Mick Gordon Composed 2020’s Most Metal Soundtrack, so Why Are Fans Mad About It?

This story was originally published concurrently in video form by Subpixel, but in light of recent developments has been delisted.

EDIT: Please read Mick Gordon’s full statement regarding the score for Doom Eternal.

The name Mick Gordon carries an incredible amount of goodwill within the world of gaming. It seems like the man can literally do no wrong when it comes to game composition. Every one of his soundtracks is a fan-favorite, from Killer Instinct to the Wolfenstein reboots, to the more far flung projects folks might not have realized he was a part of: like the game adaptation of M. Night Shaymalan’s The Last Airbender or Cliffy B’s Lawbreakers — may it rest in peace.

Gordon became a household name with his aggressively bombastic soundtrack for id’s decade long gestating DOOM reboot — earning awards that year at The Game Awards, DICE Awards, SXSW (read as South by Southwest), The Game Developer’s Choice Awards, and the BAFTAs.

Okay, side note, I’m listening to these Lawbreakers tracks while I’m writing this article, and I don’t know why I’m surprised, but they absolutely rip. I mean, holy cow. Give these tracks a listen if you can. Good lord. Mick Gordon’s music makes the hair on the back of my neck stick up straight. It is haunting. It is beautiful. It is brutal.

Back to DOOM — the soundtrack for Gordon’s first DOOM title was unique for a few reasons: firstly, id and Bethesda’s original brief for the soundtrack forbid the use of guitars. They wanted an entirely synth based soundtrack to set this new DOOM apart from its predecessors. Then, slowly but surely, Gordon convinced the team to let some guitars onto the soundtrack. And then more guitars. And then we arrived at masterworks like “The BFG Division”. Gordon talked about all this in much more depth in his 2017 GDC talk on the music of DOOM, if you’ve got an hour to kill and want to hear more about the minutia of videogame composition and music composition in general. For those with shorter attention spans, Gordon has two short videos on his own YouTube channel about the composition of DOOM. In fact, these two videos actually do a fair amount to help explain Gordon’s compositional process in simpler terms than his conference talks. From Gordon’s own website, he says that “[His] work considers the role of music as a translation of the world in which it exists rather than a simple accompaniment.” His score for DOOM — and all of his scores more generally — are never meant to be just a collection of songs, but an extension of the worlds of their respective games.

But we’re here now to talk about the followup to 2016’s DOOM, 2020’s Doom: Eternal — which once again put Mick Gordon in the driver’s seat of the game’s score. Surely composing for a sequel to a game you scored would be easy, yeah? Well, perhaps it would be easy, but not in ways you’d expect. In a 2016 interview with PC Gamer, Gordon had this to say about his compositional process:

“The last thing you want to do is take something from the last project into the next one. I throw it all away and go back to the beginning, relearn how to approach music for each project. Each needs its own unique identity. The ultimate goal is that people won’t be able to tell that it’s the same people behind these projects.”

From designing synth pads from recordings of chainsaws to recruiting a live choir, it was clear that Gordon’s approach to Eternal was anything but rinse and repeat from DOOM 2016.

The metal choir was particularly interesting in that, while there was “choir” in the first DOOM soundtrack, Gordon revealed in a 2019 interview with the Australian wing of Press-Start.com that he always felt the choir in the first DOOM soundtrack felt “out of place”, and had only been included for the “token Biblical aspect”. So when it came time to consider a choir for Doom: Eternal, Gordon was sure there was a “much more metal” way of doing it:

“…we thought what if, instead of a brogue choir, let’s just fill it with screamers. Screaming metal, that’s a very interesting texture, what happens if we do that?

“A lot of these ideas come about from asking that question. “What would happen if?” Those ideas I feel very fortunate to be able to explore because obviously not every game would support such a thing.”

But while the compositional approach may have been tweaked here and there, Gordon was adamant that the score would not stray far from what fans had come to love about DOOM’s soundtrack:

“I always feel really disappointed when I play a game and I think the music is great, and then by the time the second one comes around, the music is completely different and it loses the feel of what you liked about the game in the first place. We spent so much time defining the sound of DOOM, we’re not going to abandon it now.”

