Doom has had a strong linage of games over the years, including the mobile-only Doom RPG. Unfortunately, it was hard to get your hands on this lesser-known entry in the Doom franchise, but dedicated fans have now changed that for the better. Thanks to the team of fans at GEC, Doom RPG can now be played on PC with a newly created port. It can be downloaded from the Doom World Forums.
The game is not just running via emulation as it turns out. The fans at GEC managed to reverse-engineer the entire game to run natively on PCs, which is highly impressive. On top of that, this native port comes with new graphics and sounds taken from the BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) version of the game.
Doom RPG was developed by Fountainhead Entertainment and was initially released in 2005 as a mobile-only entry in the long-running shooter series. It combines the first-person shooter gameplay that the series was known for, with the trappings of turn-based RPGs. Players take on the role of the familiar Doom-guy, and many of the staple weapons and enemies make appearances too. It’s a game that takes several hours to complete, and it uses an engine that was later used on games like Doom II RPG, and Wolfenstein RPG.
On the Doom World Forums, Erick194 says, “As we promised, the Doom RPG port for PC is finally here. created using SDL2 and BREW version doomrpg.mod original file reverse engineering. This is my first port made for PC and I hope this works for you too. Special thanks goes to Anarkavre as thanks to him we got the original Brew game files.”
He goes into further detail about how to get Doom RPG up and running. On the forum, he states, “You need to get the original files to be converted into a friendly format for the port, you can get them from Archive.org, you can search “Doom RPG BREW” on SOFTWARE menu. Run the BarToZip program to convert the file doomrpg.bar into a DoomRPG.zip, then you run the DoomRPG.exe.”
Doom RPG was a game that was mostly lost to time thanks to its limited release on pre-smartphone mobile devices. With that in mind, we’re glad that fans finally have a way to access this hidden gem once again.
