Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Developer: Apogee Software
Year: 1994 (shareware release) 1995 (full version)
The 1990s were a good time for videogame gore. If you really wanted to see some spinal cords being removed, games had you covered. Two years after Mortal Kombat and one year after Doom, Rise of the Triad was a particularly memorable example of the artform that is making red stuff come out of people in entertaining ways.
Apogee had been working on a sequel to Wolfenstein 3D. When the project was canceled, it left them with a bunch of first-person shooter assets. They built Rise of the Triad (later renamed Rise of the Triad: Dark War to differentiate it from a remake) on those bones, improving on Wolfenstein in a bunch of ways—especially the scale of their game's destructibility. Glass shattered, bulletholes persisted, and various bits of level scenery like plants and lights broke.
The most impressive destruction was that visited on the enemies, who popped into red smears. Hit them with a rocket and they were reduced to spinning offal: an eyeball; a severed hand that gave the finger as it passed; a skull with some of that attached spinal cord the '90s was all about.
Accompanying this carnage was the message "Ludicrous Gibs!" because 'gibs' was apparently short for giblets at Apogee. This internal studio slang would go on to be referenced by Quake and become a lasting bit of videogame lore.
It may not seem like much today, but the first time an eyeball slid down your screen it was pretty special. What a time to be alive.
