Gatling Good

The Governator vetoes a bill.
"Sasha weighs one hundred fifty kilograms and fires two hundred dollar custom-tooled cartridges at ten thousand rounds per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to fire this weapon, for twelve seconds."
—The Heavy, Meet The Heavy

Ever since Richard Gatling's 1861 invention, the rapid-firing rotary gun has had a special place among BFGs. Because it's basically the gun equivalent of a chainsaw, there is an undeniable attraction to a gun which can produce high enough rates of fire to cleanly trim hedges, cut down trees, or, in the case of the GAU-8 Avenger, cut tanks in half. Just imagine what they do to human flesh.

The gatling gun is likely to function as a significantly more powerful version of a regular machine gun, requiring hulking mountains of muscle to move them, or some kind of vehicle mount. If one gets used, you can expect it to give a nice steady buzz as it spews a constant stream of death.

Modern superfast Gatling guns actually make a strange, deafening buzzing sound in the bass register (5000 rounds per minute equals 83.3 Hz). Some of them, like the Phalanx anti-missile cannon, sound even weirder, because they start at a lower rate of fire and then spin up to a higher one in distinct steps (in such designs they do not actually begin spinning the barrels until it fires the first shot and they require a moment to come up to speed), giving two or more separate "notes". Instead of a Dramatic Gun Cock, the sign that a Gatling is preparing to fire tends to be the sound of it spinning up.

A popular form of the BFG in fiction, and both a fictional and real-world way of achieving More Dakka via Everything's Better with Spinning. It may be present even if Energy Weapons are abundant in the setting, as Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better. See also Bang Bang BANG.

According to Cracked.com, owning one of these things is perfectly legal.

Examples of Gatling Good include:

Anime & Manga

  • A man with a Gatling gun killed several powerful villains (in fact, practically every villain besides himself) early on in Rurouni Kenshin. It was actually a very primitive design, was operated manually with a hand crank, and jammed after one of the villains stuck a poison dart in the ammo bandoleer in the anime (he ran out of bullets in the manga after firing non-stop at everyone).
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh 5 Ds, Lotten uses Gatling Ogre, with which he does a First Turn Kill.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: When Basque Grand transmutes an enormous arsenal of weapons, there's a gatling gun somewhere in there.
  • For a while, a Vulcan cannon was the primary "weapon" of Bungo Takano's "shadow dragon" Hainekuwele in Narutaru.
  • Gundam features gatlings all the time. The most prominent example is probably the Gundam Heavyarms. Aside from the Beam Gatling fitted on the arm, it also carries a pair hidden in its chest. Later in the series, it gets upgraded to a double beam Gatling. In Endless Waltz it was retconned into having two double Gatlings, and four in the chest.
  • Macross (and Robotech) both feature Humongous Mecha scale Gatling cannons typically called Gunpods as their primary weapon for nearly all Valkyries, in various forms since inception. It should be noted that the Gatling cannons generally have a two inch bore.
  • Gargomon in Digimon Tamers had a Gatling gun on both arms, making him dangerous to the humans as well as the Digimon early on—he was a bit drunk with the Champion level power.
  • Zoids had the Hibilt Vulcan cannon, a massive six-barreled beam Gatling weapon. Oddly enough, the anime would often inconsistently depict it as a projectile weapon instead. There are too many Zoids that can equip it to list here, but we will mention Karl Shuvaltz in Chaotic Century, who was known for having all his Ace Custom units being armed with one.
  • Guu has a gatling gun arm.
  • In episode 21 of Zettai Karen Children when Oboro Kashiwagi the otherwise ordinary secretary lays eyes on a life sized doll of herself, her response is to whip a minigun out of nowhere and shoot it to dust.
  • Appleseed has large tanks that have stupidly large six-barreled rotary cannons in place of the main gun. And the monstrous mobile gun platforms have four of the same. Each.
  • Chao's robot army in Mahou Sensei Negima used these against Mahora's mage army. They were loaded with bullets that could send the victim into a future in which they'd already lost without any possible defense aside from dodging as a functional One-Hit Kill.
  • In One Piece, new character "Blood Splatterer" Coriboo is seen wielding a hand-held crank-operated one. Probably how he got the nickname.
    • His brother Caribou also carries one inside of him.
  • One villain from Black Lagoon wields one in "The Hunt for Greenback Jane"/"Roanapur Freak Show".
  • The first Rebuild of Evangelion movie featured Unit 01 with a huge gatling gun [dead link] . Eva-scale. With spent casings that crush cars underneath them.
  • The titular Exaxxion mecha from Cannon God E Xa X Xion subverts this by making a trio of 88 mm gatling cannons the SMALLEST weapon on the entire mech.
  • Milly Thompson of Trigun carries a semiautomatic version that fires expanding projectiles with enough force to knock over whatever they hit, including armored trucks.
    • Monev the Gale uses a pair of wrist-mounted Gatlings powerful enough to tear through buildings, then switches to an even larger one that can destroy a bank vault.
  • Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force has Arnage, whose Divider is basically a pair of Gatling guns strapped together which she easily wields with one hand.
  • In Ghost in The Shell Stand Alone Complex, Batou uses a gatling in the style of "Ol' Painless" from Predator during an invasion of Section 9's headquarters by a military wet team.
  • Bard from Black Butler has one of these in the kitchen!
  • The Big O's "O Thunder" is a pair of retractable gatling arm cannons.
  • The Gatling Missile from Voltes V.

