Doom (1993 video game)
Because id planned to self-publish the game, as the game neared completion they had to set up the systems to sell the game. Jay Wilbur, who had been brought on as CEO and sole member of the business team, planned the marketing and distribution of "Doom". He felt that the mainstream press was uninterested in the game, and as id would make the most money off of copies they sold directly to customers—up to 85 percent of the planned US$40 price—he decided to leverage the shareware market as much as possible, buying only a single ad in any gaming magazine. Instead, he reached out directly to software retailers, offering them copies of the first "Doom" episode for free, allowing them to charge any price for it, in order to spur customer interest in buying the full game directly from id.
Doom (2016 video game)
The "Doom" soundtrack was composed by Mick Gordon, with additional contributions by Richard Devine. Gordon aimed to treat the game's original soundtrack with "utmost respect" while modernizing it; however, the team at id stipulated in the initial brief that they wanted "no guitars" on the soundtrack, fearing that it would make the game "feel like Bill & Ted" and that heavy metal music itself has become "a bit of a joke". Gordon's initial concept was based around the idea of Argent energy corrupting human-made devices; to mirror this in music, he fed basic waveforms - sine waves and white noise - through a complex array of effects units such as distortion and compression. While this resulted in a unique electronic sound, the game still wasn't "sounding like Doom"; Gordon then gradually started adding more and more guitar elements, which eventually resulted in the desired tone and feel for the game; Gordon used seven- and eight-string guitars to give the music a lower tone, and used a nine-string guitar for the game's main theme, a variation on Bobby Prince's "E1M1" / "At DOOM's Gate" theme; Gordon would eventually admit that using a nine-string was "kinda stupid" in its excess, and that while he eventually sold the guitar to Fredrik Thordendal from Meshuggah, "even he can't find a use for it". The soundtrack contains numerous easter eggs: some songs reference themes or sounds from older Doom games, others contain backmasking ("Jesus loves you"), images of pentagrams and the number 666 embedded into the sound via steganography. Gordon intended these as a joke, and never thought anyone would found them, but it took someone about two weeks, and it was widely covered in the media.