Tag: rise of the triad

1261: Registered Version

The resurrection of various video games from my youth is interesting.

I’m not talking about remakes here — though this discussion is in part prompted by the upcoming Unreal Engine 3-powered remake of Rise of the Triad — but instead, the rerelease of old DOS games, suitably tweaked and DOSboxed up in order to make them work properly on modern machines.

An awful lot of these games that are being resurrected were once “shareware” titles. For those of you too young to remember the shareware model — I’m not even sure it’s still around these days — it was a means of distributing usually independently-developed games that involved giving away a significant proportion of a finished product for free, then inviting people to cough up for a more fully-featured “registered version” if they liked it.

The distinguishing factor between a shareware version and a good old-fashioned demo was the fact that demos are usually crippled or limited in some way; shareware versions, meanwhile, are fully-functional, just not quite as fully-functional as the registered version.

I didn’t explain that very well. Let me give you a practical example that might make it a bit clearer.

Let’s take the PC game Rise of the Triad, since it was that that got me thinking about this today. Rise of the Triad’s shareware version was subtitled The HUNT Begins and featured ten levels in which you could only play one of the different characters available in the full version. These ten levels did not appear anywhere in the registered version, which was known as Dark War. This meant that you could play through the shareware version, decide you liked the game, buy the “full” version and play through a completely new series of levels.

This was one approach to the shareware model. Other games, such as Rise of the Triad’s spiritual predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, were split into discrete “episodes”, with the shareware version consisting of only the first episode and usually not featuring all the enemies, weapons and graphics from the full version.

The reason I’m thinking about this today is because when I was young and playing shareware versions of these games that I got from various magazine cover CDs and downloaded from CompuServe (yeah, you heard me), attaining the registered version appeared to be something that was all but impossible to me as a teenager with no credit or debit card. Digital distribution of paid-for titles was unheard for, so there was no “just download it from Steam”, and many shareware titles required you to order the registered versions from America, leading to exorbitant shipping costs.

As such, I didn’t really get to play many registered versions of shareware games I remember rather fondly until much, much later. It’s a lot of fun to be able to revisit these games so quickly and easily these days and discover that the registered versions were indeed rather fun, after all.

Do they still hold up as decent games after all this time, though? Your mileage may vary somewhat, but I certainly still have a soft spot for things like Rise of the Triad, and am very much looking forward to seeing what Interceptor Entertainment have made of the upcoming reboot, which I preordered today. (It’s $15, and you get four old Apogee titles for free when you preorder, including the original Rise of the Triad, its expansion and the two Blake Stone games. Not a bad deal at all.)

Rise of the Bizarre

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I’d love to have sat in on the design meeting for Apogee Software’s 1995 FPS Rise of the Triad, now available on Good Old Games. In my mind’s eye, it runs something like this:

“So, gentlemen. That Wolfenstein thing did rather well. Let’s do a sequel.”

“Yes! I love Wolfenstein. Who wants a beer?”

(Beer is chugged. Conversation resumes.)

“Right. So how are we going to make this better?”

“Okay. Here’s the deal. Umm… Hitler was actually being controlled by… like… um… some big corporations.”

“Great. Sounds good. How many?”

“Um. Three. Three’s always a good number. Wolfenstein had three episodes. Plus another three.”

“Right! We could call them the Triad.”

“I think that’s been done.”

“Doesn’t matter. Okay, so Hitler was being controlled by the Triad.”

“Yes. I need another beer. It helps me think.”

(More beer is chugged. Conversation resumes.)

“Okay. So, game-wise, what are we going to add?”

“Rocket launchers.”

“More gore. More gore!”

“Dual-wield pistols!”

“Traps! Spiky things! Flame traps!”

“All good suggestions, but… let’s think outside the box a little.”

“Boss?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t use management-speak. It makes you sound like a douche.”

“Sorry. Where were we? Come on. Think bigger.”

(Silence ensues.)

“Nothing? Really? Okay, maybe this will help.” (Produces a bottle of absinthe.)

(Absinthe is chugged, with much teeth-sucking and head-shaking.)

“Right! That should get those creative juices flowing. Okay, let’s try again!”

“Ooo! Ooo! We need jumping.”

“Yes, but not normal jumping, no. We need springboards.”

“Yes! And floating platforms to jump onto. Otherwise there’s no point.”