Comic Books


Fanfiction


Film

  • Terminator 2. And it was reported that Schwarzenegger was the only man on the set strong enough to carry it on his own.
    • Terminator Salvation. The T-600s robots have Gatling guns attached to their arms.
  • The Matrix features a helicopter-mounted minigun, which is one of the few weapons that fires too fast for the Agents to dodge.
  • Predator features the famous GE M134 minigun 'Old Painless' wielded by former Navy SEAL, former Pro Wrestler and later Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, and was the first handheld minigun ever to be used on film (or in any fiction for that matter). The actors firing that thing had to be braced just offscreen, lest the recoil knock them on their ass. And that was just firing blanks. They also had to connect it to an external power source offscreen, via a wire that went down his pants.
    • Jesse himself has stated that while the gun was suspended from an offscreen crane in early takes, later he actually managed to fire it without. According to him: 'You just had to grit your teeth and hold on. It's like firing a chainsaw. It's fucking ridiculous. Why the fuck would anyone want to use something like that?'
  • The Sum of All Fears has a scene where a 20mm Vulcan cannon in a Phalanx mounting on the USS John C. Stennis is used in an attempt to defend the ship from a missile attack.
  • A criminal uses one in Superman Returns, to no effect.
  • The Big Bad's suit in Iron Man has, in addition to a rocket launcher, a huge wrist-mounted Gatling gun.
    • In the sequel the War Machine armor also sports a Gatling gun, which Rhodes uses to great effect against the Hammeroids.
  • In the epilogue of Grindhouse: Planet Terror, Cherry Darling has replaced her rifle-leg with a minigun. There's also a motorbike-mounted chaingun in the Machete trailer.
  • All robots seem to have rotary guns in the Transformers movie. Including ones made from mobile phones. In the first movie, you also see the famous A-10 firing its GAU-8 Avenger at Scorponok.
  • The 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma features a hand-cranked Gatling gun.
  • One of the more awesome scenes in Black Hawk Down involved one of the MH-6 Little Bird helicopters obliterating a group of Somali RPG gunners using mounted miniguns.
  • In The Last Samurai, the Japanese government purchases a battery of Civil War-era Gatling Guns from the United States. These weapons quickly and efficiently wipe out the remnants of the Samurai during their final Desperation Attack.
  • During a car scene in Last Action Hero a door on a van suddenly opens, and a goon steps out with a mounted short-barreled minigun and proceeds to fire it at Arnie's car. Which, of course, remains untouched, but the premise of the movie means this actually makes sense.
  • The first car chase in Batman Forever: The Batmobile is chased by a pair of '50 Buick Roadmasters, each with two miniguns mounted on the hood. Not that they ever reach real Gatling fire rates, let alone do any halfway realistic damage to anything.
  • The Dark Knight Saga. Bruce Wayne conducts a ballistics test using Gatling guns. Since they only fire a single round at a time there is absolutely no reason to have them other than Rule of Cool and Screw the Rules, I Have Money - which entirely fit Wayne's persona.
  • The War Wagon (1967). Western starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, who plan to rob an armoured stagecoach (owned by a villainous Land Baron) that is armed with a turret-mounted Gatling gun. Since the wagon effectively amounted to a horse-drawn tank the Invulnerable Horses trope had to be in full effect as well.
  • The 1983 movie Blue Thunder 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 saw a police cruiser in half to facilitate the escape of the hero's girlfriend. To provide sufficient drama, the turret gets disabled by a surprise attack to set up the Final Battle.
  • Guess what's bolted to the port side of that black truck in Tango and Cash. Right, a 20mm Gatling.
  • In the Clint Eastwood vehicle The Outlaw Josey Wales the Redlegs used Gatlings mounted on the back of a wagon to kill all the bushwhackers that had just surrendered to them and turned their own guns in
  • G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra features a suit of Powered Armor with a Gatling gun built around the right forearm. It suffers from a somber rate of fire and gates in ammo from the Dakkaverse.
  • In Van Helsing, as Carl hands out a variety of standard vampire-killing weapons, Van Helsing notices a prototype Gatling Gun being tested elsewhere in the room and quips 'Why can't I have one of those?'
  • In Resident Evil Apocalypse Nemesis uses one as his main gun for half his screen time. According to the effects crew the barrel was cut to about 9 inches, a "elbow box" added to the back then geared it to half the firing rate, plus they used live ammo.
  • Spoofed in Carry On up the Khyber Pass. The heroes turn a hand-cranked gatling-type on the horde of rampaging Burpers, only for it to play music instead. They open the drum magazine to discover a gramophone record.
  • Kick-Ass features a suit of Power Armor with gatling guns built into each arm.
  • The Rojos in A Fistful of Dollars steal a shipment of gold by posing as American soldiers, using the Hand-cranked Gatling Gun the real soldiers they'd already ambushed and killed had brought along.
  • 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.
  • The long-nine bow cannons on the Flying Dutchman had three rotating barrels.
  • In Rango, the moles are seen riding on bats mounted with civil war-style gatling guns. In addition, Rattlesnake Jake has a gatling gun where his rattle should be.
  • In The Warrior's Way, the Colonel's gang had at least two miniature gatling guns they used against the horde of ninjas.
  • In Death Race, four out of the ten cars present in the film have rotary guns - most M134 miniguns, but one has two M61 vulcans.
  • Jonah uses a small, man-portable gatling gun at several points during Jonah Hex.
  • RoboCop II. Notably, after RoboCain fired his Gatling Arm Cannon, there was almost always a zoom in on the no-longer-firing barrels still spinning for a second or three.


