This weekend, thousands of FPS fans, boomer shooter devotees, and many literal boomers have descended on Dallas, Texas suburb Grapevine for the yearly Quakecon event. Id Software and its parent company Bethesda like to use the event to disseminate news about their products (like last year’s surprise Quake II remaster release), and this year brought a pretty exciting announcement for fans of the original DOOM and DOOM II games: a new re-release, moving the game to the KEX engine.
The new release is a full remake of the game inside the versatile KEX engine. Created by Samuel “Kaiser” Villareal specifically for the purpose of porting Doom 64 to the PC, the KEX engine is a fully modern 3D game engine that is highly-configurable in terms of the game experience, and is capable of accurately recreating the ‘feel’ of many classic game engines. If you’ve played a recent remaster of a classic FPS game, including Turok, System Shock, Blood, Quake, or even the aforementioned Quake II remaster (along with many, many others), you’re already familiar with Kaiser’s work and the KEX engine.
You can also enjoy a fully revamped soundtrack courtesy of Andrew Hulshult, a beloved name in the Doom community as well as the composer of the music for Doom Eternal‘s DLC (to say nothing of his other works, like on the games Amid Evil and Prodeus.) Of course, the option to use the original songs, whether in MIDI or emulated FM synthesis, is still there. Hulshult’s remixed soundtrack is based on his “IDKFA” album release from 2016, but it includes many new recordings to fill out the Doom II soundtrack.
The new “Doom + Doom II” release includes The Ultimate DOOM, Doom II: Hell on Earth, and a new episode created by Id Software, MachineGames, and Nightdive Studios staffers called Legacy of Rust. It also includes numerous map packs for Doom and Doom II: The Master Levels for Doom II, Final Doom (comprising TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment), John Romero’s SIGIL, and the somewhat rare No Rest for the Living episode created for the 2010 release of Doom II on Xbox 360. That’s a lot of DOOM.
Of course, if you’re still not satisfied, then you can delve into the wealth of user-created content for Doom. There are an absolute mountain of incredible fan-made Doom and Doom II levels out there, and we could gush about them for hours. Sadly, the incredible Eviternity and Eviternity II won’t be compatible with this version of the game, but tons of other awesome map packs will, like Back to Saturn X, Double Impact, Arrival, No End In Sight, and so on. Because KEX engine supports DeHackEd mods, these can include gameplay changes, too!
Perhaps the best part of all is the price. If you already own any version of Doom or Doom II on any of the supported platforms, the new release is just a free update. Don’t worry; you can still access the old version of the game on most platforms in case you were right in the middle of a playthrough. If you don’t own any of these but want to get in on some of that 16 player online deathmatch action, the whole kit and kaboodle is just ten bucks on GOG, Steam, Epic, or your console store of choice.