Bobby Prince talks about origins of At Doom's Gate and music copyright quagmires

[Revenant100]

I just recently came across this half hour interview with Bobby Prince from only a couple of weeks ago in which he discusses his work at Apogee/3D Realms and id Software, of course having quite a bit to say about Doom in regards to both his sound effect and music contributions to the series:

 

 

Of note is that he addresses one of the soundtrack's most hotly debated debates: the inspiration for E1M1's track, At Doom's Gate. That discussion begins at 21:59. In summary, it wasn't inspired by any familiar source as it was actually written before he listened to any of the heavy metal CDs famously given to him by Romero. So there goes another mystery for the ages.

 

Perhaps more interestingly, though, is that he talks about the legal issues of tracks that have clear inspirations. At 13:07, he mentions the tracks he made which were straight covers were named "un" for "use not", assuming that id would not use those tracks. You may recall this "un" prefix from the unreleased midi tracks that Romero released some time ago. Prince says he didn't intend for id to have these particular tracks, but they got them somehow, and that he had no say in how they used them, which they did indeed end up using. In short, he thought they would get sued. But they didn't. And the rest is history.

 

So in conclusion, despite the scathing condemnation from meanie heads, Bobby did nobody wrong. However, perhaps nobody did nothing wrong as, 25 years later, id is still a free man and lawsuit-free. Except for that rocket scientist guy.

[Gez]

Very nice find!

[Tristan]

Awesome, will have to watch this later.

 

I can't say I'm surprised about E1M1, as some have pointed out over the years, it's a pretty standard heavy metal riff with roots in classical music and didn't really need to be inspired by anything, especially given the presence of other entries in the soundtrack that didn't have inspirations. Hopefully this gets widely noticed, because this topic was really quite tiresome :P

[Memfis]

This is very interesting. Many times on this forum I've read stuff like "Bobby Prince was very clever in that he would change the songs just enough to avoid any lawsuits". Nice to finally know what he was really thinking.

[Linguica]

According to the naming scheme, it would appear he made, like, 52 songs with a "un" prefix. So why did Bobby Prince make literally dozens of tracks that he didn't want anyone to use? More to the point, if he never "gave" the MIDIs to anyone and id only somehow mysteriously got a hold of them by accident, how did a version of un23.mid end up in DemonStar in 1997?

[Revenant100]

1 hour ago, Linguica said:

According to the naming scheme, it would appear he made, like, 52 songs with a "un" prefix. So why did Bobby Prince make literally dozens of tracks that he didn't want anyone to use?

The direct covers seem to fall under the "that's what he was told to make" umbrella, but from examining his other creations in general, it's clear that Bobby has produced an immense body of work that has never been (and will likely never be) heard outside of the very few involved in the associated game productions. He says in the interview that some of his favorite tracks have never reached the public, and he mentioned he's even produced music for other composers that's gone completely uncredited.

Just as a small example of something we do have a little insight into, he also mentioned elsewhere in the interview (7:15) that he created between 2,000 and 3,000 sound effects for Duke Nukem 3D, and only over a hundred of those ultimately went used. A few months ago, Bobby posted on his blog the contents of an email he sent to 3D Realms back in 1995 during the game's development of a large group sound submission for the two concluding bosses. Of the 47 effects he submitted, only 9 ended up in the final release, and even fewer of those were implemented in-game. Some of this would be the expected casualties of the development process, but imagine the number of projects he's worked on, including the ones we don't even know about, and yet he's still done so much for them all.

We've had a few fortuitous glimpses into this unseen work, such as the extended cut of Donna to the Rescue and just recently a hitherto unheard of rendition of Duke 3D's Going After the Fat Commander, but that's barely a scratch on the surface. It's pretty criminal when you consider that we'll probably never know the full breadth of the man's output.

[Nevander]

What I want to know is why anyone thought they might have gotten sued for MIDIs.

[Doomkid]

What makes copyright infringement any different in MIDI form than in any other audio format? Making these MIDIs and putting them on the net is one thing, but selling them for profit is another. It's a good thing they're different enough to avoid legal trouble and I'd be blown away if that wasn't at least partially the reason they're changed in the way they are.

[Jimmy]

Wow. Not one person on the Duke3D team had any idea about bitrate/sample rate?

 

...it shows.

[Gez]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

What makes copyright infringement any different in MIDI form than in any other audio format?

Technically, if you write a MIDI version of a song you heard, you're making a new arrangement or a cover. If you want to be safe you can purchase a mechanical license for the song, that will let you use your cover.

 

Though given how another Prince got away with selling blown up versions of other people's photos, there's something to be said about how far you can get with "transformation" as a way of appropriation.

[Gifty]

9 hours ago, Jimmy said:

Wow. Not one person on the Duke3D team had any idea about bitrate/sample rate?

 

...it shows.

I wish I could like this post more than once.

[Memfis]

What is that Duke3D stuff about? I don't know anything about sound.

[Da Werecat]

Duke3D has remarkably distorted sounds compared to its contemporaries. Maybe it's about that (haven't watched the video yet)?

[fraggle]

This is great! I added some links to this interview to the Doom wiki.

 

Listening to this interview the main thing I notice is that Bobby Prince seems like such a nice guy. Seems like he has a lot of stuff figured out in life.

[reflex17]

Yeah thanks for posting the video, he does seem like a chill dude. I'd like to hang out on some porch and look at the sunset while he talks about games and music lol.

 

His work was in many more games than I knew, before I thought Duke3d music was all Lee Jackson, and to hear that he formatted a lot of Jon st. John's lines was also really cool. Hundreds or thousands of unused sounds, what a shame!

 

[PsychoGoatee]

Good stuff, Bobby Prince is the man.

 

Random note, Duke Nukem 2 has a cover of Skin O My Teeth by Megadeth in it's music. So he had done that before Doom, and I thank him for it. Metal is good.

 

 

Edited November 5, 2017 by PsychoGoatee

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

5 hours ago, PsychoGoatee said:

Good stuff, Bobby Prince is the man.

 

Random note, Duke Nukem 2 has a cover of Skin O My Teeth by Megadeth in it's music. So he had done that before Doom, and I thank him for it. Metal is good

 

 

He did a lot of this.  Another well known one:

 

 

also, heh:

 

I'm 90% certain that Major Stryker had some remixes of known rock songs as well, but I can't put my finger on any of them at the moment.  A non-Doom Bobby Prince remix list would be pretty interesting.  I suspect that when he talks about "direct covers" in that interview, he's being pretty literal and talking about the super obvious ones like E3M1 and D_AMPIE, more so than the "noticeably remixed but the inspiration can still be heard" ones.

 

Edit:

And let's not forget that Apogee in their early years weren't exactly that worried about copying stuff in other ways than just music:

http://www.nemmelheim.de/turrican/news/duke/

http://dosclassics.com/duke/1other.php

Edited November 5, 2017 by ETTiNGRiNDER : A note about other "borrowed" stuff in the early Duke games

[Lvangundy]

He seems like such a decent person who loves what he did and would jump right back into a little office with the old crew. Hearing him describe the nostalgia makes me a little teary eyed. I hope his health issues are resolved and he can get back to doing that classic collaboration he mentioned.