Doom becomes the third game to have its soundtrack preserved by the Library of Congress

Doom box art of Doomguy punching a bunch of demons — Doom’s soundtrack is certainly worth saving (Bethesda)

Only three pieces of video game music have been selected for the National Recording Registry, the most recent inclusion being the Doom soundtrack.

Video game music, very similar video games itself, has become more widely accepted and celebrated in recent years, with orchestral game concerts especially common nowadays.

And yet in all that time, only two video game soundtracks have been officially entered into the National Recording Registry in USwith a third joining them today.

If you’re not familiar with it, the National Recording Registry is for storing sound recordings that, according to His website‘are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and/or inform or reflect life in United States.’

Each year, people are allowed to submit their own nominations, although the Library of Congress gets the final say, with 25 new registrations (from over 3,000 nominations) she considers ‘worthy of preservation’ announced today.

Most of the 2026 inductees are traditional songs and albums spanning the 1940s to the 2010s, including 2008’s Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) by Beyoncebut video game fans will be pleased to see that Doom made the cut.

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I’m the original Doom soundtrack from 1993 composed by Bobby Prince, who also worked on the soundtracks for Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D. So he was crushed very quickly.

It’s certainly worth including for the song At Doom’s Gate alone, which remains one of the most iconic pieces of video game music ever created.

Modern Doom fans may have longed for heavy metal music of the 2016 sentence reached, but entries must be at least 10 years old to qualify.

Since that game launched on May 13th, it only became eligible yesterday, so while it missed this year’s window, it can now be nominated next.

However, shockingly, only two other video game soundtracks have been successfully added to the registry. The first, surprisingly, was Super Mario Bros., but not only was it only added in 2023, but it’s not actually the full soundtrack, it’s just Earth theme (which, to be fair, is the most famous piece of music from the game).

The second, and much less obvious, choice was Minecraft – Volume Alpha in 2025, which is one of two Minecraft soundtrack covers albums by Daniel ‘C418’ Rosenfeld.

Minecraft’s soundtrack is mostly ambient music and certainly nothing we could hum on command, though it’s certainly popular, with the Volume Alpha album among the most streamed video game albums in Spotify.

The Library of Congress also operates similar registries for movies and books (obviously), but, surprisingly, doesn’t yet have one for video games. The closest equivalent is the Video Game Hall of Fame, which is hosted by the US National Gaming Museum and adds several games every year.

They are usually very reasonable choices and of course are Super Mario Bros., Doom and Minecraft already there.