Bleep, now with added bloop!
March 28, 2007 9:56 AM   Subscribe

The dark side of Phobos, soundtrack tunes of the seminal first person shooter Doom from 1993 as an album remade by fans. The project originated at Overclocked Remix, a site dedicated to album endeavors of this sort. Of course there are others doing this as well, the freeware Jump'n'Run Doukotsu Monogatari (Cave Story) for example got this treatment. Not as albums, but SID tunes have been remixed a lot (e.g. here, here) and by Machinae Supremacy. Would you like a radio station with this music to tune into? You've got it.
posted by Glow Bucket (16 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Here's to downloading Doom from BBSes over 2400 baud and then swearing because my sad little 386sx didn't play it that fast.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:28 AM on March 28, 2007


Cool links, good post, thank you!

The Bittorrent distribution of The Dark Side Of Phobos appears to contain all the tracks in both MP3 and FLAC, and is a whopping 750+MB. Just a warning.
posted by Western Infidels at 10:52 AM on March 28, 2007


The Overclocked project for Street Fighter II, "Blood on the Asphalt"
is nearly on constant rotation in my WinAmp playlist.
posted by The Giant Squid at 11:14 AM on March 28, 2007


I'm still plucking up the courage to play Doom 3. Ah, such a great game. Thanks for the music!
posted by algreer at 11:21 AM on March 28, 2007


I'm still miffed that I have an actual Doom CD, but it's only the shareware version. I want the full thing, damnit!

(I do have the full Doom II cd, though, so that's something. A friend gave both to me several years ago, and decided he didn't care if I kept them. I plan on hanging on to them, so that I can shake them angrily at the youngsters and say "In my day, games were GRAINY and PIXELATED and ran in 640x480 in DOS!")
posted by caution live frogs at 11:36 AM on March 28, 2007


My favorite is the Earthbound remix project.
posted by grobstein at 11:37 AM on March 28, 2007


gg nextmap
posted by prostyle at 11:57 AM on March 28, 2007


Holy crap, grobstein, you just made my day.

::whistles the Saturn Valley theme while pining for Mother 3's Japanese-only status::
posted by Mayor West at 11:58 AM on March 28, 2007


Having always been a huge fan of the music from doom, I was moderately disappointed with dark side of Phobos when I heard it. Not that I necessarily think it's bad, but it definitely didn't fit with my idea of the doom music, or how I felt most of it was intended. Definitely not my cup of tea. The significant exception to that was E1M1, which I thought was very nice. I'm going to give it another try, though.

Of course, I never knew the extent to which the best parts of Doom 1's music was pulled from metal songs - I should have wondered why Bobby Prince put together one game's worth of fantastic music and never really did anything that impressive afterward.

Blood on the Asphalt, however, has so far impressed me tremendously. The Ken Stage is fantastic - I did a Ken Stage remix once, and it sounded far better than the original SNES track, but it isn't a tenth of what this one is.

Also, in my day, doom ran at 320x200! And I only got about 15fps on my 486 that I got just so I could play it.
posted by pinespree at 12:35 PM on March 28, 2007


I absolutely love the music in Civilization IV, the theme for which, Baba Yetu is available for download.
posted by Manjusri at 1:47 PM on March 28, 2007


E1M1... what a great song for the beginning of such a revolutionary game. My experience of Doom's sound was interesting, because when I first got the game, I didn't have a sound card in my 486 SX, so I played through all three episodes with only the PC speaker giving a weak little "bloom!" as a crappy excuse for a shotgun report., and a buzz to indicate that a monster had seen me. When I eventually bought a Pro Audio Spectrum card off of a classmate and played Doom all over again, I really appreciated what a difference the sound made to the overall experience of that game, especially the distant, ominous growling you could hear echoing through the halls.

When I learned that Doom 3 would be a remake of the original, I was hoping they'd have a new version of the E1M1 song to start the game off. This is the next best thing!
posted by good in a vacuum at 2:36 PM on March 28, 2007 [1 favorite]


oh awesome. i totally learned how to play 3 or 4 songs from the original doom, almost by osmosis. so many earworms. this is great.
posted by es_de_bah at 5:35 PM on March 28, 2007


I remember the Doom music very well.

Doom was a watershed in a way that people don't remember today: having an online fan community keeping abreast of the game's development. I first learned about Doom about six or so months before the release date and followed development of it avidly. I had just bought a Gravis Ultrasound sound card and Doom supported it. Recall that in those days most sound cards produced MIDI music with FM synthesis. The GUS used sampling and sounded much better for that and other reasons.

I got pretty involved in analyzing and working with those MIDI files. I compiled a list of the instruments used in the game and released it on the net. That file still shows up in the Doom repository.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:47 PM on March 28, 2007


Thank you prostyle, these comparisons snippets are really interesting.

When I recently tried out zDoom with Doom 1, I was astonished how well I remembered not only some of the tunes but how I still knew a lot of the level details. In a way it felt like walking from my parents house to school again as a lot of associations came up this way.
posted by Glow Bucket at 11:38 PM on March 28, 2007


There was some file copier utility for the Amiga. The entire left edge of the UI had a trio of bouncing color bars that acted like LED peak meters.

It's a longshot, but does anybody recall this?
posted by Moistener at 11:05 AM on March 29, 2007


(duh/arg)

It had delightful music that I wish to hear again.
posted by Moistener at 11:05 AM on March 29, 2007


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