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The Metalification of the Blues: How the Doom Soundtrack Used the Past to Electrify the Future

By July 28, 2026No Comments9 min read

“Doom” Soundtrack – Bobby Prince, composer (1993) Essay by Dan Spencer

The first thing that hits you is drums, then guitar, then thrash metal as you enter a world of poisonous green slime pits, demons to fight, and a percentage of potential kills tracked after each successful level. For 1993, this is heavy.

Our story begins when John Romero, co-founder of id Software, hands composer Bobby Prince a stack of albums as the direction for the soundtrack of a new video game called DOOM. Pantera, Slayer, Alice in Chains, Metallica, plus one rough guide: make the music like Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath.[1]

Bobby’s composition source files for the game surfaced in 2023, and the file comments label the homages to the original stack of metal albums outright. The “At Doom’s Gate” file cites Metallica’s “Master of Puppets.” “Kitchen Ace and Taking Names” cites Pantera’s “Rise.”[2] These and other metal-inspired pieces on the soundtrack pay homage as they walk right up to the line of copyright infringement and cheekily peer over the walls of potential litigation to see what is on the other side. As far as I can find, nobody ever sued anybody over them.

Metal music is what Bobby was asked for, and by most accounts that was exactly what was delivered, along with some ambient textures, to accompany the heart-pounding shooter game.

The metal is real.

And, I think there may be more to the story.

The metal is a paint job over a much older machine.

Underneath the distorted guitars, heavy bass lines, and brutal riffs lies one of the most storied American music traditions: The Blues.

To understand how and why the Blues runs through this soundtrack, let’s start with Bobby Prince. In 1993, he was forty-eight years old. A Vietnam veteran. A lawyer who passed the bar in 1980,[3] and before all that, he was a working musician. In the mid-1960s, Bobby played in the Jesters, an Athens, Georgia, Rhythm and Blues and Motown cover band that backed touring acts like Marvin Gaye, the Drifters, and the Platters.[4] Decades later, he answered a post on a Prodigy message board[5] asking for people who could write music for computer games. An electronic music tools autodidact, he fit the bill, standing out from about fifty other composers who answered the call.[6] The post led to Apogee Software, Apogee led to id, and by Doom, Bobby had already scored several games including the 1992 release Wolfenstein 3D.[7]

The composer id asked to write a metal soundtrack was a Rhythm and Blues man first.[8] Listen with that in mind and you cannot unhear it. The clues are everywhere. The ambiguity between major and minor. The I, IV, V chord progressions, sometimes matching a twelve-bar Blues, sometimes taking liberties with how long each chord lasts for.

Listen to “The Imp’s Song.” The key is F♯…something. The alternating major to minor harmony that enters in the third repetition of the riff keeps you guessing, and that ambiguity is a Blues signature all by itself, albeit presented in a delightfully unorthodox way. The harmony sits on the I chord for a long stretch. Moves to the IV. Comes back. Then V, IV, I, V. That is a classic Blues progression, done up all heavy-like with an androgynous key.

Once you hear it there, you hear it everywhere. “Dark Halls” runs I, IV, V. “On the Hunt” is a Blues dressed in a Phrygian major mode. “They’re Going to Get You” moves from the I to the IV like any twelve-bar Blues. The melody is another story. It creeps around in half steps and sounds like it is going to throw you into the back of a blacked-out van, tires screech and you are never to be heard from or seen again.

Zoom in one more level. The “Dark Halls” riff has the 3 right before the ♭3. Accompanying that ♭3 are the 6 and the 1 it started on. Together they spell a IV7 with its root left out. You hear the IV anyway. A Russian nesting doll of Blues: the whole I-to-IV progression compressed into a single instance of a riff that comes right out of a slippery major to minor Blues move.

Another gem hides in “Untitled.” The track opens on muted guitar chugs, a rhythm move straight out of Pantera’s “Mouth for War.” Then Bobby hands the chug to a string section. And the chord the strings play is the “Jimi Hendrix” chord, a I7(♯9): the major third and the minor third stacked into the same chord, over a harmony we already met as minor. Pantera brings the rhythm. The Blues brings the harmony. The strings walk in to play it. Like…who thinks to do this?

Some tracks are a bit more metal in the modulation of the initial riff. “Intermission from Doom” moves to the ♭III. The gesture mirrors the spirit of the Blues. Sit on an idea. Move the whole idea to new ground. Bring it home. That gesture is the grammar of the Blues. And here is the thing about the metal Bobby was handed as reference: it kept the pentatonic scales and power chords from Robert Johnson and Lead Belly. After all, metal is the rebellious great-grandson of traditional Blues. Bobby gets Great-Grandpa to speak in the “only fourteen-year-olds sound cool saying this” lingo of the day.

This Metalification of the Blues is the inheritance of Bobby’s musical life well lived.

Listen to “Suspense.” It runs on an ostinato figure of three notes: 1, 2, ♭3, played in the order 2, 1, ♭3, 1. Different sequences of minor ostinato is now part of the DNA of menace in game music.[9]

Bobby handed down more than musical figures. Listen to “Waltz of the Demons.” Timpani, xylophone, piccolo: a true orchestral moment. Now if you score a dark action game with an orchestra and add in the hybrid of electronic sounds, nobody blinks.

