Doom was released on December 10, 1993. Bobby Prince downloaded a copy to hear how it sounded. Some of the songs playing in it were ones he had written as quick examples, imitations of metal bands, made while he doubted that a score of nothing but metal would work. He remembered thinking: "Here's a lawsuit waiting to happen!"
No lawsuit came. Prince said later that he did catch hell for stealing songs, and that he had nothing to do with them making it into the game. The man this happened to had spent years around the law. He was born in 1945, grew up in Athens, Georgia, and took a psychology degree at the University of Georgia in 1966. From 1969 to 1970 he served as a platoon leader in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He earned a master's in counseling in 1972, then a law degree at Woodrow Wilson College of Law, and passed the bar in 1980.
Music ran alongside all of it. In 1964 he and high school friends had started an R&B band called The Jesters. Decades later, his path into games began with his brother David, a singer and bass player who performed a one-man show over backing tracks. Professional backing tracks were hard to find then, so Prince began making them for him. He ended up making a lot. He also became fascinated with MIDI, the way computers could now play real music on their own.
Around 1991, a forum message went out looking for people to write computer game music. Accounts differ on who wrote to whom first, but the thread ran from that message to Scott Miller at Apogee, and from Miller to John Romero at id Software. Prince's first game work was on Commander Keen. One song he wrote for Keen Dreams was turned down because it would have made the game too big for a single floppy disk. In 1992 he scored Wolfenstein 3D and designed one of its levels.
Prince said game companies of that time wanted one person who could do everything: write the music, make the sound effects, understand the hardware, and deliver fast. When id came to him about Doom, Tom Hall's design document, the Doom Bible, described fast, violent, futuristic combat against demons. Romero and the others loved heavy metal and wanted the game to feel like a metal album cover come to life.
Prince wasn't sure an all-metal score would work. So he wrote the quick metal covers and tried it. The developers handed him stacks of CDs by Metallica, Pantera, Alice in Chains and Slayer. He said he came more from jazz and broader traditions, and had to absorb that vocabulary quickly. What interested him was a different problem: "how do you make a computer sound dangerous?"
He turned out to be right about the levels. Some of them needed music that was pensive rather than in-your-face, and after trying the all-metal route the team chose a mix. Romero decided where each piece went. The sound cards of the day left little room, and every note and every sound effect had to fight for space. Prince also negotiated rights to his audio, and was later paid when some of his sound effects appeared in films. He went on to write music for Doom II, Duke Nukem II, Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D, and received the Game Audio Network Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.
On May 22, 2026, the Library of Congress interviewed him. Asked why the Doom soundtrack lasted, he said the tracks had strong riffs and recognizable hooks, and that gamers could hum them afterward. That same month the soundtrack was inducted into the National Recording Registry. Bobby Prince died on June 16, 2026, at the age of eighty-one. —If you doubted the plan, would you argue, or would you quietly make the test and let it speak for you?