Every Mick Gordon Game: From Need for Speed to Doom Eternal and Defect

Mick Gordon has worked on the music or sound of 34 games, and most people can name two of them: Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal. The rest of the list is a lot stranger. A game about a hot dog king, three Need for Speed racers, Marvel Super Hero Squad, the Killer Instinct reboot, three Wolfenstein games, Prey, Atomic Heart and a single song in Absolum. Here they all are in order, from 2006 to Defect, a shooter that still has no release date.

For every game I checked what Gordon actually did on it, because plenty of databases list him as "composer" on games where he made sound effects or one trailer track. Roles come from his own site and the credits, scores from Metacritic, reviews from Steam, all as of September 30, 2026. There is a separate section on the fight with id Software, told through both sides' own statements. The full table is at the end.

2006-2009: the first 7 games, from Hot Dog King to Need for Speed: Shift

Gordon's first credits date from 2006, and they are modest. He did music and sound for Hot Dog King and additional sound design for Pandemic's Destroy All Humans! 2, which, according to Wikipedia, won the audio award of the Game Developers' Association of Australia. After that came licensed games aimed at kids: Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots in 2007, El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera in 2008, Marvel Super Hero Squad in 2009.

2009 is also the year he got into a big series. He scored EA's Need for Speed: Shift together with Stephen Baysted and Mark Morgan, and his site credits him with the original score and the trailer audio. Shift scored 83 on Metacritic, higher than Prey or Wolfenstein: The New Order would later get. The first Real Racing for iPhone is also on his list for 2009, though nobody seems to have written down what he did on it.

2010-2013: 11 more games, EA racers, Marvel and Trackmania

The next four years look like steady contract work. Original music for THQ's The Last Airbender and for Need for Speed: World. Shift 2: Unleashed in 2011, a game with six composers on it, Ramin Djawadi of Game of Thrones among them. Additional music for Need for Speed: The Run. Two more Marvel Super Hero Squad games. On Real Racing 2 and Real Racing 3 he did sound effects rather than music (easy to miss when a database just says "Mick Gordon").

He was also cutting trailers for other people's games: Crysis 3, Dead Space 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Need for Speed Most Wanted. They are listed on his site. I left trailers out of the table below, otherwise it would be twice as long.

The most interesting job of this stretch was for Ubisoft. For Nadeo's ShootMania Storm and Trackmania 2 he wrote full original soundtracks. ShootMania got a 76, and it is a good example of a game you had to play in 2013: an online arena shooter that belonged very much to its moment.

Killer Instinct, 2013: the first score people remembered

Killer Instinct launched alongside the Xbox One in November 2013, and this is where people started to know Gordon by name. Double Helix made season one, Iron Galaxy took over for season two in 2014, and Gordon scored both. Some tracks build on Robin Beanland's themes from the original Rare games. "Touch Me and I'll Break Your Face", sung by Ali Edwards, won a G.A.N.G. award for best vocal pop song, which is a sentence I never expected to write about a fighting game.

Critics gave it 73 on Xbox One. It reached Steam in 2017, where 86.6% of almost 5,700 reviews are positive. For a fighting game, where a good half of reviews get written right after a loss, that is a strong number.

Wolfenstein, 2014-2017: three games for MachineGames

Wolfenstein: The New Order (May 2014) was his first big game for Bethesda. His site credits him with the original score, and Meshuggah guitarist Fredrik Thordendal plays on it. Metacritic 81 on PC, 91.7% positive on Steam out of 62,000 reviews. The Old Blood followed a year later with his music too: a 76 and 90.3% on Steam.

For Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in 2017 he shared the score with Martin Stig Andersen, the composer of Limbo and Inside. Critics liked it most of the three, 86 points, while Steam players liked it least, 81.3%.

Between the Wolfenstein games he also played guitar on Project CARS (2015) with John J. Harvey. It counts as one of his games, even though he did not write its music.

Doom, 2016: an 85, a Game Awards win and a GDC talk

Doom came out in May 2016, and after it Gordon became "the Doom guy" for a lot of people. It has an 85 on PC and 95.5% positive reviews out of 221,908 on Steam, the best player score of any game he has worked on. At The Game Awards 2016 it won Best Music/Sound Design, and Gordon played the soundtrack live at the show (video below). The D.I.C.E. award for original music and an SXSW award followed. BAFTA stopped at a nomination.

The most useful video about this soundtrack is one Gordon gave himself. At GDC 2017 he did a talk called "DOOM: Behind the Music", where he walks through how he built Doom's sound out of synths and heavy guitars. If you make music, or just like knowing how things work, it is the best game audio talk on YouTube. I will die on that hill.

Prey and LawBreakers, 2017: Arkane in space and a forgotten shooter

Arkane Austin's Prey came out in May 2017 with a Gordon score that sounds nothing like Doom: more synths with an eighties sci-fi feel, far less metal. Metacritic 82, 90.8% positive on Steam. It sold below what it deserved and now shows up on every list of underrated games.

Boss Key's LawBreakers, from the same summer, is the sad one. Gordon was one of five composers, and his tracks on the album are "Faust" and "Toska-9". The game got a 76, but Steam reviews sit at a Mixed 64.7%, and its store page is gone. No screenshot here, as there are no official ones left on Steam.

