Doom composer Robert Caskin “Bobby” Prince III has died at 81, his family has confirmed. Prince helped give some of gaming’s earliest classics their voice, and his work was closely bound up with id Software’s rise.
He wrote the music for landmark games including Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D.
The man who helped define video game music
Prince’s work drew recognition inside the games industry and outside it, with honors piling up across the course of his career.
The biggest may have come earlier this year, when the Doom soundtrack for preservation through a program dedicated to recordings considered vital to the nation’s musical heritage. That means Prince’s work will be kept for future generations and, according to the Library of Congress, it’s only the third time a video game has been given that distinction.
It didn’t take long for Prince’s former colleagues to respond after the news broke. John Romero, the designer behind Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, said that “he left a huge mark on games and on my life.” George Broussard, co-founder of 3D Realms and Apogee, said that “he was blessed with a creative gene, and a generation of early gamers were blessed with his music”.
Those tributes say a lot about how much Prince was admired by the people who worked alongside him.
His death also brings something else into focus. Video games are still a young medium, at least compared with film, television, or popular music, but many of the people who built that early history are now well into old age.
News like Prince’s death is the kind of news we’re going to see more often over the next 10 or 20 years. The gaming world still isn’t used to it. But it will become part of growing older as a medium, because video games are aging, and so are the people who helped define them.
