Doom is famous for being one of the most influential first-person shooters of all time, but would it have worked as a 2D platformer? Given the premise angry space marine must kill monsters, reach end of level it probably wouldn't have been as gamechanging, but judging by this fan project, it'd still have been pretty cool.

MiniDOOM is a "very short parody game" based on the first Doom, made as part of a course using GameMaker Studio. While short (it's only an 11MB file, too), it's worth a download just to enjoy the beautiful sprites the recreation of the Cacodemon is a personal favourite.

Download it over here, or watch the trailer below:

Back when Bethesda and id Software were making announcements about the recently rebooted Doom, one of the hints that it might end up decent was confirmation that Mick Gordon was onboard to compose the soundtrack. His work on Wolfenstein: The New Order and Killer Instinct is cherished among those games playerbases, and the intensity of both owe a lot to his anarchic (but still impressively subtle, when it needs to be) approach to getting visuals and music swinging to the same beat.

Based in Australia, Gordon s been around for a while. He s worked on two Need For Speed games, as well as Shift 2 Unleashed and ShootMania Storm, to name a few examples. Currently he s working with Arkane Studios on its Prey reboot, which as he relates below will mark a departure from his recent, foot-to-the-floor audio rampages.

PC Gamer: Since you re based in Australia, how did you get started in the industry?

Mick Gordon: It s interesting, I started about 12 years ago and, at that time, there were about 40 companies making video games in Australia, and there were very few people doing sound. It was cool because I was able to contact people who lived in the same town as me which was Brisbane at the time and back then we had Pandemic, the THQ studio, and quite a few others. I started making music at home on little computer setups, sending it around to developers. For the [local studios], it made sense because they were able to work with someone local versus someone overseas. That s kinda how it started.

Did you always want to compose for games? Did you play in bands or work in other fields beforehand?

I started playing in bands when I was 12. I was in pubs at 13, out the back playing rock songs and all that sort of stuff. It was good because it was a good education in learning what works for an audience, basically. That was really my only education in music. I did guitar lessons and things like that, but I never studied anywhere. When I left that world, I still wanted to do something in music because I really couldn t do anything else. I wasn t quite there for film, and I wasn t quite there for pop music or rock music or any of that kind of thing that world scared me a bit. Videogames were staring me in the face. I d always played videogames, I grew up with them, so it seemed like a logical thing.

The original Doom soundtrack was heavily inspired by thrash metal. What inspired your direction for Doom 2016? Could there potentially have been another direction in which to take it, aside from industrial metal?

It s interesting. I went over to Dallas for a couple of days and hung out with the id Software guys. That s an incredible studio to visit because they ve got this glass cabinet with all these original clay sculptures from the original Doom. It was amazing.

When I was there, we talked about what their direction for Doom was. The first thing you ve got to do on a project like this is literally strike out the word Doom . You can look at the past, but if you get hung up on the fact that it s Doom, you get caught up trying to remake what s already been done. I have a good friend who s a guitar player in Meshuggah, who said something interesting to me once: why would you do something that someone else has done before? It already exists. It s already out there . So we sat down with Marty [Stratton, Doom game director] and Chris Hite [audio director] and talked about their approach to this game. Yes, it was called Doom, but what was this [particular] game [going to be]?

They said it was a very high impact, quick, violent, visceral, shooting experience that was all based around movement. A lot of games have taken a similar approach to cover-based shooting, which has been a thing for a while, but Doom really wanted to break that and get back to moving around. It was interesting, I played a very early version of Doom at that point and, amazingly, it didn t look anything like Doom whatsoever, but it felt like Doom. They d nailed the movement back then, and that was really quite interesting.

So we focused on those elements, the fact that it was quick and fast and in your face, then I looked at the aesthetic choices they d made. They re on the Mars base, so there are deep industrial factories and molten rock it s an isolating environment. Hugo [Martin, art director] talked very much about a high fidelity of information. That sort of stuff I wanted to get into the music and not just go straight down that 90s thrash metal tribute thing.

Mixing electronic music with metal has a mixed history, but you ve done it well. Why did you choose to mix those elements, what was the purpose?

It s fascinating because I don t even look at it like a genre. I never set out to make a metal song. Maybe on one or two of them, I do like on Rip and Tear or BFG Division but generally, it s more about breaking down what makes that genre special. So for me, it s the fast tempos, the kick drums, the heavy guitars. Then what you can do is pull out some of those elements. You can pull out, say, the heavy guitar element, and put that aside. Then you can look at industrial music: proper industrial music is like what I imagine German techno to sound like, distorted synths, repetitive kick drums. So you might extract that out and put that aside. If you do this with enough things you end up with a toolkit of elements you can mesh together.So if you ve put aside distorted synths, heavy guitars and those fast kick drums and whatever else you want to work with choirs, horrible strings you can start to carve a sound that is more unique to that project. So while it has elements of industrial and metal, I don t try to think about it as a metal album, or a metal soundtrack.