Bits of Doom: Eternal’s soundtrack were teased out to fans as id and Bethesda released more info on the game during events like Quakecon, but the marketing machine went into high gear in early 2020, when gameplay from Eternal was streamed on Twitch. The music included in that gameplay footage went on to be used in nearly all the following Doom: Eternal marketing materials — until a Feb 24th promo spot was released with, let’s say an odd, soundtrack choice. The spot was quickly and extensively maligned by fans, as any gameplay of DOOM without Gordon’s soundtrack was and should be viewed as heretical. Gordon even took a jab at the spot, inserting the licensed music into a commercial for Animal Crossing: New Horizons — which, due to a shared launched date with Doom: Eternal, had enjoyed a healthy amount of cross promotion amongst the two games’ communities. Although someone at either Nintendo, Bethesda, or the label that owned the aforementioned song did not like Gordon’s cheeky tweet, and it has since been scrubbed from the internet.

However, the official releases and teases of the soundtrack had fans salivating for the final product — often joking that it was awfully considerate of Bethesda to release a whole game alongside the new Mick Gordon album. But much like with the score for DOOM (2016), fans would have to wait just a little while past Doom: Eternal’s March 20th release date to feast on Mick Gordon’s final soundtrack, unencumbered by the sound of shotgun blasts, machine gun fire, or the screams of the damned — or at least the screams of those not commissioned for Gordon’s choir of Metal screamers. Bethesda announced on March 11th, 2020 that the official soundtrack release still needed a coat of polish before hitting the airwaves, but assured fans that this wouldn’t affect Eternal’s release date or in-game score.

In a late March email exchange with reddit user u/DerLuftwaffe, Gordon said that amidst the delays he was still working on getting the soundtrack out as soon as possible, saying he was “working tirelessly on it and really want to make it good” and that “fans deserve a really great standalone soundtrack”.

On March 19th, a day before Eternal was set to release, Gordon streamed a huge behind the scenes look at the score for Doom Eternal, and if you didn’t watch the stream live or haven’t had a chance to sit down and watch it — there is a ton of neat info about not only the Doom Eternal score, but also Mick’s compositional process. I thought there was a very interesting bit near the 40 minute mark, where he shows off a mockup of an early track for Eternal. It’s bombastic, and sitting at 264 beats per minute it feels like it would be a snug addition within the sounds of Doom Eternal. But in a game like Doom, such frenetic music actually hinders player performance. If the score is too aggressive or too frenetic, it will actually distract the player from what they need to accomplish.

When I was in college a buddy and I found this out ourselves when we were playing firefight in Halo: Reach. We decided to turn down the game music and put on a Led Zeppelin record instead. But we soon found that listening to Zeppelin actually made the firefight more challenging. Mick Gordon, being the immaculate composer that he is, understood the fine line that Doom’s soundtrack needed to traverse in order to keep the player engaged, but not pull them from their tasks. It was also somewhat humorous watching him pull up a clip from Doom 3 and worry that it might result in a copyright strike on his channel.

And so the launch of Eternal came and went, and while folks may have been mixed on the gameplay or the story the consensus was that once again Mick had delivered an astounding original score. Much like DOOM 2016, Eternal’s score paid homage to classic Doom themes like Bobby Prince’s “Sign of Evil”, as well as themes from Gordon’s previous score.

Rips of the game’s music files began working their way onto YouTube in the following days, but Gordon has always maintained that these versions should never be considered perfect analogs for the versions released with the official soundtrack. His previous scores have all backed this up, with their official counterparts living in a totally different world from the ripped YouTube versions — at least in terms of quality.

On April 19th, nearly four weeks after the release of the game, Doom Eternal’s score was finally made available to those who had purchased Eternal’s Collector’s Edition, but the plebeians who didn’t pre-order the Collector’s Edition would need to wait until later for Gordon’s gorgeous guitars to hit their ears. But fans of Doom and Gordon’s work would hear the soundtrack anyway, as whispers from owners of the freshly released tracks began painting a bleak picture of the record’s production processes, and that of an artist locked away from his creation.

The score for Doom Eternal contained an updated version of 2016’s “BFG Division”, which in the years since DOOM 16’s release had become an anthem amongst Doom fans and non-Doom fans alike. Twitter user @thatACDCguy noted that the waveforms for the two “BFG Division”s appeared to indicate that the latter and updated version of “The BFG Division” had suffered from an overabundance of compression — a technical process by which all the instruments in the given song are brought to near the same level in the mix, resulting in a waveform that is more or less a straight line, rather than one with peaks and valleys. Gordon himself jumped into the twitter thread, responding that he would not have mixed the tracks that way, indicating that he’d apparently been removed or absent from that process. Per his claims, the handful of tracks he did mix himself would be obvious amidst the greater collection of Eternal’s score.

