| At Doom's Gate |
| Composer |
Bobby Prince |
| Released |
1993-12-10 |
| Title Origin |
Official |
|
At Doom's Gate was one of the first heavy metal tracks that Bobby Prince composed for Doom, and it is also the first level music you'll hear since the song is played in E1M1: Hangar. The title is a play on words, meaning that you are at the gates of the concept of doom, while also at the gates of the game itself. The song starts a trend with the game using a heavy metal genre. The song consists mostly of electric guitars and drums. Like much of Doom's music, fans have compared this track to other heavy metal tunes Prince may have used for inspiration including the work of Metallica's Master of Puppets and No Remorse, King Diamond's The Family Ghost, and D.R.I.'s Hooked (Slayer's Behind the Crooked Cross is very similar to Hooked).
Prince used Sequencer Plus Gold to compose this track. This track appears on the Doom Music album.
Bobby Prince had this to say about the track:
“
The id Software development team originally wanted me to do nothing but metal songs for DOOM. I did not think that this type of music would be appropriate throughout the game, but I roughed out several original songs and also created MIDI sequences of some cover material. This was before any level design and was before most of the artwork had been created. As the game came together, the guys at id saw that this type of music was not appropriate for many of the levels in DOOM. Thinking that this would be the case, I had also roughed out a lot of ambient moody background music, much of which ended up in the game. This song was one of the first of its type that I wrote. I heard it as being on a level that went by real fast. As it turns out, John Romero (who placed all of the songs on the levels) decided it was a perfect song for the first level.
„
Games
Doom (DOS)
"At Doom's Gate" plays in E1M1: Hangar, the first level of the game.
The internal name of the song is "D_E1M1".
Doom (32X)
In the Sega 32X version of Doom, "At Doom' Gate" can be heard in the Main menu (replacing Introduction, although it is still present on the game's ROM), during the demo rotation, on MAP01: Hangar and MAP10: Containment Area (replacing The Demons From Adrian's Pen song, since it is absent there).
The song comes in two versions. With the first one being used in the aforementioned scenes, the second is located in the game's ROM but never used and lacking perscussion. Based on pre-release ROMs that have been dug up, it appears that this is an earlier arrangement that was eventually replaced by the one used in the final game, but never removed from the game's source files.
Doom (JAG)
The Atari Jaguar version of Doom lacks any in-game music due to hardware limitations, so instead plays tracks from the original PC soundtrack in-between the levels. This song is played after the level Containment Area.
Doom (SNES)
Doom songs on SNES can be compared with the 3DO version in its good quality.
Like the DOS version, Super Nintendo plays At Doom's Gate while you are on E1M1: Hangar. The song does loop.
The SNES version of the song was arranged by Paul Webb, who arranged the music in BMus. The instrument samples come from the Ensoniq EPS keyboard, which Bobby Prince used for the original version to record his music in MIDI
Doom (3DO)
The 3DO version features this on MAP01: Hangar as usual, on MAP12: Deimos Lab (replacing They're Going to Get You) and after the completion of a level (replacing Intermission From DOOM).
Doom (GBA)
This version of At Doom's Gate for the Game Boy Advance which is on the GSF chip. This system has to compress the audio to work well and run. At Doom's Gate is badly synchronized this song sounded at the end of the game at level 24 due to bad programming and in this reason level 1 has this song as the main game.
DOOM RPG (J2ME)
An arrangement of At Doom's Gate on DOOM RPG plays in the main menu. The tune has retained original tempo, but you hear drums firstly unlike other arrangements.
The song is contained in a file with MIDI format and is played at different sounding depending on the device that runs the game.
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