There’s no shortage of video game soundtracks that you can boot up and enjoy these days, but few can compare to Mick Gordon’s work on 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal. Each soundtrack has a raw, unflinching sound that perfectly encapsulates the rip-and-tear gameplay with its heavy beats and unrelenting ferocity, and Gordon even built a custom analog effects and audio-routing rig to turn the most brutal of sounds into harmonic violence.
Gordon will be bringing that soundtrack with him when he hits the Radar Festival stage as a headline act in the UK next summer, and ahead of that performance, GameSpot spoke to him about his work on the Doom games. One of the interesting takeaways was how Gordon sees himself in the space of video game music, as he approaches each gig in the way that an archeologist works on an excavation site. As Gordon puts it, the music is already there–he just has to uncover it.
“I think my job, I feel, is very much like a musical archeologist,” Gordon said. “My job is to turn up with a delicate set of tools and very carefully–with a very delicate brush and a very careful hand–start uncovering what I feel is already there. It’s just the sound or the music is already there, and the job I feel is to uncover it and very, very delicately unearth it, polish it up. And then send it out into the universe. Because the truth is, a franchise like Doom inspires that type of music, and I feel it wouldn’t deserve anything less than that.”
As for the longevity of his work, from Doom to a guest spot on Gareth Coker’s Absolum album? Gordon credits the fans of his music for giving his soundtracks plenty of airtime.
“Once I’ve done my job, save out the audio files, and I send it to the developer, they wrap it up into the game, it comes out, and I’m no longer involved,” Gordon explained. “That’s it. That’s my job done. If this thing has any legs, goes off, and does the things that you just mentioned there, that has nothing to do with me. That’s all about the fans. That’s all about how other people receive it. It’s not me who’s been prolonging it. It’s the fans enjoying it. You know what I mean? So they deserve as much credit as I do.”
Following a sabbatical at the end of his work on Doom: Eternal–which Gordon has since distanced himself from–he has lent his talents to several other games, from Atomic Heart to Routine, and his next project will see him riff and tear in the upcoming cyberpunk FPS game Defect.