Australian composer Mick Gordon is one of the most widely-recognized composers in the videogame industry, with his signature propulsive, distorted, future-metal sound helping define id Software's wildly successful Wolfenstein and Doom reboots.
In the five years since a public falling out with longtime collaborator Bethesda, Gordon has contributed to metal projects, a large portion of Atomic Heart's soundtrack, and as a guest composer on Absolum, but he recently revealed he's working on his next full videogame soundtrack for the ambitious upcoming cyberpunk FPS, Defect. I recently sat down with Gordon and Defect director Emanuel Palalic to talk about the game, Gordon's work on it, and game music writ large.
"When Covid kicked up, there were a whole bunch of projects that got put on hold because people weren't really sure what was happening," Gordon said of his work in the 2020s. "I was finally able to say yes to a bunch of this band stuff that was coming up. I was able to jump in and do production role stuff with metal bands like Architects, Bring Me the Horizon, 3Teeth, and Monuments."
Defect, the first game from new studio emptyvessel, is promising singleplayer, co-op, and 4v4v4(v4?) asymmetric PvP, with gunplay balanced by an emphasis on exploration, disguise (via consciousness transfer possession, naturally), and subterfuge not dissimilar to Payday or the upcoming Thick as Thieves. In terms of story and art, Defect is all Dredd (2011), with mega-high rises and a world where all-seeing surveillance AI tries to contain criminal anarchy.
Gordon's eye was caught by Defect's unique visual, thematic, and gameplay identity, which he said "makes it very easy for me to slot in and just kind of do my thing there." But it also didn't hurt that Gordon and Palalic worked together before on Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.
Palalic was a character artist on both games, but also directly collaborated with Gordon in the "metal choir" used for many tracks in Eternal. "I think Mick was one of the most talented musicians I've met," he said of the experience. "I remember, distinctly, being there and him just starting to tap the tempo out without, like, listening to anything. He just starts tapping a tempo out and kind of guiding the whole crew there."
Cowabunga
Gordon said that one of his primary goals with any project is to not override its identity with his own style and hallmarks. That being said, he's still experimenting with two of his signature moves for Defect: "Microtonal" sounds, musical notes found in intervals smaller than the 12 equal intervals of an octave, as well as a focus on deliberately discordant, off-tempo beats not constrained by a time signature, but still very deliberately laid out.
Gordon hopes this will dovetail with Defect's themes of barely-contained chaos. "It's celebrating that deformity, almost like some form of rebellion," the composer said. "I'm always trying to push it, always trying to push it more. Like, how heavy can we get it? I'm really exploring the extremes of distortion with this project. How distorted can you get it, where you lose the musicality, and then bring it back."
The setting also has him turning to a cyberpunk hallmark, synthesizers, but with a more deliberate deployment than some of the muscle memory cliches we're starting to see out of the sci-fi subgenre.
"Setting that background theme against this dystopian cyberpunk world gave me all sorts of ideas, especially with regards to synthesizers, and how synths should resemble analog machinery in a way," Gordon said. "Something that's palpable and tangible, and it must be alive within the sort of grimness of the cityscapes that this game takes place in.
"We're at a point now with synthesizers where synths don't necessarily sound futuristic anymore. Synths have a past at this point. I want to celebrate that past in a way. They're not vessels of escapism to a future that doesn't exist yet."
Speaking of celebrating the past, Gordon cited a surprising additional source of inspiration for his work on Defect. "The actual feeling I'm trying to capture is from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie," he said. "There's this great scene where Shredder's crew, they're trying to recruit kids. And they're recruiting kids into their organization with video games and cigarettes and skateboards. It feels very late '80s, early '90s."
I thought he was pulling my leg at first—the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie has been a blind spot in my cinema digest—but I'll be damned if the scene he's talking about doesn't go bafflingly hard. With fewer preteens smoking novelty gag cigars, it wouldn't feel out of place in something like Johnny Mnemonic.
Gordon cited the kind of record scratchy, '90s hip hop vibe of this scene as something he's exploring. "That's where I feel there's something really unique happening with the music in Defect. It's borrowing from that world and then wrapping this sort of stuff into it."
I'm definitely sold on the soundtrack, then, and I've been getting more on-board with Defect's gameplay as emptyvessel reveals more about it. Defect does not yet have a release window, but you can wishlist the shooter on Steam.
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