The Rockets

Lore & Background

In the world of Serious Sam, the megalomaniacal Dr. Mental has assembled a vast army of mechanical horrors and is methodically working toward global annihilation. His first target in the player's campaign is a rocket-launch installation, a facility bristling with fuel lines, gantries, and half-assembled warheads. The Rockets level drops the player into the middle of this site just as Mental's forces pour in from every direction—bipedal gun-platforms, hovering bombers, and the signature rocket-troopers that give the level its name.

The level's geography is deliberately readable: a central launch pad flanked by fuel-storage annexes, a control tower, and an open coastal stretch where the sea provides a hard boundary. Weapon pickups are scattered along the expected path, escalating from a sidearm to a shotgun to a rocket launcher, each new tool arriving just as the enemy mix outpaces the last. The comedic script is baked into the level design itself—enemies explode in cartoonish bursts, a fuel tank will happily detonate if you shoot it while standing next to it, and the boss fight at the end is less a tactical puzzle than a timed sequence of "aim at the big thing, keep it from hitting you, repeat until it stops."

As the franchise's entry point, The Rockets also carries a quiet narrative function: it is the moment the player learns that Mental's plan is not a single doomsday device but a rolling campaign of destruction, and that Sam's response to any threat, regardless of scale, is to find a bigger gun.

In Their Own Story

The salt air stings your eyes. You're crouched behind a fuel drum on the launch gantry, watching a rocket-trooper line up a shot at the control tower. The missile fires. You duck. It wipes the antenna clean. You stand up, pull the pistol you found in the sand, and fire twice. The trooper sparks, stumbles, and topples into a crate of spare warheads. The crate does not, mercifully, explode. You jog to the next platform, grab the shotgun, and hear the whine of three more rockets incoming. You grumble about your lunch. You return fire. The sea is very blue. The sky is very full of things that are trying to kill you. You think this is fine.

Reader's Guide

You spawn on the coastal approach to the launch facility with a pistol and a health pack. The first wave is a handful of gun-platforms and a couple of rocket-troopers; the beat here is pure "wait, how many of these are there?" as the count climbs past what feels reasonable. Grab the shotgun at the fuel annex and the level shifts into a more frantic rhythm—Bombers join the mix and you're learning to track two projectiles at once.

The mid-level stretch runs through the control tower and the gantry walkways. Pick up the rocket launcher and the comedy lands: you are now outgunning the things that were outgunning you. The enemies don't seem to mind. They keep coming. A fuel-tank chain-detonation sequence is the set-piece here—shoot the tank, back up, watch the shockwave clear the platform. It is the level's little "you did that on purpose" moment.

The boss is a large rocket-automaton at the launch pad. The fight is a loop of dodging its salvo, shooting its exposed thrusters, and repeating. The comedic beat is the sheer disproportion: you are one man with a rocket launcher versus a vehicle the size of a bus, and it is losing. The level ends with it tumbling into the sea.

A note on continuity: the exact enemy roster and weapon-drop positions in The Rockets shifted slightly between the original 2001 PC build and later console/Steam ports, and a small number of fans still argue over whether the Bombers appear in wave two or wave three. The core structure—pistol, shotgun, rockets, boss—has remained consistent across all versions.

No major retcons affect this level, but be aware that Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (2002) reuses the same engine and some enemy models, which can make early-Sam levels feel like a direct sequel rather than a prequel if you play them back-to-back.

Did You Know?

• Serious Sam (2001) was developed by Croteam, a studio based in Zadar, Croatia, and the game became one of the studio's defining titles.
• The game was noted for rendering unusually large numbers of enemies on screen simultaneously for its era, a technical flex that The Rockets showcases from the very first wave.
• The Serious Engine, Croteam's in-house engine, powered the original and was later licensed to other developers for titles like GRAW and Serious Sam 2.
• The franchise's signature humor—absurd enemy designs, deadpan weapon pickups, and cartoonish destruction—was established in the first game's levels and has remained a through-line across every entry.