At the same time a rumor had begun to circulate in the Doom subreddit that Gordon had cut ties with Bethesda over disagreements with how the score was handled. An unverified screenshot purporting to show Gordon confiding this news to a fan raised flags amongst others on the subreddit, as such images could easily be fabricated; but without word from one of Gordon’s official social channels the only thing anyone could do was speculate. Other reddit users remarked that perhaps it was true, as breadcrumbs leading to such a schism had already been laid out. Reddit user u/Dr_Brule_FYH noted that months previous Gordon had left a YouTube comment on a guitar cover of one of Eternal’s tracks, noting that “All those stupid “time signature changes” are a result of someone from marketing piecing this track together without any musical knowledge”.

When asked by Fraser Brown for an April 20th PC Gamer article about the debacle with the mix, Gordon said that he was still trying to understand the situation and didn’t have any comments beyond the fact that he took great pride in his work, but didn’t respond to the notion that his time with Bethesda had ended.

All of this came as something of a surprise to me, in so far as there had been few to no indications that anything was amiss within the halls of Doom Eternal’s development. Now, we all know that plenty can go on behind the scenes without the public’s knowledge, Doom 2016’s storied development a prime example; but even in the March 19th livestream, Mick went out of his way to say that he “loves” the team at iD.

However, everyone’s worst fears were finally confirmed when on Thursday, April 30, Gordon posted a Throwback Thursday image on Instagram of his performance at the Game Awards, and replied publicly to several queries about the status of Doom Eternal’s soundtrack.

In response to one comment asking “will you ever make music for Doom again?” Gordon responded with a reference to Rockstar’s LA Noire, “(X) doubt”.

Another user asked “what’s going on with the doom OST then? Can we get any updates?” to which Gordon replied, “Sadly, I’ve been wrapped up by them [Zenimax] legally and can’t do it”, adding further down the thread — in regards to questions of the possibility of getting Gordon’s definitive mix of the rest of the album, “I’m trying. Dude, nobody is more upset than me, honestly. I’ll keep trying my hardest to get this thing together for you all, it means so much to all of us as DOOM fans. I hope it can be fixed, some day…”.

So why would Bethesda, or iD, outsource mixing of the soundtrack? The original soundtrack for Doom 2016 released to the public an astounding four months after the game, specifically because Gordon felt he needed time to work the fragmented parts of the game score into cohesive bits of a standalone album — even going so far as to include bits of the in-game dialogue to give the album some 70s prog album flair — a thread that carried over to the official release of Eternal’s soundtrack — such as it was.

In a timeline chock full of scandals from Bethesda (whether fully deserved or not, in some cases), jettisoning Mick Gordon from Doom and subsequently all future Zenimax projects may very well be the most asinine thing Bethesda has ever done. God help whatever Doom title follows up Eternal. At the risk of sounding like I’m discrediting any of the immensely hard work put into the actual game-y portions of DOOM 16 and Doom Eternal, I think it’s safe to say that a great part of the two most recent Doom titles’ legacy and success within the greater games’ sphere is largely in part to Mick Gordon. Sure, Doom has a cult following, and has ever since the 90s, with Gordon telling the audience of his 2017 GDC talk that “if Doom fans don’t like what you’ve done they’ll burn your house down”; but Mick Gordon has — at this point — arguably an equally passionate fan base, built up over many years through his work on games like Doom, Wolfenstein, PREY, and Killer Instinct. And I can’t speak to specific numbers on this, but I know that there are people out there who play games just because Mick is involved in their production. PREY, while it ended up being one of my favorite games of 2017, probably wouldn’t have been on my radar if not for Mick Gordon. At the time PREY was announced I hadn’t yet played either of the Dishonoreds, so Arkane was an unknown entity to me. Mick wasn’t. I bought PREY because Mick composed the score.

This story is really not one I want to be writing. I’ve been working on this script on and off for weeks, adding details as new interviews aired or Mick posted some new video or another on his Twitter or Instagram, and all I was doing was waiting for the score to officially release so I could write an ending for the script. But then this whole second part of the video completely changed once the Collector’s Edition soundtrack released. It’s really frustrating that this is the direction the story went. But all this news is still relatively fresh, so there is more than enough time for the dust to settle and burned bridges to be rebuilt, but for the time being it looks like Mick Gordon is blazing new trails apart from Zenimax.