Literature

  • "Reason" of Snow Crash ("I told you they'd listen to Reason") is a ridiculously powerful rotary rail gun that fires small fragments of depleted uranium. To drive the point home, at a certain point in the story the main character gets in a fight with two Phalanx CIWS carrier-mounted 20mm vulcan guns. Reason wins.
  • In the novelization of Rambo: First Blood Part II, one of these guns shows up on a helicopter. Every fourth bullet is a tracer bullet, leaving a column of fire from the weapon's mouth, leading to the weapon's nickname of "The Dragon", which is Truth in Television.
  • In the Armageddon Trilogy by Robert Rankin, this is lampshaded with a running gag that characters going into a fight say they wish they had 'an amazing rotary machine gun like Blaine had in Predator'. This exact phrase is used consistently until Elvis correctly identifies it as the M134 General Electric mini-gun.
  • The Dresden Files. Small Favor. Hendricks, on the helicopter, with the gatling gun. Which happens to be blasting The Ride of the Valkyries. While being piloted by an actual Valkyrie. Let it never be said that a Chooser of the Slain doesn't know how to make an entrance.
  • The Western series Gatling by Jack Slade had as its hero an operative for the Maxim Gun Company named Gatling. The series hook was that the title character used period automatic weapons, including gatling guns.
  • John Ringo's Unto the Breach features the Dragon, a modified Hind helicopter equipped with quad gatling guns. Another Hind owned by the Kildar uses the more conventional miniguns to port and starboard for defense when used as a troop transport.
  • The Hell's Gate series by David Weber gives us the Yerthak Pedestal Gun, a naval weapon designed to destroy torpedo boats and hastily converted by the Fort Salby garrison into makeshift anti-aircraft guns. They are four to six barreled Gatling Cannons that come in one-point-five-inch and two-point-five-inch calibers capable of firing shrapnel rounds, high-explosive or solid ammunition. They're used to shoot down dragons.
  • The titular mercenaries in David Drake's Hammer's Slammers novels use revolving energy guns called "Tribarrels". Even though they don't fire projectiles the point is the same: three rotating barrels to avoid overheating.
  • Mentioned in the Honor Harrington series where variants of the Gatling Gun were used for anti-missile defense until they were quickly replaced by newer Laser Clusters. They are still used by some second- and third-rate powers like the Silesian Confederacy and the Solarian League.


Live Action TV

  • MythBusters used a Gatling gun as the last stage of the "shooting fish in a barrel" analogy. They busted out a privately owned minigun and unleashed it on the barrel; by the time it was over, the barrel was in a million pieces and there was more lead in the fish than fish.
    • They also used the minigun on at least two other occasions: Once, to see if incendiary rounds could blow up a gas tank (busted), see if you could chop down a tree with bullets (confirmed) and blow up a propane tank (confirmed).
  • The penultimate episode of Stargate Atlantis had a scene of a Wraith being strafed by an A-10. Also, The Daedalus Variations showed us that the Tau'ri ship-mounted railguns are gatlings.
  • Wiseguy. Hitman Roger Loccoco has a car with a gatling gun firing from the trunk, and twin machine-guns between the headlights.
  • G3-X from Kamen Rider Agito has the handheld GX-05 Cerberus, which is utilized as a Finishing Move.
  • The Giga Streamer from Tokkei Winspector is a handheld energy Gatling Gun. Recoil and vibration makes it impossible to use effectively without the user wearing a Crash Tector suit - and even then, it has a steep learning curve.
  • In one episode of Sons of Guns, Will is challenged to build an electric gatling shotgun. The initial attempt fails. Miserably. Changing gears, they take 3 stock semi-auto Saiga shotguns off the shelf and mount them in the reconstructed remains of the gatling unit. It works well enough that the customer buys the result.
  • Andromeda's assault bots are armed with six Gauss Gatling guns, each firing guided rounds.
  • Power Rangers: The Red Battlezord has gatling laser cannons built into its arms. One of the Rescue Megazord's guns is a huge gatling gun. The Delta Megazord has gatling gun hands. The Supertrain Megazord is armed with a gatling missile launcher.
  • Gabrielle's descendant used one in "The Xena Scrolls.
  • Used in an elimination challenge during Season 3 of Top Shot; the goal was to cut through a group of telephone poles.
  • Deadliest Warrior season 3 has Theodore Roosevelt vs. Lawrence of Arabia, and one of Roosevelt's weapons was a hand-cranked gatling gun.