“Right. And we can call them Gravitational Anomaly Discs.”

“GADs?”

“Yes. And the elevator ones can be called EGADs.”

“Egads! What a fabulous idea.”

“I see you’re getting it. Let’s have another drink.”

(Another shot of absinthe is consumed.)

“Jesus. Maybe… maybe you… maybe we should have a… y’know… God mode.”

“Ishn’t that, ishn’t that… jusht… y’know… an invinsh… invinsh… invuln… can’t die mode?”

“No no nononono, I mean an actual… actual God mode. Where you become God.”

“Oooo! I likesh it. You could get really big.”

“Yesh. And kill… peoplesh by pointing at ’em. You’sh an angry God.”

(Hysterical laughter.)

“Oooo! And how about… y’know… as a joke… we also put in a… a… Dog mode!”

“What, where you turn into a dog?”

“Yesh. You get *hic* really shmall and bite peoplesh nutsh.”

rottdogmode5rw

(Thunderous belch.)

“Ugh. *hic* This is… ‘scuse me… *hic* shounding great. You know what? Shall we just ditch the World War II thing?”

“Yeah. Too much research.”

“Let’s have shome mad monksh inshtead.”

“Monksh with ROBOTSH.”

(Fade to black as hysterical laughter continues.)

The alarming thing about Rise of the Triad is that all of the above features were actually included in a game that was originally intended to be a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D. Now, Wolfenstein didn’t take itself too seriously anyway, what with all the zombies, and a very fat Hitler in a mechanized suit wielding two chainguns, but presumably at some point it became apparent to Apogee’s Developers of Incredible Power, the team behind Rise of the Triad, that a World War II setting wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, the game features a very strange setting, with players battling everything from soldiers dressed in what look like World War I uniforms to robots to monks, armed with a selection of weapons ranging from the straightforward (pistol) to messy (bazooka) to bizarre (drunk missile) to outright insane (Excalibat, which is exactly what you think it is). Add in the God/Dog modes, the ability to fly with Mercury mode, the headache-inducing Shrooms mode and you have a game which is clearly designed for fun foremost with the story being cast aside in tatters.

It’s all the better for it. The sheer speed and insanity of Rise of the Triad is one of the game’s best features. The relatively simplistic, boxy level design design based on an evolution of the Wolfenstein 3D engine means that it’s easy to race through relatively mindlessly, or those who prefer a more methodical approach can attempt to solve some of the quasi-platforming environmental puzzles in order to unlock the game’s secrets.

It’s evidence of a simpler time, when games either weren’t capable of telling a decent story, or it was seen as a secondary thing to do. Half-Life this ain’t. Rather, Rise of the Triad represents a time when gameplay was at the forefront, and shareware games were on the cutting-edge of technology. These days, shareware titles are less prominent in their importance for many people, but in the mid-90s when Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad appeared, shareware developers like ID/iD/id/whatever and Apogee were very much leaders of the pack, pushing the capabilities of the PC to the limit. This was also a time when “shareware episode” meant “complete game in and of itself” – both Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad‘s free shareware episodes featured ten full levels, which were complete experiences in their own right. Rise of the Triad actually went one step further by making its shareware episode a completely different set of levels to those in the full, paid version, meaning those trying out the game and then going on to buy it didn’t have to run through the same levels again. There were no 30-day time limits or crippling of features – if all you wanted to play was those ten levels, so be it. If, however, you wanted more levels and more features (in the case of these games, more enemies, more playable characters and more multiplayer modes) then you shelled out the money to support the game.

Apogee, of course, later became 3D Realms, which begat Duke Nukem 3D and Max Payne. Rise of the Triad does show that it’s worth delving back into a company’s history as you can often found some hidden gems amongst them, however bizarre they may be. There’s one thing you can’t deny about Rise of the Triad, and that is that it’s immensely creative within the limitations of the time, the genre and the medium. Releasing titles as shareware often freed up developers to do what they really wanted to do – and if that was to have the player assault an island full of soldiers, monks and robots while armed with a magic baseball bat and having the occasional ability to turn into a dog, that was up to them. Occasionally these days with indie titles we see glimpses of the same creativity. It’s important to keep that dream alive, otherwise we end up with a hundred and one identikit brown shooters.

Rise of the Triad 2009 on XBLA anyone?

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