Mick Gordon, composer of various AAA video games, including Id Software’s Doom series and the upcoming first-person shooter Atomic Heart, has released a report on his work on Doom Eternal the full-time statement. It’s a lengthy article that delves into severe austerity, months without pay, mismanagement and a lengthy legal battle.
For those unaware, Doom Eternal’s OST was released in April 2020 as an apparently confusing product. We covered this with a lengthy feature at the time, but it was clear that something had gone wrong between Mick and Id. Now, three years after Id Software’s Marty Stratton wrote an open letter that placed much of the blame for OST quality on Mick, Mick has come up with his own story.
Gordon’s Medium post (which we highly recommend you read in full here) covers the various issues he claims to have encountered while working on Doom Eternal and in the months and years after the game’s release. That includes crunch, Gordon said: “I’ve been working on it for months, desperately trying to stay on top, and every week seems to bring a new set of problems”. Gordon claims it was made worse by meetings being cancelled, emails going unanswered, documents being automatically deleted and information being withheld.
Additionally, Gordon claims he had serious pay issues while working on Doom Eternal. He alleges that the audio team refused to approve the track, which in turn refused to pay, causing him to allegedly work for up to 11 months without pay.
As for the Doom Eternal OST, Gordon claims that when pre-orders began, he was not awarded a contract to make the Doom Eternal OST, and his name was attached to the product.
As far as the extra work goes, Gordon claims he’s produced “more than double the contracted minutes” when he gets the job done. He also claimed that Id Software used almost all of the music, which was more than double what the company allegedly paid. Gordon said in his post that Id Software still refuses to pay for the tracks.
As for the original scope of the Doom Eternal OST, Gordon claimed that he initially “proposed a comprehensive album with 30 tracks and a run time of over two hours,” but if Gordon’s claims were to be believed, this was rejected, although Marty Stratton’s open letter claims otherwise.
Perhaps the strangest claim Gordon made refers to an edited album sent to him by Id Software, which the company claims has been in production for a short period of time. However, due to metadata in the audio files that Gordon revealed in his statement, some tracks appear to have been in production as early as August 2019, before Gordon claimed he received the contract.
The sprawling statement ended with an open letter post on Reddit, which Gordon said came after a Skype call between him and Stratton. Over the next few months, he engaged in a series of legal negotiations, and he was allegedly paid six figures to keep quiet about the situation.
What happens next is up in the air, but it looks like Mick Gordon has managed to throw himself into new projects that work better for him. We’ll just have to wait and see if Gordon will receive the public apology he wants, or if the legal battle will continue behind the scenes.
