Early video game composer Robert Caskin Prince III, who composed many famous soundtracks of the 90s forward, has passed away. An obituary and statement from iD Software give testament to his involvement with one of the biggest gaming houses of the 1990s and beyond.
Bobby Prince’s Doom soundtrack was inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry earlier this year.
His personal blog has a lot of really great anecdotes and recollections of those early days of video game music. He talks about trying to convince AdLib and Sound Blaster that video games are a market worth courting, sourcing FM synthesizer patches and sound conversion software, the costs of modem calls to distant BBSes, and interactions with game developers and publishers. There’s also material about more recent video game happenings.
I suspect many readers of this forum, and indeed many people in general of a certain age (and younger!) can bring the Doom E1M1 background music to mind as easily as any number of platinum artists’ works.