You can play it on your lawnmower. You can play it in the Windows Media Control panel and directly on a CPU. You can even play it on a pregnancy test (sorta).
It’s Doom, and it’s everywhere.
Since its initial launch in the early ‘90s, porting Doom to other devices has become a meme we’ve covered many times here at Kotaku. As we’ve seen retro gaming surge over the past five years, we’ve also seen Doom appear on basically every game console available, and as one of those kids who grew up playing Doom freeware on a monochrome LCD laptop at 2 a.m., I’ve always been mildly obsessed with bad versions of one of the greatest games of all time.
Of course, none of these ultra weird versions of Doom are official releases, but one of my favorite versions of Doom, for all the wrong reasons, is the surprising (and official) port from Williams Entertainment and Randal Linden to the Super Nintendo in 1995, just a couple of years after the game’s initial DOS release. Linden is a Canadian developer known for his work on oddities like Dragon’s Lair on the Amiga as well as the Bleem and Bleemcast emulators, and his port of Doom for the SNES felt, to me at least, like magic.
Late in its lifespan, the SNES had amassed an impressive library but was significantly underpowered compared to the PCs running Doom. Just the anachronism of seeing Doom, one of the poster children for the moral panic around violent video games, on a Nintendo console is novel, but, above that, the tech that makes the PC version work just shouldn’t be feasible on Nintendo’s console.
And indeed, despite Linden’s technical wizardry, even he couldn’t do anything about the underpowered hardware, and, as anyone who’s played it can tell you, while the sheer existence of Doom on the SNES may be magical, playing it is anything but.
As it turns out, Linden himself isn’t satisfied with it. Sure, nowadays you can easily play a pitch-perfect version of Doom on your PC or Switch 2 or Steam Deck, but, what if, Linden asked himself, he didn’t fix Doom by putting it on a new, more powerful system, but went back and fixed the SNES version instead? I spoke to Linden to get the story of how he fixed his game, and fulfilled a dream, 30 years later.
Making Doom out of duct tape and gum
Back in 1994, Doom was a year old and represented the cutting edge of a newly popularized genre that would, eventually, become known as first-person shooters (though back in those days, they were usually just called “Doom clones”). It was also the same year Randal Linden started working out of a big warehouse in San Diego for Salt Lake City-based Sculptured Software. Linden joined his colleagues at a private Nintendo event showing off Star Fox running on the SuperFX chip.
“It got a standing ovation,” Linden recalled, “and right then and there Sculptured decided they wanted to do a Super FX game.”
His friend and fellow Sculptured Software developer John Morgan was well regarded for his 3D and math skills, and was put on a project for what would become a 3D dirtbike racer called Dirt Trax FX. The trouble, however, was that Sculptured Software didn’t have a development system, and barely even knew the hardware specs for Nintendo’s new chip.
“I had this idea,” Linden said. “Let’s go out to a store and buy the Star Fox cartridges, buy three or four of them. Open up the cartridge and replace the ROM with some RAM and a little tiny boot ROM.” Linden wrote the software for the boot ROM, which allowed them to hook the cart directly to the Amiga where he did most of his programming, and then they’d write programs directly onto the newly soldered RAM chip.”
With this homebrew development kit in place, and working the way Linden intended, he knew he needed a way to test the Super FX chip. “I thought, ‘what better way than to start writing a version of Doom?’” And that’s just what he did. There was no way Doom‘s PC code would run in the console hardware environment, so Linden reverse-engineered Doom himself. “It wasn’t like I could just call up Id Software and say, ‘Hi, I’ve got this wacky idea to put Doom on this new Super NES chip.’”
“We needed to know how the memory map works and some basic stuff like that, and so Nintendo sent over very minimal information that was basically just the processor specification.” From that, Linden was able to write a custom assembler and linker and source level debugger based on the Amiga-based development system he’d used to make other Super NES games like Home Alone and Wayne Gretzky Hockey.
With the assembler in hand and access to the Super FX locked down, Linden took Matthew Fell’s “Unofficial Doom Specs” and got to work writing his own game engine for Doom. No remnants of Id’s engine remained.
