History Main / GatlingGood

It should be noted, however, that most videogames heavily '''downplay''' the rate of fire. This used to be for technical reasons - back when computers weren't terribly fast, calculating trajectory, damage and effects for fifty or so bullets per second would slow the framerate down to a crawl - and good luck sending all that information through a 56k link during a multiplayer game. Nowadays the technical reason is no longer important, as computers and broadband links are powerful enough to effortlessly process the needed information, but the rate of fire is usually kept down anyway for gameplay reasons: if you had a gun that could [[WaveMotionGun shred any enemy in half]] in just a split-second of sustained fire you'd have very little incentive to use anything else, and [[GameBreaker gameplay balance would go to hell]]. There are a '''very''' few exceptions, but in general whenever you pick up a rotary gun expect to ask yourself "so, why exactly does this thing have more than one barrel?" every time you squeeze the trigger. By the same token, many games have a "heat meter" or something that requires periods of not firing to cool the gun down and prevent it from overheating and not working. As noted above, multiple barrels are supposed to prevent this, but unrestricted firing would further wreck the balance.

* There seems to be a pattern of Machine Gun use by villains in Spaghetti Westerns. In ''The Grand Duel,'' The Saxons use a water-cooled machine gun against a group of settlers sitting on a silver claim.

** In the sequel the War Machine armour also sports a Gatling gun, which Rhodes uses to great effect against the Hammer Drones.

** The [[GundamWing Gundam Heavyarms]] is the poster boy for Gatling-armed HumongousMecha. Aside from the [[{{BFG}} Beam Gatling]] fitted on the arm, it also carries [[ChestBlaster a pair hidden in its chest]]. Later in the series, it gets upgraded to a double beam Gatling. In ''Endless Waltz'' it was [[RetCon retconned]] into having ''two'' double Gatlings, and ''four'' in the chest. Even the MechaMooks bit that one, carrying a double Gatling of their own as their ''standard'' weapon.

** Later, [[http://www.onemanga.com/Mahou_Sensei_Negima!/274/04/ Sayo uses one]] while giving the most adorably {{Moe}} and [[{{Understatement}} understated]] warning ever: "Ah... Uhmm, please stay away, okay? It's dangerous!"

* Fanfic/AndIfThatDontWork, an {{Evangelion}} FanFic, has a Texus arms manufacturer come up with a Gatling railgun.

* And If That Don't Work, an {{Evangelion}} FanFic, has a Texus arms manufacturer come up with a Gatling railgun.

** Though all Unreal games have a minigun in one form or another, the Ballistic Weapons mod of UT2004 adds a realistic minigun with variable rate of fire: it can fire single shots, 900 RPM, 1800 RPM or 3600 RPM. A short burst can tear the target in two but it has a beastly recoil when firing at full auto. It even has a tripod mount which can be deployed to become a stationary turret with no recoil - quite useful in team games. Oh, and it has enough ammo to score at least 50 frags per clip if you conserve it.

* The 1983 movie ''BlueThunder'' features a modified Aérospatiale SA-341G Gazelle helicopter with a 20mm Gatling cannon mounted in a turret attached to the nose. This cannon has such a high rate of fire that, during the movie, it is used to [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome saw a police cruiser in half]] to [[BigDamnGunship facilitate the escape]] of the hero's girlfriend. To provide sufficient drama, the [[spoiler:turret gets disabled by a surprise attack to set up the FinalBattle]].

*** It never has, has it? Everybody who ever thought that by creating a weapon too terrifying to use, by taking it upon themselves to conceive a monstrosity that no sane man would use against another, that war would end because it would be too terrifying to continue... always finds out [[HumansAreBastards he's wrong]], and this invention becomes the [[WhatHaveIDone 'must-have' accessory]]. Gatling thought it for the machine gun. Nobel made explosives for mining and engineering, and didn't realize that the military was his real main customer until his newspaper accidentally declared him dead and published an obituary [[CompleteMonster blaming all the blown-up corpses on him.]] The Wright brothers also felt that airborne reconnaissance would be the end of war. One of the last lived long enough to see modern warfare include airplanes that carried enough explosives and machine guns to [[BigDamnGunship kill hundreds at one go]], from too far up to see coming.

** The concept was [[BigDamnGunship later improved]] with the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_AC-119 AC-119]] "Stinger" and "Shadow" gunships which added a 4th minigun and a pair of 20mm Vulcan guns to the mix.

* In ''SuperRobotWars'', when Kyosuke Nanbu findshis SuperPrototype Alt Eisen wasn't super enough for the battles ahead, he gets it upgraded to the Alt Eisen Riese. Among the upgrades is to replace the tri-barreled Autocannon on the right arm to a gatling gun (misnomered as a Chaingun in the localization).

** ''Predator'''s minigun is actually the very same model that was later used for the aforementioned ''Terminator II''.

** The combination of red tracer rounds and the high rate of fire creates the effect of a single red beam of death shooting out from the nose of the A-10. Iraqi soldiers during the GulfWar mistook the gun for some sort of directed energy weapon.

Gatlings in games are often further balanced by reducing the damage each individual shot can do and making each shot wildly inaccurate. Both of these are not true to RealLife, as the GAU-8 Avenger not only fires anti-tank caliber 30 mm shells, but can place groups of three shots on tanks from nearly a mile away. Even the smaller M61 Vulcan fires a 20 mm round with a comparable effective range and the so called M-134 "mini"gun ("mini" by comparison with the M61, anyway) fires 7.62x51mm NATO, the same caliber as an FN-FAL or a lot of modern belt-fed [=MGs=]. SoYeah...

* Averted in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 - the Minigun the player gets to use when riding on Flynn's chopper may not have the insane rate of fire, but the sound is definitely not "rat-tat-tat" but a realistic low-frequency godawful ripping/tearing.

* In the ''Stargate SG-1''/''X-COM: UFO Defense'' crossover ''XSGCOM: Mirror Image'', the Tau'ri realizes that the main problem with staff weapons is that they have a slow rate of fire, low accuracy and quick overheating. The solution? They cut staffs in half and mounted proper iron sights on them (they sold the new design to the Free Jaffa). Later, they even '''built an impromptu Gatling-Staff'''. If that's not enough, they mounted that on a remote-controlled chassis with a revolving turret. Hello, Mighty-MALP. When it was deployed in battle, enemy Jaffa fell by the HUNDREDS as the gun unleashed plasma at 400 RPM; hell, it's psychological effect was much more brutal than that of a flamethrower. Seeing that X-COM captured so many staffs an entire warehouse at Area 51 was chock full of them, it's not like they were short on materials either. It got even better later in the war when they deployed a HWP with '''two''' gatlings, a Sectoid plasma cannon, shields and Sectoid antigravity. They even put those things on the ''Prometheus'' instead of railguns!