So...Why does DOOM use repeat songs?

[Obsidian Plague]

Howdy!

 

So, I've been playing through doom again and i've only now kinda started realizing how many repeats the soundtrack has across both games. Especially weirder considering the fact that the repeats (minus the ones from e4 for whatever reason and the xbox levels) have their own files, which means it can't be a file limitation. What gives? What was stopping the team from adding new tracks?

[Ozcar]

It's more likely that he ran out of ideas or didn't have enough time to create new music, considering that the game's soundtrack was only composed by one person.

[Baron T. Mueriach]

There were only so many rock songs in the 90's Bobby Prince could rip off...

 

Jokes aside I'd imagine it's for the reason Ozcar stated, not enough time or too little inspiration. Or maybe they just liked the older tracks so much they decided to recycle them.

[EvilSqueegee]

17 minutes ago, Ozcar said:

It's more likely that he ran out of ideas or didn't have enough time to create new music, considering that the game's soundtrack was only composed by one person.

 

I agree. It's very likely that development timetables didn't allow for more music to be made before the game was released, or budget didn't allow for more music to be composed.

[Bald Cyberdemon]

Imagine trying to make two 30+ track albums back-to-back within a year of eachother

It's been done before, but could that be reasonably done by 1 guy making a game soundtrack while also juggling the rest of the sound design all while being under constant threat of his boss barging in and going "Dude, I just had an idea"?

[Tycitron]

4 minutes ago, EvilSqueegee said:

 

I agree. It's very likely that development timetables didn't allow for more music to be made before the game was released, or budget didn't allow for more music to be composed.

Wasnt there like 40+ unused songs for Doom 1? some of them sounded really good and they could have used them i think. But then again i guess them being unused means there was a reason for it lol.

[Baron T. Mueriach]

Just now, Tycitron said:

Wasnt there like 40+ unused songs for Doom 1? some of them sounded really good and they could have used them i think. But then again i guess them being unused means there was a reason for it lol.

Yes, but some of them were just blatant recreations, the reason was exactly that haha

 

 

[vanilla_d00m]

I noticed this a long time ago but I played the games so much I got used to it.  I never even once thought about why they used the same music on the other levels, it’s very noticeable in DOOM II.

 

Time constraints?

[Shepardus]

In addition to how much work it would be to create unique tracks for every level, Doom and Doom II were not the only games Bobby Prince worked on in that time. Aside from that, I'm not sure it was even known until late in development how many levels there would be.

[Chernobog The Exalted]

I mean, some of the song slaps, I wouldn't mind repeating it

[Wahrnehmungskrieg]

Both Doom and Doom II's soundtracks are CD-length programmes, they're long enough.

[DiavoJinx]

Aside from other smart comments above...

One thing I feel people in the 21st century are forgetting in discussions like the "Why didn't id do more????" is simply:

FILE SIZE.

 

Holy heck, on my family's 486 33Mhz, it had a 250 megabyte hard drive (megabyte, not gigabyte), most of which was filled up by Windows 3.1 & Windows programs...

Doom 1 came on two diskettes for installation, installing at like 10-ish megabytes. I can't remember how many more diskettes Doom 2 came on atm (four total?), and installed to roughly 20 megabytes I think. They each took over 10 minutes to install, IIRC -- besides the install program copying all the files from each diskette as you were prompted to switch diskettes, when all that was done the program had to de-compress the package and I remember whenever I reinstalled a Doom game and it got to that point I'd go to the kitchen and make a sandwich... and eat it. ;-)  Remember, in the 90s the world wasn't full of instant gratification with tech jazz like today.

 

Disk space also was precious in the 20th century.  See also: how Super Mario Bros 3 dealt with the NES cartridge limits (brilliant, smart color palette swaps) and go back further to how tiny Atari 2600 games are.  From what I've observed over the decades, 21st century game programmers lost the art (as much an art as a science I think) of efficient coding & designing... as they're no longer concerned/constrained by disk spaces.  Modern example on the extreme end: Jedi Survivor's install size is 155 gigabytes!

Additional music tracks mean larger IWAD file size. To follow that line of thinking one way: larger install size might mean an additional diskette for the installation, which in turn increases production costs and thus cut into net revenue. Every little bit matters.

