'Hans Zimmer of Shareware': Industry Mourns Bobby Prince

"Bobby was a prolific creator. Looking back and considering his body of work, he was essentially the Hans Zimmer of early shareware games." That's how Apogee and 3D Realms co-founder George Broussard described Bobby Prince in a tribute posted to X following the composer's death on June 16 at the age of 81.

Broussard's full remembrance is one of the most detailed accounts of what Prince was actually like to work with. He described a man who would fly in for week-long stints on projects like Duke Nukem 3D, wandering the office with a recorder to capture sounds, talking to team members to understand what kind of music each moment needed. "It was a joy to have him in the office and he felt like every other team member," Broussard wrote. "What that man did on an AdLib card with limited instruments was staggering."

Prince's family confirmed his passing through an obituary posted to Legacy, describing him as someone who "approached life with gratitude and an open heart." Before he ever touched a synthesizer for a video game, Prince served as a platoon leader in the Vietnam War, then worked in counselling and law. He didn't start composing for games until the early 1990s, when he began collaborating with id Software and Apogee Software.

The Doom soundtrack's final honour

What makes the timing of Prince's death particularly striking is that just weeks earlier, the Library of Congress selected the Doom soundtrack for its National Recording Registry, recognizing it as one of 25 recordings worthy of permanent preservation. It was only the third video game soundtrack ever inducted, after Super Mario Bros. And Minecraft. The Registry cited its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance, placing it alongside new additions like Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds and the original cast album of Chicago.

I wrote about Prince's passing earlier this week, but the tributes that have continued to surface since then deserve attention on their own. Doom co-designer John Romero wrote on X that Prince "left an incredible mark on games and on my life." Composer Lee Jackson, who worked alongside Prince on Duke Nukem 3D and Rise of the Triad, called him "a teacher, a mentor, and a friend" in a post on Bluesky. "We worked together so well on Duke Nukem 3D that we could anticipate what the other was going to do next," Jackson said. Id Software co-founder Tom Hall described him as "a true legend" and "such a nice man."

Prince's catalogue stretches well beyond the games most people associate with him. He scored Catacomb 3-D back in 1991, composed for Blake Stone, Bio Menace, and multiple Commander Keen episodes, and worked on Duke Nukem II, Zorro: A Cinematic Action Adventure, and the 1998 wargame Axis & Allies. His final game soundtrack was for Wrack, a Doom-inspired FPS, in 2014. But it was always Doom that defined him. Those frantic, heavy metal-influenced tracks, packed with nods to Metallica, Judas Priest, and Diamond Head, became inseparable from the game itself. The original Doom sits at a 92% critic recommendation rate on OpenCritic decades later, and Prince's music is a huge reason why.

Broussard's "Hans Zimmer of shareware" line might sound like hyperbole, but it captures something real. Prince wasn't scoring orchestral epics with a full studio budget. He was writing melodies on hardware that could barely reproduce them, for games distributed on floppy disks, and those melodies stuck in people's heads for thirty years. His influence runs through Mick Gordon's work on 2016's Doom and into Doom: The Dark Ages.