Borderlands 3 and Beautiful Desolation, 2019-2020

On Borderlands 3 Gordon provided additional music. The main score came from Jesper Kyd, Michael McCann, Finishing Move and Raison Varner. An honest credit, but a small one.

Beautiful Desolation, by the South African studio The Brotherhood, is all his. An isometric adventure set in a post-apocalyptic South Africa, it came out in February 2020, a month before Doom Eternal, and barely anyone noticed: a 76 on Metacritic and fewer than 700 reviews on Steam. If you like Gordon in his quiet and weird mode, start here.

Doom Eternal, 2020: an 88 and the fallout with id Software

Doom Eternal launched in March 2020 and is his best-reviewed game: 88 on Metacritic, 91.4% positive out of 217,600 on Steam. The recording used a choir of metal vocalists that his channel calls The Heavy Metal Choir, octavist Eric Hollaway and, again, Ali Edwards. The soundtrack was nominated at The Game Awards 2020 and lost to Final Fantasy VII Remake. It did win Best Soundtrack at the Steam Awards 2020.

Then comes the story that still makes people search his name. The official soundtrack album came out in April 2020, and fans quickly noticed that many tracks sounded different from the game, heavily compressed and flattened. On May 4, 2020, id Software executive producer Marty Stratton posted an open letter on Reddit. His version:

Gordon's full answer came two and a half years later, on November 9, 2022, in a long Medium post. In it he says Stratton lied about what happened and that id later offered him a six-figure settlement to take the blame publicly and never talk about it. He says he only got the album contract on March 18, 2020, two days before launch, with an April 16 deadline. Before that he went eleven months without pay, while the game shipped with almost five hours of his music and he was paid for half. He also says the file metadata shows Mossholder started his own version of the album in August 2019. He calls Doom Eternal the worst project he has ever been involved with.

From the outside there is no way to check who is right: there are two texts and that is it. The outcome is clear though. The Ancient Gods DLC was scored by Andrew Hulshult and David Levy, and Doom: The Dark Ages in 2025 was scored by Finishing Move. To my ear, Doom without Gordon still sounds good, just different.

Atomic Heart, 2023: four tracks and a fee for the Red Cross

Atomic Heart's credits are messy. Gordon's site lists it as an original score, and Mundfish's music page calls him "a legend of the gaming industry", but the same page names Igor Gribov as the studio's composer and Andrey Bugrov as sound director. On streaming services Gordon is credited on four tracks of the second soundtrack volume: "A Fridge Called Nora", "Polivoks", "Viy" and "Plyusch". He is not credited on the DLC albums, so he most likely did not work on the expansions.

A week before release, on February 14, 2023, Gordon posted that he had donated his Atomic Heart fee to the Australian Red Cross Ukraine Crisis Appeal. The game came out on February 21: 76 from critics on PC and 81.1% positive out of 56,000 Steam reviews. The 2020 trailer with his music is on Mundfish's channel.

2023-2026: a Diablo IV trailer, Absolum, Routine and Free Fire

After Atomic Heart, Gordon mostly stepped away from big games and spent the time producing metal bands: Bring Me The Horizon, Architects, Motionless In White. His game work since then is small and scattered. Music for the Rogue class trailer in Diablo IV. Additional sound design on the horror game Routine, released December 4, 2025. Original music for Garena's Free Fire: Project Crimson; his site gives no year, but his channel has a live set from the Free Fire world finals in Jakarta in November 2025.

The best known of these is Absolum, Dotemu's beat 'em up, released on October 9, 2025, with an 87 on Metacritic and 92% positive on Steam. Gordon wrote exactly one song for it, "The Underking", for the boss of the same name. The score is by Gareth Coker, with Yuka Kitamura and Motoi Sakuraba as guests. Buy Absolum for the game, not for Gordon.

Defect: his first full score since Doom Eternal

Defect, from the small studio emptyvessel, was announced in 2024. It is a cyberpunk shooter that the developers themselves compare to SWAT and Ready or Not, with online modes and a separate single-player campaign. In March 2026 the studio said it was building the single-player part together with NCSOFT. There is no release date, and Steam still says "To be announced".

In November 2025 PC Gamer called Defect Gordon's first full game soundtrack since Doom Eternal. In that interview he said the feeling he is chasing comes from the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, and that he is exploring the extremes of distortion. We will hear how that turns out when it ships.

Every Mick Gordon game: the full table

The table has all 34 games with his music or sound. Trailers for other games and the museum exhibition A Day in Pompeii are left out. Where his role is not documented anywhere, the table says so.

Scores and reviews: which of his games did best

With critics, Doom Eternal leads at 88, followed by Absolum and Wolfenstein II. The lowest score belongs to Need for Speed: World at 62, but that was a free-to-play online racer from 2010, so it is hard to hold it against anyone.

Steam players see it a little differently. The 2016 Doom is first at 95.5%, and Doom Eternal only fourth, between Wolfenstein: The New Order and Prey. At the bottom are Shift 2 and LawBreakers, both Mixed.

Where to start

We have covered people like this before: every Akira Yamaoka game, another composer known mostly for one series, plus every John Carpenter game and every Guillermo del Toro game.

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