Michael John Gordon is an Australian composer and sound designer, composing music primarily for video games. Gordon has composed for several first-person shooters, including Lawbreakers, ', ,Prey, the 2016 reboot of Doom and its sequel Doom Eternal, ', and Seasons 1 & 2 of the 2013 fighting gameKiller Instinct.
Career
Gordon first began to work as a sound designer with Pandemic Studios, where he contributed additional sound design for Destroy All Humans! 2. In 2013, he scored the first season of the fighting video game, Killer Instinct, a reboot of the original 1994 title. The following year, Gordon scored the second season of Killer Instinct and the action-adventure first-person shooter'. He returned to the Wolfenstein series in 2015 to compose the score for , a prequel to . In 2016, Gordon scored the science fiction first-person shooter, Doom, a reboot of the 1993 game that was developed by id Software. His score for Doom won a number of awards including a DICE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition, SXSW Gaming Award for Excellence in Musical Score, The Game Awards Best Music/Sound Design and was nominated for a BAFTA Games Award for Best Music. In 2017, Gordon composed the score for the horror first-person shooter, Prey, developed by Arkane Studios. He also worked alongside Martin Stig Andersen to again return to the Wolfenstein series, scoring ', developed by MachineGames. In 2020, he composed the score of Doom Eternal; while the music for the game was once again well-received, circumstances around the soundtrack release led to a public falling out between Gordon and id Software and the parting of ways. On June 23, 2020, British rock group Bring Me the Horizon announced they'd be working with Gordon on their upcoming release. Vocalist Oliver Sykes discusses how he fell in love with the DOOM Eternal soundtrack during quarantine. Being heavily inspired by Gordon's work, the band decided to reach out to him and offer a collaboration. The resulting work, titled "Parasite Eve", was released on 25 June alongside an accompanying music video.
According to Mick Gordon's official website, Gordon "utilises a broad range of modern musical sound design and traditional composition techniques in order to be unconstrained by any singular genre," and that it is "inspired by the connection between the audience and the experience." Gordon's work "considers the role of music as a translation of the world in which it exists rather than a simple accompaniment."