Manhwa

  • Novic from Priest carries around a gatling gun. He doesn't seem to have any trouble firing it from the hip.


Music

  • The Protomen present Proto Man and Mega Man with Gatling guns for arms in artwork and live performances, as opposed to the plasma cannons they have in the games.


Tabletop Games

  • Warhammer 40,000 loves these, from the "assault cannon" on Space Marine Terminators and Dreadnoughts, the Tau's Energy Weapon Burst Cannon, through the tank-shredding Vulcan Mega Bolter and Gatling Blaster, and right up to the Imperator Titan's Hellstorm cannon—a Gatling Energy Weapon the size of a skyscraper.
  • BattleTech commonly depicts many machineguns and Autocannons as rotary-style guns, and recently introduced the separate Rotary Autocannon as its own class of weapon.
  • Many mecha and vehicles in Rifts are adopting rotary railguns as antipersonnel weapons.
  • Shadowrun has, in addition to its more ordinary miniguns, a vehicle mounted weapon called the "Victory Rotary Assault Cannon", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: a rotary gun that fires artillery rounds.
  • The evil rat-like Skaven in Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy Battle, ever on the cutting edge of technological development, have gatling guns. Naturally, they're called ratling guns.
  • GURPS: Ultratech has gatling versions of just about everything which are at the low end of the high power weapons but have four times the rate of fire and about twice as many shots.
  • Gammarauders, a game about giant mutant cyborg animals fighting in the radioactive wastes after an apocalyptic nuclear war, features the Macrotechnic Popgun, so called because though it is of little use against the bioborgs it can still waste a lot of regular human soldiers, called popcorn because the bioborgs eat them like snacks.
  • Warmachine has two warjacks wielding gatling guns, both part of Cygnar's armies. The first is the Sentinel, a light warjack sporting a gatling gun for its right arm and a shield on its left and second is its bigger brother, the Cyclone heavy warjack. Cygnar also have chaingun teams among their ground troops.
  • Gatling guns exist in New Horizon. They're quite powerful, but extremely expensive.
  • Just one of the many weapons employed by the Jammers in Feng Shui. Subtle, these guys are not.