People tend to think about music in terms of the artists emoting, expressing themselves. Composing for video games must be different, but is there a personal element in it? When you composed the Doom soundtrack, is that an artistic statement for you? Or is it something else?

It s two things. The first thing is that I m trying to make the statement of the player. What is the player feeling, what are they going through? I m taking myself out and wondering what the player needs to feel at this point.

The second thing I like to do is use music as a reward. So when the player jumps into the arena and the revenant jumps out, and rockets start flying about, and then the music kicks in and makes them headbang or bop the music is the reward. Music is a positive experience there. It s reinforcing a positive. So when you do those two things especially with a game like Doom you end up with a really unique result which is far beyond any sort of personal creative expression.

I guess you re always going to have some element of yourself [in the music], because it s you approaching that project. If someone else did the Doom soundtrack, they might come up with something different, so you can never be fully unbiased of your own pre-ideas.

Responsive video game music seems like a baffling and almost magical thing to achieve. In layman s terms, how does it work?

It s quite simply... imagine a song, right. A verse, a chorus, a bridge, whatever a basic song structure. Essentially, when you re listening to a pop or rock song, it has a standard structure like this. That structure has already been defined, so the musician behind it has already come up with it, and you re just hearing it from start to finish. When you re doing music for a videogame, you re handing that structure over to the player. So you re saying, Player, based on what you do, you ll get the verse, or you ll get the chorus. And that s essentially it. There s a lot of technical wizardry in the background, but that s the basic concept.

What about the adjustments between tracks, the conjoining parts that need to quickly adapt to the player s actions. How do they work?

It s crazy really, I have these really massive sessions of music which can be around 20 minutes or 40 minutes long. What s in there is a whole series of possibilities. An example of one of these will be, Oh, you ve just stopped shooting and it s mid-verse, what does the music do? Then that happens. Another example will be, What if you stop shooting and a giant boss jumps out? That s its own possibility again. Another could be, What happens if you ve gotten up to a boss and you ve paused the game? When you start on a project, you basically define these possibilities and then write music around them, it s always pre-planned.

PCG: You mentioned before that you went over and met with id Software and had discussions about the game. How prescribed is the style of Doom s music? Do they say, We want heavy metal? How specific were they and how much leeway did you get?

MG: What s interesting about that is that, when I went to Dallas, one of the pre-conditions of working on Doom was, believe it or not, no metal. Nothing. You d think it d be the opposite, right? The worry was that it would be corny, and that it wouldn t be serious, and that it wouldn t be the visceral experience they wanted. That s what they were worried about being corny. So we started for about six to nine months doing just synthesisers, and then after a while, I started going, You know what, guys... if we can add five percent guitar in here, everybody will love it.

Then that five percent turned to ten percent. Then it turned to 15 percent. And just like when you and your mates are out for a night, trying not to drink too much, it turned into an all out bender. It was cool, though, because we arrived at those metal-type sounds from a different direction. So we didn t set that as the initial style, we didn t say, Let s make a metal soundtrack. We went synths and kickdrums, and then we ended up working in metal elements. I feel like that s what gave Doom its identity in a way, it wasn t just a straight 90s thrash tribute thing.

It s interesting what you said about trying to capture the tone and trying to avoid being corny. Doom isn t corny, but it s not exactly bleak. It s often very funny. How much of that was prescribed? Were id Software keen to give it a campy edge?

MG: The one thing that really explained it to me in the beginning was [the notion that] the player is the demon. That s what they said. The demons are scared of you. They re running away from you. All of a sudden, that flips the conventional shooting game on its head. You re not a lone warrior fighting everybody. Instead, you ve accidentally been woken up and you re going to wreak hell on all these creatures out there. That was an interesting concept to me.

The campness is always a fine line, because there s always too far. But the team at id did such a great job hitting stuff that gave the demon slayer enough personality through no dialogue, but it wasn t campy at the same time. It is over the top, it s action movie, it s all that sort of thing.

PCG: Aside from the obvious elements, heavy guitars etc, were there other, more subtle ways you captured the spirit of the game?

Another element that we really focused on was this concept of dissonance it s where you take a couple of instruments and you play them badly, or wrongly, and you get some really horrible evil sounds that are wrong. It s stuff like this that puts the player on the edge. There s a lot of choir stuff as well, and that was mainly to aide some biblical overtones to the hell levels, really. The hell levels in the game really felt like we described them as a haunted castle that you re trying to escape from. It didn t feel hellish at first until we started putting the choir in there. There are those ways of getting evil, too.