Look at the puzzle a first-person shooter hands a composer. Will the player finish the level or “die” in nine seconds or nine minutes? You cannot know. When the timer runs low in the 1985 game Super Mario Bros., the music speeds up. Same music, faster, amping up the expectation and the stakes as the player amps up the gameplay. Bobby’s tracks make a different move. They don’t just loop. They accumulate, stacking new layers with each pass of the riff. But it is not adaptive. There is nothing you can do in the game (I have found) to get the music to change other than wait for it to progress.

Perhaps most importantly, this soundtrack sets a tone of bringing in the music of the day custom-composed for the game, not a licensing deal for already existing popular music.

Some think of Video Game Music as being banal beeps and boops, but it is so much more than that. It can be anything and everything, with composers holding the same standards, discipline, and quality of output as any other art form. The beeps and boops are high art worthy of every accolade and honor.

On May 14, 2026, this score became the third video-game recording selected for the National Recording Registry.[10] Bobby Prince died thirty-three days after the announcement, at eighty-one.[11]

The “Doom” Soundtrack is a document of an American shouldering one of America’s oldest musical languages to do the work we have always done: see a vision for how things could be, get a new paint job to match a soon-to-be-explored frontier, and survive the trip to tell the tale.

Dan Spencer is a music teacher, music book author, video game music composer, and the founder of Best Music Coach (bestmusiccoach.com). His twelve books on music theory, composition, guitar, piano, and songwriting, “Compose Legendary Video Game Music” among them, include six #1 Amazon bestsellers in their categories. His soundtracks stream on Spotify, his indie game credits ship on Steam and itch.io, and his songs have charted on Beatport and Traxsource. He has helped hundreds of students one-on-one and thousands more through his books and courses, and he breaks down game soundtracks live for 129,000+ subscribers on his channel Music Theory for Gamers.

Notes

  1. Reference albums: Tom Regan, feature on the making of Doom’s soundtrack, Louder/Metal Hammer, May 20, 2026 (Romero: “We gave him CDs from Pantera, Slayer… Alice In Chains, too”), https://www.loudersound.com/features/doom-story-behind-metal-videogame-soundtrack. Metallica among the reference albums: Daniel Kreps, Bobby Prince obituary, Rolling Stone, June 20, 2026, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bobby-prince-doom-video-game-composer-dead-obituary-1235581084/. Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath tapes as a rough guide: “Robert Prince,” DoomWiki (“For inspiration Romero handed Prince tapes with what he calls ‘Tony Martin-era Black Sabbath’, to serve as rough guides for ‘what we are looking for’”), https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Robert_Prince. ↩
  2. “Musical inspirations behind Doom’s music,” DoomWiki (source-MIDI file comments naming “Master of Puppets” and “Rise”), https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Musical_inspirations_behind_Doom%27s_music; “At Doom’s Gate,” VGMPF, https://vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/At_Doom’s_Gate. ↩
  3. “Robert Prince,” DoomWiki, https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Robert_Prince; “Bobby Prince,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Prince. ↩
  4. “The Jesters (R&B band),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jesters_(R%26B_band); “Bobby Prince,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Prince. Both draw on Chris Starrs, Athens Banner-Herald/OnlineAthens, November 27, 2009. ↩
  5. Prodigy was one of the earliest mass-market online services in the United States, a dial-up forerunner of the web run as a joint venture of IBM and Sears. It rolled out nationally in September 1990; its message boards and email were among its most popular features, and by 1993 it was the largest consumer online service in the country. “Prodigy (online service),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service). ↩
  6. Bobby Prince interview, Quarter Circles, April 2, 2020 (Prince: “there was a post on Prodigy’s computer music board asking was there anyone on that board that could write some music for computer games”; “he [Scott Miller] had received about 50 responses from his post on Prodigy, and he had decided mine was the most interesting”), https://quartercircles.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/bobby-prince-composer-of-doom-doom-2-interview/. ↩
  7. The Prodigy post and the Apogee-to-id chain: “Bobby Prince,” Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki (“Prince saw a messageboard on Prodigy asking for people interested in music composition for computer games… he was contacted by Scott Miller of Apogee Software. This led him to a talk with John Romero of id Software”), https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Bobby_Prince; Bobby Prince interview, Quarter Circles, April 2, 2020 (Prince: “Scott told me that he was going to have id Software call me”), https://quartercircles.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/bobby-prince-composer-of-doom-doom-2-interview/. ↩
  8. Bobby’s previous soundtracks used the Blues including “Security center from Commander Keen IV, “Omegamatic” from Commander Keen V, and “Faster” from Commander Keen VI. ↩
  9. Bobby uses an ostinato technique in his earlier work Wolfenstein 3D’s “Enemy Around the Corner.” Due to note choice, this earlier ostinato is more “sneak and spy” and less “rip and tear.” “Wolfenstein 3D (DOS),” Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki, https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Wolfenstein_3D_(DOS). ↩
  10. Library of Congress, National Recording Registry 2026 announcement, May 14, 2026 (“For the third time, video game music was selected with the soundtrack from Doom”), https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/national-recording-registry-inducts-sounds-of-taylor-swift–beyonc—the-go-go-s–vince-gill–weezer/s/bc258688-e655-4ffb-9f91-f32b94956f36; National Recording Registry, 2026 induction list, https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/recording-registry/registry-by-induction-years/2026/. ↩
  11. Daniel Kreps, Bobby Prince obituary, Rolling Stone, June 20, 2026, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bobby-prince-doom-video-game-composer-dead-obituary-1235581084/; family obituary for Robert “Bobby” Prince III, Legacy.com, https://www.legacy.com/legacy/robert-bobby-prince-lll. ↩