Video Games

  • The Terran Republic in PlanetSide have a handheld BFG gatling gun. It has a crazy rate of fire, ammo size, and damage per second. Unforunately, it's useless past 50m. Some of the Terran vehicles also have miniguns, but they're bigger and fire more slowly.
  • The pioneers of First Person Shooters, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, used these, the former as the player character's most powerful weapon, and the latter as his default automatic weapon. It's also used by bosses, Hans/Gretel Grosse and Hitler in the former, and Spider Mastermind in the latter. It's become a standard weapon in First Person Shooter games since.
  • Quake II features the "chaingun", a gatling gun which is one of few examples of this trope played straight in games. It has very high damage output and tremendous rate of fire, high enough to literally mince most enemies in a blink of an eye and deplete all player's bullets within few seconds of continuous firing.
  • Outlaws, the Wild West Themed FPS from the good old days of Lucasarts, had a gatling gun as a weapons. Due to it being mounted on a tripod, you had to be stationary to use it.
  • Though all the Unreal games have a minigun in one form or another, the Ballistic Weapons mod of Unreal Tournament 2004 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 if you conserve it.
    • Speaking of Unreal, the Pulse Gun in Unreal Tournament goes with this as well, having six barrels that rotate at a high rate whenever it's fired.
  • Command & Conquer makes fair use of these. The First-Person Shooter Renegade had mini-Gatling armed foot soldier for both GDI and Nod, with a few more scattered here or there on various weapons. In Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge Gatlings became their own weapon, and fired a steady stream of bullets that sped up the longer the gun fired on a single target (or another nearby). These were later given to the Chinese in Generals. One of the chinese subfactions in Zero Hour gives them to the standard infantry, making them incredibly powerful.
    • Tiberium Wars continues the proud tradition of gatling weapons, now in the hands of the Forgotten mercenaries. GDI also had gatling weapons mounted on the Hammerhead gunship in the Kane's Wrath expansion.
  • Grand Theft Auto occasionally features the absurd hand-held minigun.
  • Heavy Weapons Guy in Team Fortress 2 one-ups this by lugging around something resembling a dismounted GAU-8. Known simply as Sasha, this minigun weighs over 300 pounds and fires $200 rounds ten thousand times a minute (except in gameplay, when its fire rate drops to 2,400 rounds a minute). The Engineers Sentry Gun sports dual miniguns after the first upgrade.
  • In Resident Evil 4, one of the most powerful enemies is J.J, a huge guy with a belt-fed minigun, a later-stage counterpart to Dr. Salvador, the earlier "huge guy with a chainsaw." Lucky for you, it takes an obscene amount of time for him to spool up the barrels, fires it without much regard as to your location, and stops shooting as soon as a bullet connects with you. He also tends to appear in places with extremely convenient cover.
    • Resident Evil 2 and 3 featured an unlockable gatling gun. In the second game (aside from the first PS1 version), it was available in the easy mode.
    • In Resident Evil 5, you can unlock a gatling gun for Chris once you fully upgrade the first machinegun. It comes with a huge vision-obscuring backpack and Chris can't move as fast while equipped with it, but after a brief moment to spin it up, he can give everything in his path a dose of hot lead, and the backpack is bulletproof.
  • An alien "chaingun" appears in Perfect Dark. It's got sharp edges too.
  • Cosmic Break has three well-known weapons: Large Gatling, Buster Gatling and a Bazooka Gatling.
  • Vulcan Raven from Metal Gear Solid wields not only a full sized M61 Vulcan cannon, but he also carries its ammunition drum on his back. Though notably not any kind of power source. The titular model of Metal Gear is armed with twin Vulcan cannons for surface-to-air defense.
  • Universe At War has the minigun-wielding Colonel Moore as a hero.
  • Maya Schroedinger of Wild ARMs 3 manages to keep a Gatling gun hidden under her skirts.
  • Final Fantasy VII's Barret has a gatling gun built into his arm.
  • In Xenosaga, one of KOS-MOS' signature weapons is a triple set of tri-barreled Gatlings, that she could carry one-handed.
  • Makai Kingdom has gatling guns as equippable weapons.
  • In Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, one of Rozalin's special attacks was pulling a Gatling out of Hammerspace and opening up.
  • Serious Sam can use a chaingun rotary gun while running and not lose any accuracy. The Arachnoid enemies also have an Arm Cannon version. In Serious Sam II, one of the enemies carries a minigun too.
  • One of the purchasable weapons in Army of Two is an M134 Minigun.
  • In Super Robot Wars, when Kyosuke Nanbu findshis Super Prototype 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 with a gatling gun, which is misnamed as a Chaingun in the original Japanese text and in the English localization.
  • The Fallout games have several models of personal-scale gatling-style guns. Most playthroughs of the first game have the player first encountering them in the hands of eight-foot-tall, muscle-bound Super Mutants.
  • The relatively obscure FPS games Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter and Alpha Prime both feature assault rifles with 6 rotary barrels. This doesn't seem to be so much for practical functionality as it is for Rule of Cool.
  • Halo featured the Warthog, which was essentially a jeep with a gatling gun mounted on the back. In Halo 3, the player could fire a stationary turret-version of the gun, and then rip that gun off its stand and carry it.
  • In Dark Cloud 2, Max's final pistol/machinegun-type weapon is the Last Resort, which is a short-barreled Gatling gun that is wielded one-handed. Also, Steve's Machine Gun Arm attachment is an enormous Gatling gun, wider and longer than Max himself.
  • In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the player gets to use the 25mm GAU-12 Equalizer and a M134 Minigun in different stages. When you do, you can tell the developers were not scaling back the rate of fire. In-game cars take multiple bullets to blow up. This particular gat'ler accomplishes this goal nigh-instantly.
