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Unrealeased Doom music... which songs do they sound like?


The Coop
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Greetings all.

About a week and a half ago, John Romero of id fame released a zip file filled with unused tracks from the original Doom game. Some of the tracks are early versions of ones that would later get used in the game, but as I listened to the others, I couldn't help but notice how similar they sounded to songs released by well known bands... like various riffs or rhythms had been taken out nearly note for note, or partially changed, and then used for part of the midi. For example...

un46- Alice in Chains' "Angry Chair".

un45- "God Smack" by Alice in Chains.

un44- shares a number of similarities to "Dirt" by Alice in Chains.

un42- quite similar to "Junkhead" by Alice in Chains

un41- feels a little like "Rooster" by Alice in Chains in the beginning, but possibly only because I'd been hearing so many AiC riffs up to this point.

un32- "Outshined" by Soundgarden.

un36- I can't place this one, but it's rather familiar.

un28- "Them Bones" by Alice in Chains (wound up in the game)

un23- blatantly "Sex Type Thing" by the Stone Temple Pilots

un20- "Man in the Box" riff by Alice in Chains

So this got me thinking... how many other riffs, bass lines and such are in here? How many others can you guys recognize?

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un17 is Pantera at least, don't really know what its called though.

Un17 is Slayer - Raining Blood just slowed down. A complete rip off there.

Un18 is Silent Scream. Un48 is Behind the Crooked Cross. Un52 is South of Heaven. All by Slayer.

Some of them sounded original, but that's probably because I don't know the originals and some of the riffs were pretty awesome if indeed original.

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21-f Sounds just like Died by Alice in Chains (sped up quite a bit)

36 sounds like Dead and Bloated by Stone Temple Pilots

But listening through them, I'm placing a lot of songs in my mind, but can't find them in my library. I swear I hear at least one or two Megadeth songs in there though, I'll have to go through it again when I can actually turn up the volume.

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Eh, it's pretty well known that some of the ones actually in the game were just MIDI versions of real songs.

http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/doomcovers/

But being that I don't really listen to any of the bands he could have possibly based them off of, I can't really comment on these here new ones...

On a side note, I can't seem to get e3m3 out of my head...

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Eh, it's pretty well known that some of the ones actually in the game were just MIDI versions of real songs.

http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/doomcovers/

But being that I don't really listen to any of the bands he could have possibly based them off of, I can't really comment on these here new ones...

On a side note, I can't seem to get e3m3 out of my head...

Well, a good number of the ones I listed in my first post are as blatant as the E3M3 example you just mentioned, if that gives you any indication about how similar they are.

And yeah, I know the whole "OMG DOOM MUSIC IZ A RIPOF" thing is older than dirt, but it's interesting to see to just what degree this whole thing went.

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Well, a good number of the ones I listed in my first post are as blatant as the E3M3 example you just mentioned, if that gives you any indication about how similar they are.

And yeah, I know the whole "OMG DOOM MUSIC IZ A RIPOF" thing is older than dirt, but it's interesting to see to just what degree this whole thing went.

Back when we were deciding what tracks from Dark Side of Phobos were elligable to be added to the site, I emailed Romero about the whole thing. Might as well share it with you guys here since it's relevant to the music production for Doom:

From : John Romero <john@rome.ro>

Reply-To : <john@rome.ro>

Sent : Friday, 12 August 2005 7:02:11 PM

To : "'The Orichalcon'" <the_orichalcon@hotmail.com>

Subject : RE: Question about DooM Music on behalf of OverClocked ReMix

Hey TO,

You can get the info on all the songs that were released with DOOM that were based on real songs right here: http://www.answers.com/topic/making-of-doom

Now, the story behind the process of creating DOOM’s music is that I gave Bobby Prince a list of songs and groups that I wanted him to make versions that sounded SIMILAR TO but not an exact copy of. Well, his first delivery to me had several exact replicas of the songs I requested and I told him that we couldn’t publish those songs because they were exactly like the original, only MIDI-fied. So Bobby went back and did lots more music which I then chose from and included in the game.

The problem is that I didn’t know that the first batch of music that he sent was all 100% replica – I could only recognize the ones I knew because I wasn’t the one who listened to Slayer and Pantera (that was Adrian and he originally provided me a list of songs he liked for Bobby’s first batch). So I mistakenly chose songs from the first batch that were replicas and songs from the second batch to put in the game. I found out years later that the songs I thought were cool from the first batch were replicas of Slayer and Pantera songs! Well, it was too late at that time to change anything so…

That’s the story. J

- John

--------------------------

From: The Orichalcon [mailto:the_orichalcon@hotmail.com]

Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2005 11:58 PM

To: john@rome.ro

Subject: Question about DooM Music on behalf of OverClocked ReMix

G'day John,

Since you're a fan of some of our remixes over at Overclocked ReMix (www.ocremix.org) we were wondering if you could help clear something up for us with regard to the doom music.

We've heard rumours that some of the music from Doom is based either loosely or completely on original rock songs from artists such as Pantera, Slayer, Alice in Chains and Metallica released in the late 80's/early 90's.

We're wondering if you'd be so kind as to clear this up for us once and for all, and if you have time provide us with a list of which doom tracks fall into this criteria, and the corresponding rock pieces.

Could you please send any replies to both this address the_orichalcon@hotmail.com and also to the OCR email address creator@overclocked.org

Thankyou for your time,

~TO, on behalf of OCR

I'm assuming this set of UNxx midi's is that original set that Prince gave him.

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Thanks for clearing that up, TO. I wonder how many of the bands in question are aware of this... um... "tribute".

Un51 is based on "Walk" by Pantera, though both the rhythm and the intervals (is that the right word?) have been changed.

Un17 is Slayer - Raining Blood just slowed down. A complete rip off there.

Un18 is Silent Scream. Un48 is Behind the Crooked Cross. Un52 is South of Heaven. All by Slayer.

I can vouch for those. Un48/Crooked Cross sounds to me like the basis for E1M1.

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