Despite it being a learning project, Linden’s work on Doom impressed his bosses enough that they flew down to Id Software in Texas and presented the plan. Id was impressed, and they agreed to let Sculptured Software move forward with Linden’s port.
Hampered by a nearly unplayable framerate, especially in later levels, and mired by sacrifices, like altered levels, no floor or ceiling textures, and the entire fourth episode being cut, Doom on the Super NES was not a good version of the game, but it was Doom running on the Super NES, and, for that alone, Linden’s genius deserves recognition.
Return to work
Now Linden is back, and this time out he’s determined, with the help of a Raspberry Pi, to perfect Doom on the SNES. But whose wild idea was it to take a notoriously bad version of Doom and improve it on original hardware three decades later?
“The initial idea came from myself at the time,” said Audi Sorlie, who has been a fan of Linden’s work since he was a youngster growing up in Europe and now works for Limited Run Games. “I couldn’t believe it when I was a kid that Dragon’s Lair [which Linden ported] was on Amiga.”
Sorlie first reached out to Linden in 2020, when the developer released the full source code for the SNES port, leading to an interview about it on Digital Foundry. “Not really knowing where fate was going to take us,” Sorlie recalled, “I asked [Linden] a throwaway question regarding the source code for Doom.” If you ever worked on this again, Sorlie asked, would you make any improvements or do anything differently?”
“Yeah,” Linden replied. “I have plenty of ideas if I could go back, but, you know, I don’t think anyone’s asking me to go back to Super Nintendo Doom and improve it.”
A few years passed, and Sorlie joined Limited Run Games as lead producer for their development department. When LRG asked him to run down his craziest ideas, a new, improved release of Randal Linden’s Doom loomed large. Convincing Linden was easy, and Sorlie said even the folks at license holder Bethesda were more amused than anything.
“You want to go back and develop for Super Nintendo?” they asked Sorlie. “Like, for real?”
“Because we were so sincere and Randy was coming back, we didn’t really have to convince them too much,” Sorlie explained. “They were just as excited as when we started sending prototypes.”
When they started on the project, Sorlie was confident Linden could figure out how to implement various software improvements, but there were big question marks about how to make hardware improvements to help with the new features they wanted to introduce to the game—like circle strafing, a faster framerate, and even rumble via a new controller dreamed up by Linden.
“The trick was actually pretty cool,” Linden said. “It’s right here.” He pointed to a chip on the prototype SNES cartridge, similar to the one Limited Run sent me to test out the game. “It’s a Raspberry Pi 2350.” Super FX chips are no longer in production for obvious reasons, but with a clever bit of programming, Linden was able to load software onto the Raspberry Pi that fools the SNES into thinking the game has one. “The Super Nintendo doesn’t know that it’s not talking to a Super FX,” he explained. When he programs for it, he writes code almost identical to what he’d write for an authentic Super FX chip.
“I had to go back and reverse-engineer my own code from 30 years ago,” Linden laughed. “It’s like, what was I doing here? And what was I doing there? Yeah, it was pretty tricky, some of the code. I was like, wow, I used to be very smart.”
The best version of Doom
The result of Linden’s work? It’s Doom, running right on a Super Nintendo, but it’s smoother, packed with new content, and even includes rumble. As someone who’s been mildly obsessed with SNES Doom since it first arrived, mesmerized by a perfect game running imperfectly, plugging the cart into my childhood console and booting it up on a CRT felt, once again, like magic.
As someone who’s played a lot of ROM hacks over the years, many of which improve on the games’ original versions via polished translations, new features, and restored content, Limited Run’s Doom is unique in the way it doesn’t just hack the code, but hacks the console itself. There’s so much beauty in the creative demands that come with technical limits, a need for creative problem-solving that we lose as underpowered game systems give way to the expansive scale of new tech.
We’ve seen director’s cuts of films, Taylor’s Versions of albums, and author’s preferred editions of novels, but rarely do we see game makers return to their own work with three decades’ worth of experience behind them and three decades’ worth of new tools to work with. As Randel Linden returns to the SNES version of Doom, a miracle despite its many flaws, we’re returned to our dark bedrooms, the glow of our small TVs, and a reminder that the best version of Doom is the one you have.
But it could be better.
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