  • Modern Warfare 2 follows after Call of Duty 4 by giving you several instances where you can use a Minigun with incredible effectiveness. You can literally cut apart concrete monuments while taking out SAM sites; that's just how many bullets you're shooting with these things. Unlike the CoD4 Gatlings, there's no heat buildup to account for, so you can literally fire the Minigun for as long as you're in control of it.
  • During the gulag escape in Call of Duty Black Ops, you wield a man-portable minigun with the rather appropriate name of "The Death Machine." It makes short work of the guards, though the relatively limited ammunition supply means that you don't get to use it for all that long.
    • It also appears from care packages in Multiplayer, but with about half as much ammo, preventing it from being a Game Breaker.
    • In most of the Nazi Zombies maps, there is a way to get the Death Machine. And it has infinite ammo.
  • The Ace Combat series has gatlings mounted on many of the aircraft.
    • A cutscene in Ace Combat 5 prominently features a CIWS mount on the ONS Kestrel shooting at a missile.
  • The Standard Weapons of the B, I, and M Gears in Ace Online include rotating-barreled energy weapons like the Bate, the Jin/Demon Hunter, and the Sprint (which incidentally resemble actual gatling guns).
  • The fighter you fly in After Burner was based on the F-14 Tomcat, complete with M61 Vulcan cannon.
  • The first X-COM game has the multi-barreled Autocannon, a decent early game heavy weapon.
  • The titular tanks of the Metal Slug games use side-mounted gatling guns as their primary anti-infantry weapon. Many other vehicles in the series use similar weapons.
  • In the popular James Bond 007 game James Bond 007: Nightfire, the PC version features a portable minigun, although it has been created by the weapons lab of the evil Phoenix group, as some sort of explanation of how someone could carry it. In both the console and PC versions you can acquire a remote-controlled briefcase that unfolds into a minigun.
  • In The Matrix game Path of Neo, the player controls the helicopter's minigun for a level.
  • Total Annihilation's Expansion Pack, The Core Contingency, added Gatling artillery emplacements to each side. They wiped out your power reserves in a matter of seconds, but could erase an enemy base even faster.
  • Supreme Commander. The Cybrans have the Scathis Experimental Mobile Rapid-Fire Artillery which costs an arm and a leg to build and fire and has a large spread but if you can make one lay down constant suppressive fire on the enemy base (provided you can get into range), they are dead. The expansion Forged Alliance makes it even better: the Scathis had it's maximum range removed. That's right, it now can fire across the whole map. Too bad it has such a low damage that two heavy shields can hold off a single Scathis indefinitely.
  • In Armored Core For Answer, one can mount hand or back mounted gatlings onto your AC. Also of note is GA's arms fort great wall, possessing two sets of two gatlings the size of aircraft carriers.
  • In Rise of Legends, the Vinci hero Lenora rides a flying machine with a massive Gatling gun mounted on the bottom. Of course, it's not nearly effective as it should be.
  • Just Cause 2 has turret-mounted miniguns placed around most military bases. The player can actually pull them off and use them like a normal gun, but with some disadvantages—slower movement, no jumping or acrobatics, and no switching weapons. These are worth it, though, as just about any enemy will fall to a minigun in less than a second, and is quite capable of destroying hundred-meter radio masts in less than five.
  • Subverted in Escape Velocity, where the mass driver, described as "the modern-day equivalent of the ancient gatling gun," has only an average rate of fire and its shots travel far slower than the standard Frickin' Laser Beams, which also have the advantage of being primary weapons.
    • Escape Velocity:Nova's chaingun follows the trope straight, however, with a fire rate (while firing, as it fires in bursts of 20) of 1800 rounds per minute (the maximum allowed by the game per gun). Additionally, it has a longer range and tends to deal more damage than medium-range blasters (and can out-damage the heavy blasters).
  • In the game Syndicate, your remote-controlled cyborg agents will end up carting these around as their primary weapon after a while. In fact, because of ammo issues, they'll be carrying several. Each.
  • The Gatling Gun is one of the strongest weapons in Star FOX: Assault. Unlike the Machine Gun, it's strong enough to even tear up armored units.
  • The first Turok game, on the Nintendo 64, has a realistic-looking minigun in its arsenal (though with a pathetic rate of fire). The sequel Turok 2 takes this trope up a notch with the Firestorm Cannon, essentially a minigun version of a plasma gun with awesome noise. Needless to say, it's one of the best weapons.
    • Turok: Evolution took it to a more ridiculous level. Instead of being three or so spinning barrels, its three spinning groups of six barrels each (which also spin). And it mulches dinosaurs like nobody's business.
  • Although the quad, tri-barrel mass drivers of the Vengeance-class frigate in Star Wars: Empire At War: Forces of Corruption don't actually spin in-game, the layout of the barrels hints at them doing so, thus making them ship-mounted bullet spam cannons that ignore shields.
  • Like their film counterparts, the T-600s in the game of Terminator Salvation carry these as standard. At a few points, you can find mounted ones, which usually means you're in for a siege.
  • Defense Grid the Awakening's Gun towers start out with a wimpy chaingun, but can be upgraded to a tri-barreled gatling, then two tri-barreled gatlings. They're also Super Effective against Deflector Shields, and one of only three towers that can hit flying enemies.
  • Most of the levels in Left 4 Dead has a mini gun that is bolted to the ground and is found only in crescendo events and finales (but none are present in Blood Harvest).
  • Hitman 47 uses this to kill the 48 clones in the final level. In Contracts, the gun is carried around by a mental patient
