'Doom' Mods Don't Even Need 'Doom' Anymore

Doom has one of the oldest, and to this day, one of the most vibrant modding scenes in all of gaming, but even more than two decades after it was first released, you still need the original game to play user-generated content. Now GLOOME, a fan-made, "commercial-friendly" game engine, aims to set the Doom modding scene free of the game that made it possible in the first place.

At this point, the modding community is arguably more important than the original game, but you technically still need to have a copy of Doom to play any mods. Buying it or grabbing the source code for free is easy enough, but then you also have to do a fair bit of tinkering with .pk3 and .wad files to get any of these mods to work. You don't need a computer science degree to figure it out, but it's the biggest obstacle between the average player and the incredible world of Doom mods.

With GLOOME, players who are unfamiliar with Doom, the modding scene, or the technical details, could just download a mod that previously required the original game and launch it like any other application.

Doom fans are still using tools like ZDoom, a source port of id Software's original engine, to create new stories, entirely new experiences, or perfect the original, like our favorite mod Brutal Doom.

GLOOM's creators claim that they rewrote all of the licensed code in that legacy, and that the engine itself is now completely open source and free for anyone to modify, adjust, distribute, and do with as they please.

"If somebody wanted to make a full-fledged indie first-person-shooter, they can use this engine to create a slew of new maps, new enemies, new levels, new items, new weapons, and more, and then throw it up on Steam without worrying about Doom copyrights," GLOOME's creators said. "All of the code from Doom has been relicensed from the Doom Software License to the [General Public License], and all legally troubled code (such as the code taken from Ken Silverman's BUILD engine) have been either removed or rewritten and licensed to be GPL compatible."

GLOOME's creators have two games to demonstrate the engine, Project 67 and Nocturne Yellow. They make the engine look legit. As for GLOOME itself, you can grab it from Github.

Correction: An earlier version of this article suggested that you might want to pirate Doom. There's no reason to do that. The source code is free to use for all your non-profit needs.