Mick Gordon

Specialising in creating soundtracks for video games, Australian composer Mick Gordon is best known for the mix of industrial, electronic aggression and the grinding, grunting metal riffs heard on the 2016 version of the iconic first person combat game Doom. Born in Mackay, Queensland (July 7, 1985) and growing up in Brisbane, Gordon started playing in bands when he was 12 years old, spending most of his weekends thrashing out classic rock anthems in rowdy, sweaty pubs. Despite his love of music he later realised that life as a touring musician wasn't quite for him and instead started making his own broody soundscapes on his home computer and sending them to the video game companies that had been setting up in his home city since the mid-2000s. Landing the job of a sound creator at Pandemic Studios, he cut his teeth on the alien invasion game Destroy All Humans!, before working for children's TV channel Nickelodeon and writing music for a wide range of their cartoon characters and their video game adaptations. He also produced the music for the Need for Speed racing games but really hit his stride when he collaborated with a viking choir and a Native American tribe to create the soundtrack for the update of classic fighting game Killer Instinct in 2013. Another big project was the score for Wolfenstein: The New Order on which he used a range of retro guitar pedals, analogue recording equipment and synths made in the old Soviet Union to create a feel of dense, suffocating, chaotic thunder, before Gordon was tasked with re-inventing the music for Doom (2016), one of the most groundbreaking shooter games from the early 1990s. Initially developers id Software were keen to move away from the heavy metal screed that accompanied the original games in favour of more electronic ambience, but Gordon found an ideal mix when he re-interpreted the game's iconic riff on a distorted eight-string guitar and added metallic, eerie, claustrophobic atmospherics. In 2024, Gordon collaborated with Tex Perkins on the industrial track "The Partisan".