Bobby Prince Got His Library of Congress Nod Just in Time

Just last month, the Library of Congress announced that the original Doom soundtrack had been selected for its National Recording Registry, one of only three video game soundtracks ever preserved alongside Super Mario Bros. And Minecraft. Bobby Prince, the man who composed it, died on June 16 at the age of 81. He was alive when the news broke. He knew.

I keep coming back to that timing. Prince spent the last decade and a half of his life largely out of the games industry, his final credited soundtrack being 2014's Wrack. He'd moved on. But the work hadn't moved on from him. Mick Gordon built 2016's Doom reboot soundtrack directly on the foundation Prince laid, and you can still hear echoes of those original Metallica-adjacent MIDI riffs in Doom: The Dark Ages. The man composed on an AdLib sound card with limited instruments, and George Broussard, co-founder of Apogee and 3D Realms, called him "essentially the Hans Zimmer of early shareware games" in a tribute posted to X.

Prince wasn't just the Doom guy, either. He scored Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, multiple Commander Keen episodes, and worked alongside composer Lee Jackson on Duke Nukem 3D. Jackson wrote on Bluesky that Prince was "a teacher, a mentor, and a friend," and that they worked together so well they could anticipate each other's next move. John Romero said Prince "left an incredible mark on games and on my life." Id Software's official account kept it simple: "Your music lives on forever."

The Library of Congress Registry described its 25 new inductees as "audio treasures worthy of preservation for all time." Prince's Doom soundtrack sits alongside Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds and Fly Me to the Moon by Kaye Ballard. According to his family's obituary, Prince received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the video game industry back in 2006. Twenty years later, the country caught up. I'm glad he was still here to see it.