 

 

In all my years playing both classic Doom games since their releases, the thought never came up for me that there was anything "wrong" about playing music tracks multiple times, because there isn't. I always just rolled with it, enjoyed what was presented. =)

 

So anyway, don't look at things in the 90s through the lens of the 2024.  Night & day here; different worlds.

 

/rant ;-)

Edited May 5 by DiavoJinx

[DiavoJinx]

One more thing to bring up: Wolfenstein 3-D has 60 levels. It does not have 60 music tracks. And that's also totally fine.

 

I think what matters to both Doom and Wolf 3-D vis-a-vis music tracks is the art of it: music is intentionally set to a level. It literally doesn't matter how many times a music track is used in an entire game, as long as that music selection works where it was used in the moment (level playthru).

And if it works or not is up to the creators of the game as they were creating it. ;-)

[Shepardus]

5 minutes ago, DiavoJinx said:

Aside from other smart comments above...

One thing I feel people in the 21st century are forgetting in discussions like the "Why didn't id do more????" is simply:

FILE SIZE.

The repeated music tracks are separate lumps in the WAD files, so they didn't save any space by repeating tracks. They could have reused lumps instead of duplicating them (and they did so for episode 4 as well as Heretic), but evidently space wasn't enough of a concern for them to do that for the first three episodes or Doom II.

[SuperGiantNinjaYeti]

I'm no expert but I suppose the repeated tracks would be more compressible, saving space in the installation disks.

 

As for why have separate lumps for each repeat, I guess it could have been to facilitate  modding? Maybe not, given how E4's music was handled. But we know Doom was intended to be moddable to some extent, so priorities may have changed from one rushed dev cycle to another.

 

Lastly, regarding the reuse of music as a design choice, I'm fine with it in general and how Doom does it, except E2M3, that was silly.

[LadyMistDragon]

Most likely, it would have been more trouble than it was worth to hire another composer with all the other development challenges that they had to handle at the time. See why Strife had lots of repeat tracks even though it's pretty clear Morey Goldstein couldn't carry an entire game.

[taufan99]

Bear in mind that he also worked for other games (notably Duke Nukem II, both Blake Stone games, and even some of RotT and Duke Nukem 3D with Lee Jackson, among others) at the time.

[Jayextee]

why didnt id shaftware make a different texture for each wall jeez i mean we have the technology

[DiavoJinx]

17 hours ago, Shepardus said:

The repeated music tracks are separate lumps in the WAD files, so they didn't save any space by repeating tracks. They could have reused lumps instead of duplicating them (and they did so for episode 4 as well as Heretic), but evidently space wasn't enough of a concern for them to do that for the first three episodes or Doom II.

Hey check it out, you're right!   And they aren't even particularly large, relatively.

"Trust, but verify." ;-)

[Shepardus]

47 minutes ago, DiavoJinx said:

Hey check it out, you're right!   And they aren't even particularly large, relatively.

Yeah, I didn't mention it before, but each MIDI is only about the size of a couple sound effects or textures. If they did cut anything for the sake of file size, it would have been the textures.

 

Fun fact: Versions 1.666 and later of the Doom/Ultimate Doom IWAD contain duplicates of the episode 1 music and many of the sound effects (e.g. there are two D_E1M1 lumps in the WAD, and I think all sound effects that are in the shareware episode), which I can only assume is an accident that was never caught.

[GibFrag]

It seems the music order and selection were changing very close to release for shareware and then the full game. Sound effects were added very close to release too. Not everyone was going to be able to hear one or the other or even either so it likely wasn’t a thought that entered their mind to have a different track for each level, they didn’t do that with Wolf 3D or SOD either, the latter had maybe 4-5 new tracks and the rest were just from wolf 3d. 
 

Other games like Duke 3D also went through this, Duke’s voice wasn’t added until the last month of development for the shareware. Sound and music seemed to be at the bottom of the todo list for most of these shooters of the time. 

[Maximum Matt]

Maaaaaan, Bobby Prince had a million assorted songs around this time, he could've totally filled the entire game (E4 included) with unique songs if he wanted to, but he didn't want to for whatever reason ("quality control" or whatever, as if that was some sort of priority at ID then).  

[ASD]

It's called encore.