Music / Mick Gordon

Michael John "Mick" Gordon (born 9 July 1985) is an Australian composer and sound designer. Although he has worked in the games industry for many years, his first widely-recognized success was his work on the Killer Instinct (2013) soundtrack. He later exploded in popularity after doing the music for Doom (2016), which was lauded for its quality and originality. Since then, he has composed music for many video games, most notably the Wolfenstein and Doom series among others. His score for the latter has won several awards, such as the DICE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, SXSW Gaming Award for Excellence in Musical Score, and the Game Awards Best Music/Sound Design.

Definitely One of Us, as he occasionally shares memes of some of the games he had composed for, most notably the Doom franchise, and his Twitter bio is literally just the Konami Code.

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Gordon has composed music for:

• Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (PlayStation 2 and Wii versions)
• Need for Speed: Shift
• The Last Airbender
• Need for Speed: World
• Marvel Super Hero Squad: The Infinity Guantlet
• Shift 2: Unleashed
• Marvel Super Hero Squad: Comic Combat
• Need for Speed: The Run (Nintendo Wii and 3DS versions)
• ShootMania Storm
• Killer Instinct (2013)
• Wolfenstein: The New Order
• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood
• Doom (2016), which he has played live
• Prey (2017)
• LawBreakers
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus
• Doom Eternal
• Atomic Heart

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Tropes associated:

• Bizarre Instrument:
  • Spinal's theme from Killer Instinct (2013) contains a Kangling (a flute made from a human femur).
  • Doom (2016) gives us a main menu theme sampling a chainsaw and a comparatively ancient USSR synth machine.
  • Doom Eternal has Mick adding lawnmower sounds to some of the tracks.
• Subliminal Seduction:
  • In addition to the mountain of overt references in his work, Mick also likes to insert more subtle ones, most notably in Doom (2016). Songs played with a visual spectrograph show things such as the severed head of John Carmack and a repeated pattern of "6, 6, 6, Pentagram". More complex, one song played with the channels merged, waveform inverted then played backwards gives us Abby Craden (Oliva Pierce) saying "Jesus loves you." in the most disturbingly motherly voice ever.
  • Killer Instinct (2013) also has the main theme present in some way in each of his character songs, most overt in Aria's (.execute).

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