If you are Gen X and want to feel old, here is some good news. The soundtrack for the original "Doom" video game has been enshrined by the Library of Congress.
In 1993, I played "The Terminator: Rampage" made by Bethesda Softworks and I liked the story, I liked the first-person aspect of it all, but man was it slow.
Then "Doom" was released that same month. Free of charge. It had basically no story, it was pure mania, but the code by a few people at id Software flew. It was downright revolutionary. Whereas Terminator Rampage ran terrible no matter what I tried, it feel like Doom could run on any old Intel 8088. I thought "Ultima Underworld" was well coded (olds like me thought about that sort of thing back then) but Doom was next level.
It got most of the acclaim it deserved, like Game of the Year from PC Gamer and Computer Gaming World. Terminator Rampage sold 30,000 copies right away and then cratered while Doom sold 2,000,000 - and you had to mail-order it if you wanted to go beyond the early Shareware levels. Up to 10 percent of the US population played it. Not 10 percent of gamers, the entire country.
Now its Industrial Metal MIDI Magic soundtrack by Bobby Prince, attorney-at-law, is in the Library of Congress. You read that right. Lawyer. Prince says he was handed a stack of CDs by John Romero, Doom architect, and went from there. He created the sound effects also. Now his work has been archived by the National Recording Preservation Board.
Because I never throw anything computer-related out, I still have that shareware disk, and my bought copy as well. And it remains the standard by which shooters are compared.