  • Crysis features Miniguns called "hurricane". It unfortunately fires slower than a sub-machinegun and has worse accuracy. The weapon can only be used by Nano-Suited personnel, especially an Enemy General. Featured more prominently in the expansion where it's mounted on armoured vehicles and gun emplacements.
  • The second Battle Tanx game introduced the Rattler, a small tank built around GAU-8 gatling cannon, giving it considerable punch for its size.
  • The boss of the Wild West chapter in Live a Live (O.Dio) uses a Gatling gun. If he hits with it, it's pretty much an instant KO, though its limited firing arc makes it easy to avoid.
  • Descent features a Gatling gun in the form of the Vulcan Cannon, and the sequel ups the ante somewhat with the Gauss Cannon, a Gatling shotgun which uses the same ammo as the Vulcan cannon, albeit dealing MUCH more damage per round. The third game combines the two into the Vauss Cannon.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 3's final boss has a Gatling gun mounted on its head. It's slow even by video game standards (and yet one of the fastest rapid-fire attacks in the series), and barely does any damage unless you completely stop moving. Later games added a modified version (called Vulcan) to the player's arsenal; its ammo is very limited, but the bullets stun on contact.
  • Jak and Daxter's Vulcan Fury and its upgrades.
  • Will Rock has the Machinegun, which is weak but can shoot up to 1000 bullets (its whole reserve) without reloading and later the Minigun, which is far stronger, but can shoot only 100 bullets per round and then must be reloaded.
  • Rogue Galaxy's Deego's secondary weapon.
  • In House of the Dead: Overkill, the main characters find some miniguns "just lying around" that are used to take on the final boss. After beating the Director's Cut mode, the same minigun can be purchased for use in regular play.
  • EVE Online: Several guns in the game are gatling guns. The largest of which shoots 220mm shells at rapid fire rates. There are also Gatling Pulse Lasers and 75mm Gatling Railguns.
  • Champions Online has a handful of rotary gun weapon powers: a handheld Gatling Gun, the shoulder-mounted Mini Gun, and the remotely controlled Munitions Bots. Gatling Gun and Mini Gun are capable of piercing through targets, while the Munitions Bots can spray bullets in a wide cone of effect. It is possible to use all three simultaneously.
  • The Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter series has several rail shooter sequences where the player mans a Blackhawk mounted gatling gun. A few seconds of sustained fire is able to shred infantry and cut armored vehicles apart. However, unlike its real life counterpart, the gatling gun in the game is prone to overheating after continuous fire.
  • 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 screech.
  • In Warhammer 40,000: Soulstorm, in the campaign, the Tau Commander's starting weapon is an energy gatling gun.
  • The Star Trek Elite Force games feature a Tetryon Gatling gun.
  • Hellgate:Londons Gatling Rocket pistols. Fires up to a combined total of 1200 rounds per minute.
  • Crackdown 2's turret-mounted (but carryable, if your Agent is strong enough) miniguns are more a case of Gatling Bad. You can't use lock-on targeting while wielding one, nor can you climb ledges. They do tremendous damage, but since they can't be aimed easily and limit your agility, they're rarely worth using.
  • The gunner darklings from the video game adaptation of The Darkness carry miniguns.
  • Alien Swarm features two types, which are specific to the Special Weapons class.
  • Red Dead Redemption only allows you to access a gatling gun from a fixed position and only on a few missions of the many you do. It does not reduce the raw awesome of mowing dozens of mounted troops down with nothing but raw Dakka from the back of a steam train as it barrels down a railroad track towards its destination.
  • The Vulcan Cannon in SaGa 2 / Final Fantasy Legend II is one of these, although it did not reach its awesome Dakka potential until the DS remake, where we could finally see it in all its glory.
  • Alisa Amiella in Gods Eater Burst wields the red gatling gun Raging Lore as the gun part of her Swiss Army Weapon. Later on, the player can create the very same gun, or a blue version, named Silent Cry.
  • Shattered Union has Vulcan Anti Air unit, which is basicly a tank with Vulcan instead of cannon. Pacifica takes the cake tough, by mounting two cannon sized gatling guns on their special unit.
  • The Elite Powered Armor from FEAR 2 and its successor the Enhanced Powered Armor from FEAR 3 are equipped with infinite-ammo gatling guns capable of reducing most enemies to Ludicrous Gibs. The player must use caution when using them however, as holding down the trigger too long will cause the guns to overheat.
  • Terraria has the Minishark, which can be bought at the Arms Dealer for fifty gold. In addition, the gun can be crafted into the Star Cannon, the strongest weapon in the game that fires Fallen Stars For Massive Damage.
  • In the Naval Ops series, gatling guns can be mounted to defend against enemy missiles and aircraft. Rather larger gatling cannon (up to 406mm) can be used as a battleship's main armament.
  • The first available weapon in Guns of Icarus is the gatling gun. It comes with lots of dakka.
  • Armored Core 5 has a melee-version of this. A giant weapon consisting of 6 chainsaws that can either be positioned adjacent to each other to rip stuff to pieces, or in a circular fashion resembling a gatling-gun. The weapon is simply named the "Grind Blade", and is, according to a customization-trailer revealed to be the strongest weapon in the game, being able to rip even the strongest enemy mecha to pieces with only a few hits. It's also one of the biggest, bulkiest and heaviest weapons, thus making it less ultimate. But it's still a pretty awesome weapon.
  • X 3 Terran Conflict has the OTAS Venti starfighter. Despite sounding like a coffee, this is a seriously badass ship with twin wing-mounted gatling lasers.
  • Subject Delta uses a four-barreled variant in BioShock (series) 2. Its fire rate is surprisingly low.
  • In Alpha Protocol, if you hire Steven Heck to provide fire support for a mission in the Taipei subway, he mounts a miningun inside a subway car and performs a drive-by on the station platform where you're pinned down. No, seriously.