The guitar is more about aggression, and there s actually a technical reason for why I use guitar in some of the songs. There s a lot of noise in the game already there are demons screaming, gunshots, explosions, machinery and guitar is an instrument which really cuts through, it s really obvious. Whereas if I put some subtle low strings under that you just wouldn t hear it. There are those sort of reasons as well.

You ve recently worked on Doom, Wolfenstein, Killer Instinct but you ve also done a Need for Speed, to name one example. You do a lot of action games, but are there any other genres or fields you d like to explore that depart from that?

I really love the sort of more artistic side of game development, where you can really take a moment to establish a melody. I like Journey, and things like that. They re just absolutely beautiful and really cool. For the last couple of years, I ve focused on the very harsh, aggressive and angry side of game development.

Prey is a great departure from that actually. It s more thought-provoking, there are more Western sounds Spaghetti Western elements mixed in with synths and things like that. [Arkane s] approach hasn t been to get me to write a bunch of combat music or fighting music. Instead, Raphael [Colantonio, Prey director] would just give me a concept. He ll say, You re floating in space, what does that sound like? That s great because I can spend two minutes working on what that feels like. Or else he ll say, You re sad, you miss your family because you re lost somewhere. He ll explain that and I ll go from there.

So there won t be any double kick drums and 8-string power chords in Prey?

Haha, no. That s Doom, Doom owns that. The last thing you want to do is take something from the last project into the next one. I throw it all away and go back to the beginning, relearn how to approach music for each project. Each needs its own unique identity. The ultimate goal is that people won t be able to tell that it s the same people behind these projects.

They don't make them like they used to. This is a sentiment that haunts modern mainstream games, particularly shooters, particularly for hobbyist and value-conscious players who have seen PC gaming change in a million ways over the course of the last decade. The FPS, the most mainstream gaming proposition that exists outside of a browser window or touchscreen, has been at the forefront of a series of sudden evolutionary shifts.

Shooters have always been popular, but their popularity was traditionally highest among people who play a lot of videogames. Players willing to invest in powerful PCs were the target audience for the most technologically ambitious games of the nineties or early noughties: those who would buy dedicated graphics cards to get the most out of Half-Life or later Crysis, who would spend big on broadband in the years before the mass acceptance of the tech to improve their performance in Quake or Tribes.

This was the hobbyist genre, in that sense and many more. Studios like Splash Damage were born out of modding teams that themselves were given life by developer tools shipped with first person shooters. Storytellers cut their teeth on immersive sims that permitted newly cinematic modes of expression, establishing principles both technological and narratological that would branch out to touch everything from Modern Warfare to Alien: Isolation and Gone Home.

The smaller, more specialist audience of that time imposed mutually agreed-upon standards on developers and publishers: games were expensive physical boxes expected to contain stories, multiplayer, tools, LAN supports, bots, and so on. Proportions varied, of course, but these were the expectations and that was the genre. Until suddenly it wasn't; until Call of Duty led the shooter's explosive charge into the cultural mainstream.

Fast forward almost ten years and shooters exist in tiered strata not unlike pop music or movies or young adult novels. Call of Duty and to a lesser extent Battlefield have achieved a level of cultural penetration equal only to FIFA, Madden, handheld and browser games and to an extent their achievement is more impressive because they do not have the broad recognisability of traditional sport nor the vast userbase of mobile phones to draw upon. They have achieved that peculiar degree of popularity where for many people they simply are. You've got your PlayStation for Netflix and each year you buy the new Call of Duty because your friends are playing it. It might be good this time or it might not, but you complain about it like you'd complain about the weather.

Children rush home and demand it from their parents because everyone else at school is playing it. It becomes the only game that those parents consider because it's the only thing that their children are talking about it. When the store attendant lets them know that they're also going to need a season pass and some Infinite Warfare controller stickers and some vouchers for in-game currency they reach into their pockets because the last thing was Avengers (again) and the next thing is going to be Star Wars (again) and that's just what it is to provide and consume entertainment in 2016.

That is what growth from subculture to mainstream looks like what it has always looked like and the anxiety that this has caused among enthusiast game-players is not unique to them. Publishers have discovered that they can offer far less for far more as long as they spend enough on marketing. And that complaint they don't make them like they used to starts to seem a little trite, because of course they don't. If you were an executive at EA, and you knew that you could charge $130 for a version of Battlefield 1 that includes all future maps and modes updates players used to expect for free and a load of skins changes players used to expect to be able to make for themselves why wouldn't you? They'd be insane to do anything else.

