What video game did The Smashing Pumpkins sample?
Beneath Billy Corgan‘s recent new life as a memeable avatar of self-deprecation and a history of egotistical sniping at other artists, the fact is The Smashing Pumpkins were, at a moment in the 1990s, one of alternative America’s greatest bands.
1993’s Siamese Dream and its double-LP follow-up, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, two years later, are near immaculate conjurings of dreamy grunge pop with jumps into heavy metal and teen angst anthems. With the latter’s expanded two-disc scope, a foray into chamber pop and electronic textures yielded a grand sonic opus that more than matched their frontman’s lofty ambitions to deliver “The Wall for Generation X”.
Opening the second disc, dubbed the “Twilight to Starlight”-half of the record, fans paying attention may have heard what sounds like an explosion at various points buried in ‘Where Boys Fear to Tread’s’ mix. Rest assured that it was no accident. First blasting at the one-minute-20-second mark and repeated an extra four times throughout, a heavy groover rumoured to explore Corgan’s short-lived romance with Courtney Love wasn’t too lost in romantic turmoil to include an in-joke about one of the era’s most popular video games.
Released in 1993, id Software revolutionised the gaming world with Doom, the first-person shooter that unleashed a mammoth franchise that exists even today and has embedded itself into popular culture alongside Super Mario and Lara Croft. Playing from the point of view of a space marine facing off hordes of demonic monsters on Mars, one must accrue an arsenal of weapons to eventually make it into the very centre of Hell—the fiery underworld accidentally opened up in a secret military operation—and largely spray bullets into a plethora of cool creatures from a giant brain spider with robot legs to a massive minotaur that shoots plasma lazers.
In this, one key weapon was the rocket launcher, emitting a distinct MIDI whoosh and detonation lifted from sound designer Mike McDonough’s famous Sound Ideas Series 6000 bank of recording samples and worked into the game by composer Bobby Prince. It proved to be an enduring piece of the game’s action and ripe for pilfering by any alternative rock band of the day.
In December 1993, shortly before Doom‘s release, Eli S Bingham made a post in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action newsgroup forum in Usenet, an early online networking site long before the ubiquity of the internet, using the ‘peer’ method, which anticipated today’s sites such as Reddit: “Listen up, id Software! Next time you have an impending release of a much-anticipated game, make sure its name is not so cool-sounding as Doom and much longer to eliminate all of the casual ‘Where can I get xxx’ posts. How about ‘Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris’ for the next game?”
Whether Bingham was aware of the band or not is unclear, but id was paying attention. Rather than rename their lucrative IP to stave off cloggy forums swamped with new Doom fan requests, the development team implanted a jokey cheat code into the game whereby typing ‘IDSPISPOPD’—an acronym of “id” and Bingham’s suggested retitle—on a QWERTY keyboard would reward the player with a ‘No Clipping’ ability, allowing them to walk through walls and acquire items with ease.
Acknowledging their unwitting pull into Doom lore, The Smashing Pumpkins saw to it to recognise their footnote in video game history by peppering ‘Where Boys Fear to Tread’ with the explosive effects of the game’s formidable rocket launcher. A tiny detail in Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness‘ remarkable record, Corgan and the gang’s subtle wink to Doom forms just one fraction of the album’s rich sonic flavours that still demand loving scrutiny from their fans almost 30 years since its release.