Web Animation

  • A gatling gun is seen once in Madness Combat 8: Inundation. The Auditor tries to kill Jesus with it, but misses because Jesus dodges it by levitating towards him very fast. If you think this sounds weird, look at the title again.


Web Comics


Web Original

  • In AH Dot Com the Series, Dave Howery's Canada-Destroying Mechs have Gatling gun arms, and enemy captain Ward has also been known to use a Gatling version of the standard plasma rifles (purely for Rule of Cool).
  • In Atop the Fourth Wall, Linkara used one to defeat Pyramid Head. Later, 90s Kid wielded it against Mechakara during his Big Damn Heroes moment with Harvey Finevoice and Ninja Style Dancer.
  • Global Guardians villain Caliber, a member of Hard Corps, wears a suit of Powered Armor whose primary weapon is a huge minigun mounted on his right shoulder.
  • FPS Russia has showcased a M134 Minigun in one of his videos. At the end he shows that while it's possible to fire it by hand it's still Awesome but Impractical
  • Coco's weapon in RWBY

Western Animation


Real Life

  • Richard Gatling invented the Gatling Gun in 1861, in time for occasional use in the American Civil War. It was a hand-cranked device on a small carriage, firing a rifle cartridge. Models varied between ten and six barrels. It was one of the first machine guns.
    • In 1890, a Gatling was mated with a motor for the first time. This gave such promising results that Gatling himself patented a version with 10 barrels and a built-in electric motor in 1893. It fired 50 rounds per second, a rate that would go unsurpassed for 60 years.
  • The rotary gun experienced renewed popularity in the second half of the 20th century as anti-aircraft weapons. Where firing windows are measured in fractions of seconds, higher rates of fire are a massive advantage and an externally powered gun can't be stopped by a dud cartridge. The 20mm M61 Vulcan, developed in 1959, is still in use to this day on US fighter aircraft. Newer versions of the M61 are lighter and have a faster rate of fire, with derivatives (GAU-22 and GAU-8) firing heavier shells.
  • The M134 Minigun is a smaller version of the Vulcan chambered in 7.62 NATO. It's used by some helicopters and ground vehicles as a more rapid-firing alternative to conventional machine guns. The huge ammunition stores required, power feeds and weight of the gun preclude a man-pack configuration.
  • The GAU-8 Avenger, a gun so enormous that the A-10 Thunderbolt II (AKA "Tank-Killer" or "Warthog") was built around it. It fires seventy 30mm depleted uranium rounds per second, each capable of penetrating 69mm of armor at 500m. The gun can expend its entire magazine of 1,200 rounds in 17 seconds, and at maximum fire rate, the recoil force is a significant fraction of the engines' thrust. The recoil is not enough to stall the airplane or fly it backward.
  • The T249 "Vigilante", a tank with a 37mm Gatling cannon.
  • The Russians built the Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-6-23, a gas operated rotary cannon firing at the incredible rate of 10,000 rounds per minute. Its higher-caliber relative GSh-6-30 has 6000 rpm.
    • And an even more powerful variant, that is mounted on CIWS fires can fire 10,000 rounds per minute (sasha was a Shout-Out to this gun, even though its actual firing rate is 2400) but is 2 tonnes heavier than the standard 630.
  • When President Obama was going on his procession to his inauguration, he had better protection than you probably realize; he was tailed by an Secret Service SUV with a gatling gun turret that pops out of the roof. See here.
    • While certainly complete overkill from a tactical perspective (a regular belt fed machine gun would do the job just as well, or even better considering a much reduced waste of ammo), this thing is just perfect for covering any escape. When that thing pops out from nowhere, it is guaranteed to get everyones complete attention immediately with any possible attackers very likely forgetting about their original target. Even so, the amount of collateral damage that would occur from actually trying to use this to fight off assassins makes it just ludicrous.
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