Except, of course, that they have. Besides its quality, this is what I found most surprising about Titanfall 2: not only was it released in close proximity to Battlefield 1, by the same publisher as Battlefield 1, but it has a totally different attitude towards its players. Respawn made one like they used to: a well-crafted singleplayer attached to imaginative multiplayer, a game that openly takes cues from Half-Life, Quake and Tribes as well as Call of Duty. And then they released it without a season pass, even without microtransactions (though there's lots of room for those to come later.)

Were it less prohibitively expensive and not bound to Origin then they'd have completely nailed it. But even so, Titanfall 2 marks an unexpected shift in the otherwise grim trajectory of this part of the games industry, a gamble on quality and generosity in what often feels like an age of efficiency and paucity.

This is notable for EA, but not without precedent elsewhere in the industry. Rainbow 6: Siege was an oddity for Ubisoft, a company that seemed to have invested itself wholesale in the production of annualised open worlds but made an exception to produce one of the year's best and smartest tactical multiplayer shooters. Similarly Bethesda, which has successfully supported talent at id, Arkane and Machine Games and in doing so profited from the critical acclaim bestowed upon Doom, Dishonored, and Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Seen in this light, EA's totally divergent strategies for its two shooters seems less erroneous. What I think we're seeing is the waning influence of the Call of Duty bandwagon. That particular ship hasn't just sailed: like the photogenic twenty-somethings in Infinite Warfare's cringeworthy TV spot, it has rocketed off into space. You can't beat Call of Duty or Battlefield by mimicking their business models: in fact, without the degree of mainstream acceptance that lets them get away with it, doing so is a good way to kill a game. Just ask Evolve hell, ask Titanfall 1.

It makes more sense to build something good and try to foster goodwill around it and to foster development talent, too. As people who care about these games (or care enough to complain about the way things are, at least) this provides a reason to be optimistic. Battlefield happens to be good this year, as Call of Duty may well prove to be. But there's going to be no changing the nature or the borderline-exploitative value proposition they present to prospective players. Until the public gets bored of them, they're not going to change.

It is time to start worrying less about how the sales of games like Titanfall 2 match up against the genre giants that they can't hope to usurp, and to start appreciating that we've entered an era where an alternative approach is being experimented with. If you bemoan the rise of pre-order bonuses, microtransactions and season passes, do not buy them just because. If you're going to invest yourself in mainstream games, choose the ones that meet your standards and respect your expectations. If your complaint is that they do not make these games like they used to, then it is on you to show up when they do.

We're just a day away from Halloween, when small people will appear at your door to procure sugary treats while dressed as grisly pop culture references. To get into the spooky spirit, hardware manufacturer Corsair has put together a video that is sure to scare the bejeezus out of any PC gamer.

It opens with a horse-headed man asking a man if he'd like to play a game, in a similar fashion to the movie Saw. But hey, it's not all bad. He gets to play Doom. That's a great game! Oh, wait. What's happening? Oh, god... the frame rate. It's dropping!

"What's the matter, Adam? The human eye can only see at 24 frames per second anyway," the horse man says, demonstrating perfectly just how evil he is. Don't say I didn't warn you.

As for other creepy celebrations, Steam is currently in the midst of its Halloween sale, with discounts on games like Resident Evil 4, the Metro Redux series, and much more. It lasts until November 1 at 10 AM PT.

The recent release of the Brutal Doom 64 launch trailer reminded me of another very cool-looking Doom mod we heard about earlier this year, Doom (4) for Doom. As the title suggests, it brings the weapons of Bethesda's new Doom into the realm of the 1993 original, and the new trailer marking the upcoming release of the 2.0 version of the mod makes clear that it's come an awful long way since we first laid eyes on it.

The video looks great and I'm not the only one who thinks so. The official Doom Twitter account gave the mod a shout-out yesterday:

Here's the full list of additions and changes in the 2.0 edition:

• All weapons now have upgrades. Every single one of them. Guns that don't have mods have improvement upgrades instead, and there are four upgrades to these specific weapons.
• New, mysterious items called Carrion drops from enemies when gibbed.
• The last three multiplayer weapons: Repeater Rifle, Vortex Rifle, Carrion Cannon.

Demon Runes

• There are many, all of them belonging to the bigger classes. In terms of the Doom caste, it's the Cacodemon on up.
• Drops by demon type. Very rare, yet powerful.

Powerups

• Haste sometimes replaces the blur sphere
• Quad Damage sometimes replaces the berserk.
• Quad Money (secret) can only be found in crates

Suit Upgrades

• Health Armor Air Control Credits Protection Crates

Glory Kills

• Stupidly customizable so you can have them to whatever style you want.
• Can be turned on or off with a master switch at any time.

Doom (4) for Doom will be released on the ModDB on October 31.