Mighty Doom

» see bethesda.net/en/game/mighty-doom as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Microsoft closed four game studios on the morning of 7 May 2024. Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks took the coverage, one for Prey and one for having shipped Hi-Fi Rush to good reviews fourteen months earlier. Roundhouse Games was folded into ZeniMax Online. The fourth name on the list was Alpha Dog Games, a mobile studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the shutdown notice for its only Bethesda-published title went up that same day.

Mighty Doom had launched worldwide on iOS and Android on 21 March 2023. It was a top-down roguelite built around a toy-proportioned Doom Slayer, the Mini Slayer in Bethesda's own wording, who fired automatically while your thumb steered him around an arena. Runs lasted a few minutes. Upgrades were picked up inside a run and surrendered at the end of it, and the glory kill from the console games came along in miniature, so a staggered demon still burst into health pickups when you walked through it.

Matt Booty, who ran Xbox Game Studios, explained the closures as a reordering of titles and resources toward what he called high-impact titles. A free-to-play phone shooter behind an energy meter was never going to be filed under that heading. In-app purchases were switched off at once, Bethesda posted a form for refunds on currency bought and not spent, and the servers were given a deadline of 7 August, three months to the day after the studio stopped existing.

~ the record ~

~ the mini slayer ~

Reviews split and Metacritic settled at 56. The art got the compliments: a chunky vinyl-figure Slayer stomping through red-lit corridors with the guitar still going, scaled to a screen you hold in one hand. The objections were all about what had been wrapped around it, the energy cost to start a run and the currency to upgrade between them. Pocket Gamer still put it on the ballot for best mobile action game of 2023.

Alpha Dog had built games this way before. Ninja Golf and MonstroCity: Rampage came out of the same studio and both charted inside the App Store top 100, which is what made it worth buying in the first place.

~ halifax ~

Shawn Woods and Jeff Cameron founded Alpha Dog Games in 2012 and grew it into one of the larger game employers in Atlantic Canada, a smaller claim than it sounds and still a real one locally. Bethesda Softworks bought the studio on 24 October 2019 at a price neither side disclosed. Eleven months later Microsoft announced it was buying ZeniMax, the deal closed in March 2021, and a shop in Nova Scotia became a leaf on an org chart drawn in Redmond.

By 2023 I was forty and writing computer vision that has to run on a drone, which is work that keeps you thinking about where the compute sits and who owns it. Doom as a name I have known for as long as I have known what a PC is. The branch of it that lives in a phone store behind a daily timer is one I never opened, and nothing about that year was going to send me looking.

~ three months ~

Mobile games of this shape usually get shorter notice, and a great many get none at all. Bethesda ran Mighty Doom from 7 May to 7 August with the store switched off, which is an odd machine to keep powered: a live service nobody can spend money in, supported by a studio that has already been closed. Refunds went through Bethesda's own support channel rather than Apple or Google.

No offline build was ever made, and once the studio was gone there was nobody left to make one. On 7 August 2024 the app stopped answering and the store listings came down with it.

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