Yeh, that and the little touches they added to the difficulty selection and "do you want to quit?" prompts. I think they topped Mechwarrior 2's "Embrace cowardice?" years before it ever came to be.

Awesome, what level have you reached so far? Yeah, the amount of rocket launching weapons, drunk missiles, the outrageous magic weapons, those strange powerups, and specially the entire funny tone of the game make it stand out of the early era classic FPS games.
BTW, Im trying to setup organized online rott net games, anyone would like to volunteer their time? :)

ROTT had some of the first TRUE gibbing in it, if not the first true. Sure, the enemy models in Doom would break apart into little gory piles if they got hit with a rocket, but they didn't truly explode into gibs. If I'm not mistaken, ROTT may have pioneered that idea.
EDIT- Well, it wasn't THE first game to use it, but it was damn close. Smash TV, released in 1993 was apparently the first game to use the gibbing concept. Followed by the "break apart" models in Doom in 1994, then the true gibbing found in ROTT in 1995. The next game after that would have been Quake II in 1997, or perhaps the original Quake, which the release year of which escapes me at the moment. Since Quake II was released in 97, I'll just assume that Quake was released in 96 or thereabouts.

I'm really glad GOG got a hold of ROTT. One of my favorite shooters from my young age. =)
Old school gibbing and awesomeness!

http://www.3drealms.com/rott/originalspec.html
you may find this article interesting. also all of the actors for the guards and bosses were apogee staff at the time or related to staff. they beat doom to in having to kill an program team membet to win the game since the final boss is tom hall.