Windows Explorer tells me that 3 years ago yesterday was the last time I modified my FL Studio project file, DOOMBOND. This is the filename I gave to that song up there, "Imps in the Facility". On a whim one day while I was sitting at the dining room table with my laptop and my 1st-gen iRig KEYS, I decided to play "The Imp's Song" (E1M2 theme) with the GoldenEye Facility bass. My studio desktop was in the shop for diagnosis and repair of a memory overload and so my only computer at the time was my Windows 7 laptop. I had recently discovered YanAnselmo's E-MU Systems abandonware datahoard on the Internet Archive and got the Emulator X3 working on that computer so I could play around with the Proteus patchbanks, also discovering SF2 versions of those modules which I had been playing with in sforzando. Along with the recent discovery of several videogame soundfonts, including GoldenEye 007, I decided the time was right to cover "The Imp's Song" with the Facility instruments.
From MIDI event 1, this was going to be a mashup— Doom with GoldenEye— but I was surprised at just how compatible these 2 songs were. Even with the key changes, the monochromatic James Bond Theme was easily woven into "Imp's Song". More surprising was the fact I was actually playing the song in F. Usually, I play in C and just transpose, but I was actually recording the MIDI events in F. No transposing. Not like it's hard to play Doom music in F as long as you have a basic understanding of that key's chord structure (F-minor is remarkably similar to C-minor), it's just weird to me that I decided "you know what, let's actually play in F for a change".
Talking of compatibility, Bobby Prince kept to basically a single chord progression for all of his Doom music; a fact I discovered with great glee when I covered this same song with GarageBand on my iPhone 6 and I was able to combine "At Doom's Gate" (E1M1) with it. Since I hadn't found a place for the Facility marimba yet, I decided to play "Doom's Gate" on the repetition, just in case you forgot what game this song was from. On the second verse, I decided to remove the James Bond elements and use Bobby's original accompaniment from Doom, so you get the best of both games. You get GoldenDoom on the 1st verse and Doom on the 2nd. Admittedly, I forgot about the brass sting until it was too late, so it's incomplete, but oh well.
This song was the only time I ever had any kind of notoriety on Twitter. I was using the bird site for a couple years as a regular person, but I quit using it after they said Elon Musk was going to join the board of directors. Not immediately afterwards; I still thought I could use it for stuff. But, the fact was, I just didn't care about Twitter all that much. I couldn't stand the short character limits and the constant advertising from side-hustles and all the dumb-ass takes (something about a theoretical situation where someone would let their kid starve to death because kid couldn't use a tin-opener, I don't remember). Anyway, a few months before I totally gave up on Twitter, I decided to post the link to it on there and at Grant Kirkhope and John Romero. I would have atted Bobby Prince too, but I couldn't find any evidence that he was on Twitter. Well, Grant Liked it, causing all of the people following him to see it and they liked it too. It didn't see much acclaim on tumblr, but it seemed like half of gaming Twitter and a third of musician Twitter liked it enough to Like it themselves. Of course, you know how Twitter used to be: stuff would take off for a few hours and then would be forgotten by the next day. I didn't have anything to follow it up, so that was my 15 minutes of Twitter fame. Still, the fact I can say with certainty that Grant Kirhope, the composer whose samples and music style I ripped off to make this song; and John Romero, the guy who made the game where the song I covered originally played, heard my rendition of it would have been perfectly enough for me. I didn't care about any but 2 people's engagement, and they heard it and liked it. I could now leave Twitter with a sense of satisfaction.
This sort of opened the floodgates, as it convinced me that I could write new music in Doom's style; it made Source Port possible. And that, in concert with MYHOUSE.PK3, made the so-called "Untitled Doom II Project" possible. I used MYHOUSE as a case study in how to mod Doom, as I had only a marginal awareness of it beyond making new maps in GZDoom Builder, which resulted in 8 maps with original music, new text, and a smattering of new textures. As I said in a previous entry, I quit playing Doom pretty abruptly in November 2023 because of some news I got from a friend of mine whose name is inextricably linked with Doom. I don't really want to talk about all that again, but suffice to say, getting away from Doom at long last has done more for my mental health, if not for my musical inspiration.
GoldenEye, though? I still love it. Hell, even Nintendo managed to finally hammer it out with Microsoft and EON Productions and it's available, if you can believe your eyes and ears, on both NSO+EP and Xbox Game Pass; proving other people still love it too!