Bobby Prince, the composer behind Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, dies at 81

Robert “Bobby” Prince III, who scored some of the most recognizable shooters of the 1990s, died June 16, 2026, at age 81. Before he ever touched game audio, Prince played in Athens, Georgia bands, served as an Army platoon leader in Vietnam, and worked in counseling and law. He came to id Software and Apogee later in life and helped turn game music and sound design into a craft people took seriously.

His credits read like a list of the decade’s defining first-person shooters: Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein 3D, Rise of the Triad, and Duke Nukem 3D. The driving, metal-inflected Doom score in particular became inseparable from the experience of playing it, and the industry gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

His influence outlasted the hardware it ran on. In 2026 the Library of Congress selected the original Doom soundtrack for preservation, placing a piece of game audio alongside the recordings the United States treats as cultural heritage. Prince is survived by his wife Connie, two sons, a granddaughter, and a large extended family.