Games worth discovering

Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition preserves an important, goofy slice of gaming history

2K View2023-07-27

“You ate some priest porridge.” That’s the message I see whenever I slide over a bowl of nondescript red goo in Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition, regaining some vital bars of health in its strange world of impossible spaces, springboards, and eyeball gibs.

Unlike the complete rebuild that developerNightdive did for System Shock, the Ludicrous Edition is a straightforward port of the original Rise of the Triad: Dark War, which launched as a shareware title in 1994 before seeing an official launch the following year. It’s a profoundly weird game, and I’m thrilled to see it brought back to life in this edition because it’s such an odd piece of gaming history.

What’s priest porridge, you ask? I don’t think anyone actually knows.

First-person shooters can all trace their lineage back to Wolfenstein 3D, which launched in 1992 and instantly turned id Software’s four founders into gaming superstars. The small team, which included John Romero, John Carmack, Adrian Carmack (no relation), and Tom Hall, built on the success of Wolfenstein 3D with a little game called Doom, which launched the following year and fundamentally changed the course of games.

That’s the evolutionary branch we remember best today. Doom and Doom II were watershed moments in games history, and they spawned innumerable imitators and clones. John Carmack and John Romero went on to make Quake, but Tom Hall parted ways with his id Software cofounders in 1993 to join Apogee Software and continue working on an idea for a follow-up to Wolfenstein 3D that id had discarded to focus on Doom. The game that eventually emerged was Rise of the Triad, which dropped all narrative and thematic connection to Wolfenstein 3D but used a heavily modified version of its engine.

Rise of the Triad is supposedly about infiltrating an “island” to investigate “cult activity,” but the narrative setup loses all coherence as soon as the game starts. The levels aren’t designed to mimic or even vaguely evoke real physical spaces. They’re walled mazes where pillars of lava shift around, springboards fling the player and NPCs high in the air, and “elevators” travel laterally around the map.

Rise of the Triad was also an impressive technological achievement, in its way. John Carmack created a whole new engine called id Tech 1 for Doom that allowed level designers to use any angle and multiple elevations. Rise of the Triad, meanwhile, used the old grid-based Wolfenstein 3D tech. As Apogee president Terry Nagy told me last year, Tom Hall managed to get it to do things far beyond its intended capabilities.

“He was able to get the core programming team back then to include things into that engine that it wasn’t even remotely capable of doing at the time,” he said.

It’s important to remember that prior to Quake, mainstream first-person shooters weren’t actually 3D games. They used flat, 2D maps which the game engines “projected” into a first-person perspective, making players feel like they were exploring 3D spaces. It was an early programming magic trick, and while it produced results that were impressive at the time, it came with some big limitations. One of the biggest was that maps could not contain any overlapping floor space: You could never go under a bridge, for example, or have a spiral staircase that ascended over itself.

Hall and his team of programmers worked out a way to get around this restriction. Just about every level in Rise of the Triad includes floating, circular platforms. These form ledges, staircases, and ramps, and they often move around to work as elevators and tram cars that can ferry the player around the map, high above the floor. They’re flat sprites rather than 3D objects, which can make using them difficult, but they allow for verticality that would have been impossible in Wolfenstein 3D.

Knowing that it’s built on the same technology as Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad does seem like an impossible feat. While enemies aren’t exactly clever, they were able to pull off some tricks nobody had ever seen before: some will roll to avoid being shot at, others play dead until the player gets close. There are springboards, flame jets that move around on tracks in the floor, and crushing walls that reveal hidden passageways. Rather than showing off all new technology, Rise of the Triad was an amazing example of squeezing every last bit of pizzazz out of tech that was already available, the kind of refinement and ingenuity that’s still valuable today as console hardware and major game engines start to age and fall away from the cutting edge.

I think Rise of the Triad has another important legacy, which is what makes playing the new Ludicrous Edition feel like such a homecoming. It’s a game that took a real anarchic glee in doing what I can only call “weird video game stuff,” like turning the player into a dog or having a psychedelic mushroom power-up that made the screen go bananas and enemies light up like rainbows. It’s the same spirit that’s animated the Garry’s Mod community, which has spawned dozens of game modes (such as Prop Hunt), machinima series, and memes - including the increasingly apocalyptic “Skibidi Toilet” series by YouTuber DaFuq!?Boom!.

Rise of the Triad: Ludicrous Edition launches July 31 for PC, and it’ll be coming to consoles for the first time ever later this year. Whether you’re a seasoned drunken missile veteran or a newcomer, this new edition is the definitive Rise of the Triad experience—it supports modern widescreen monitors and 4K resolutions, has cross-platform multiplayer, and even includes a level editor. Just like the old shareware days, there’s a free demo you can try out right now.