EDIT, May 4, 2020: Alright, I thought I’d given this issue enough time to sit before publishing a story about it, as I’m loathe to put my name atop unverified information — but more has come out about the soundtrack for Doom: Eternal.

In the week and a half between the OST releasing to collectors, Mick (inadvertently or not) implying he was locked out of the mastering process, and then publicly announcing he was done working on the score, many Doom fans were left in a confusing state of flux, with few details beyond internet rumors and unverified screenshots, which resulted in an incredible amount of finger pointing as to who exactly was to blame for the current state of Doom: Eternal’s score. I will be the first to admit that I was responsible for pointing some of these fingers. Bethesda is not a scandal free AAA game studio, so it was easy to imagine that some sort of mismanagement higher up the chain of command resulted in Mick Gordon being ejected from the halls of Doom. However, as the saying goes, there are three-sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

Until May 4th, 2020, all we had was Mick’s side of the story, as iD, Bethesda, and the greater umbrella of Zenimax had been silent on the issue. But that changed when Doom: Eternal executive producer Marty Stratton posted a lengthy open letter on the Doom subreddit — clarifying some of the finger pointing, as well as more details of, from his side of things, what had caused the schism with Gordon.

The upside of Strattons post was that, while the future of Doom’s music may be uncertain, he was apparently thrilled with the music that Gordon had delivered for DOOM (2016) and Doom: Eternal, saying Gordon “deserved every award won” and hoped that “his score for Doom: Eternal is met with similar accolades”. Stratton claimed that the issues with the score were not rooted in creative differences, as Gordon had been given “near limitless creative autonomy over music composition and mixing in our recent DOOM games,” but that the issues had stemmed from the realities of production associated with such creative works (EDIT: as of Nov. 2022, this has been refuted by Gordon). Let’s rewind.

At E3 2019, it was announced that the score for Doom: Eternal would be available with the Collector’s Edition of Eternal. This appears to be the fountainhead from where all the issues with the score flow. E3 2019 had been held in Los Angeles from June 11th to June 13th, 2019, little less than a year before Doom: Eternal would be released to the public. Per Stratton Gordon was not at that time formally contracted for the official release of the soundtrack, only for the in-game music. The contract that determined the delivery of the soundtrack files wouldn’t be finalized until January 2020 — with sights set for an early March delivery of the soundtrack files (EDIT: this timeline is incorrect, according to email records preserved by Gordon). This contract, per Stratton, was for 12 songs minimum, with financial bonuses in place for on-time delivery. Additionally, according to Stratton, Gordon was given full creative control over whatever he delivered.

Now, in order to keep this new section brief I won’t go into too much further detail. The post is linked above and you can make up your own mind about how this all shook out. Essentially, what it boils down to was Gordon feeling he needed more time to complete the score as intended and iD/Bethesda needing to worry about consumer protection laws if they didn’t deliver the score to Collector’s Edition owners within a certain window. According to Stratton, a compromise was reached where Gordon would deliver what tracks he could and iD’s Chad Mossholder would deliver the rest using what components they already had on file. However, Gordon’s silence on all these details is far less than ideal, as Stratton claims Mossholder suffered the brunt of fan animosity after the score was released and Gordon claiming “I would not have mixed them like that” (EDIT: Gordon’s silence at the time was, according to him, due to ongoing legal concerns associated with the project, and a Skype conversation he’d had with Stratton wherein Stratton wished to come up with a combined statement regarding the OST — a statement that would never be drafted and was superceded by the open letter on Reddit).

In our discussions amongst the four of us here at Subpixel, if all this is to be taken at face value, it really feels like no one came out of this situation looking good — except maybe Chad Mossholder, who was just doing his job as best he could. Given that the soundtrack for DOOM (2016) released four months after the game, it seems completely unrealistic that anyone involved in the production of Doom: Eternal, be they the teams at iD, Bethesda, or Gordon himself, assumed that an even longer score could be composed and mastered for the game, and remastered for the concurrent release of the OST. But I’m not going to point any more fingers. We know Mick’s side of the story, such as it is, and we know Bethesda and iD’s side of the story. Somewhere in the middle is the truth.

EDIT (Nov. 9, 2022): So now, waaaaaay after I thought all this was concluded, there is more information to be shared. The open letter from Marty Stratton, mentioned in the above section, has been thoroughly refuted by Mick Gordon from his personal Medium account. Please go read it here, and then disregard practically all of my editorializing in the previous section. I should have known not to even tease the notion of siding with a humongous corporation over a single artist.