Bobby Prince, the Man Who Gave Doom Its Sound, Has Died at 81

Bobby Prince, the composer who gave Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Duke Nukem 3D their sound, has died at 81. He passed on June 16. I got my first PC at twelve, Christmas of 1995, and for me these were some of the biggest games of my youth. So this one lands hard.

If you came up on early id Software and Apogee games, you already know his work even if you never knew his name. Prince scored Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, Doom in 1993, Doom II in 1994, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D in 1996 alongside Lee Jackson. The driving, metal-adjacent MIDI of Doom’s E1M1 is one of the most recognizable pieces of music gaming has ever produced.

He was a lifelong musician and a practicing lawyer who got fascinated by MIDI, and he used that obsession in ways that were genuinely clever. He deliberately assigned sound effects to different MIDI frequencies than the music so the gunfire and the growls would cut through the score instead of muddying it.

He got his due near the end. In May 2026, just a month before he died, the Library of Congress added the Doom soundtrack to its National Recording Registry, a rare honor for a video game score and a quiet acknowledgment that this music is part of the cultural record now. Tributes came from id Software, from John Romero, from Tom Hall.

Rest easy, Bobby. The music outlives all of us.