA in this era. Hall brought a very different sensibility than the id team he’d just left, and a lot of ROTT’s willingness to be genuinely silly rather than purely intense feels like his fingerprints on the project. The story sets you against an island fortress controlled by a cult called the Triad, playing as one of five members of H.U.N.T. (High-risk United Nations Task-force), each with different speed, health, and weapon proficiency.
Five Agents, Way Too Many Ways to Die
The weapon roster ranges from pistols and shotguns up to Heat-Seeking Missiles, Split Missiles, and the aforementioned Drunk Missile, whose disorienting screen-sway effect is one of the funniest things in any DOS shooter. Enemies can surrender, go berserk, or appear as monks who can only be dealt with in specific ways, and the level design layers in trap rooms, moving platforms, and jump pads that launch you across gaps — more than 30 maps spread across four episodes.
The tone stays consistently, deliberately over the top throughout. Where most contemporaries treated their arsenals as escalating threats to be taken seriously, ROTT seems to actively enjoy undercutting its own intensity — the Drunk Missile exists purely because it’s funny, not because the design needed another projectile weapon, and that willingness to prioritize a joke over strict internal consistency is a big part of what made it stand out from its peers.
Getting the Most Out of the Excalibat and Friends
- The Excalibat is a great ammo-saver against weak enemies early on — there’s no reason to burn missiles on a target you can melee down in two hits.
- Pick your HUNT agent based on how you actually want to play; faster, lower-health characters reward aggressive movement, while sturdier ones are more forgiving if you’d rather trade hits.
- Jump pads and elevators are frequently the key to secrets, so it’s worth taking detours off the obvious path rather than beelining for the level exit.
- Enemies that surrender can simply be left alone; wasting ammo finishing off a surrendering enemy is rarely worth it when tougher threats are usually still ahead.
- Keep an eye out for monk enemies specifically — they require a different approach than regular soldiers, and charging them the same way you’d handle a standard enemy tends to go badly.
What ROTT Did Before Everyone Else Caught Up
ROTT is often credited as one of the earliest shooters to experiment with a capture-the-flag-style multiplayer mode, arriving in the same general window as Doom’s deathmatch but pushing the format somewhere different. It’s a footnote most players never think about while playing single-player, but it’s a real piece of the game’s legacy in FPS multiplayer history. Combined with the jump pads, verticality, and trap-heavy level design, ROTT was also pushing the genre toward faster, more vertical movement well before “arena shooter” was a recognized category.
Cranking Up the Cycles in DOSBox
The shareware episode is available free below. If DOSBox is new territory for you, start with our DOSBox setup guide before going further. Our roundup of free DOS games has plenty more where this came from.
- Mount the ROTT folder:
mount c C:\Games\ROTT - Type
c:thenROTT.EXE - Set DOSBox cycles to around 20000 for smooth performance
Our DOSBox installation guide has more detail if any of these steps trip you up.
The Verdict on All That Chaos
Rise of the Triad is pure, unfiltered chaos in the best possible way, and the enemy death animations — spinning, exploding, melting, launching skyward depending on what hit them — are some of the most elaborate in DOS gaming. My honest criticism: the maze-like level design occasionally crosses the line from clever into simply confusing, and the humor, while charming, won’t land for every player the same way it lands for me. As a snapshot of the wild experimental energy of early-90s shooters before the genre settled on its conventions, though, it’s genuinely essential, and it’s a reminder that not every landmark shooter from this window took itself as seriously as Doom did. Go in ready to laugh as often as you aim, and it holds up as one of the most purely fun DOS shooters of its year. Tom Hall’s fingerprints are all over that willingness to be silly, and the game is better for it than a straighter Wolfenstein sequel likely would have been. Few DOS-era shooters had this much personality, and even fewer were confident enough to let a joke weapon share shelf space with the serious ones without the whole thing feeling like a novelty act. That balancing act between genuine action and constant self-aware humor is much harder to pull off than ROTT makes it look, and revisiting it now still makes most of its more self-serious contemporaries feel a little stiff by comparison.
Watch Gameplay
You might also like:
