Gaming’s obsession with the devil’s domain goes back decades. Burning pits, endless torture, and towering structures of gore and primordial ooze are all par for the course whenever a videogame hero visits hell’s chthonic recesses. Doom Eternal, Hades, and BPM: Bullets Per Minute all transported us to their own interpretations of hell in 2020. But while the underworld’s aesthetic is already pretty clearly defined in games, capturing its harshness and brutality through music presents a whole other suite of challenges. Composer Mick Gordon learned this back in 2014, when he was tasked with re-envisioning hell’s soundscape for Bethesda’s Doom reboot.
“The thing that I found really fascinating with Doom was this idea of why [the UAC] were going to hell,” Gordon explains. “It was this idea that there was this Argent energy source that you could find there. Somehow, they had opened up a portal to hell and went ‘hey, there’s all this energy everywhere and maybe we can harness it.’” The technology that results from this effort in Doom 2016 pays homage to the infernal-industrial aesthetic that's distinguished Doom's vision of hell ever since its launch in 1993. And so in music: it’s that industrial edge that inspired Gordon to stay respectful of the sound that had come before, while experimenting with weightier, electronic tones.
“What if, when I was playing my synthesisers, the electricity running through them was dead, evil humans? The souls of the most despicable human beings on Earth were being used to create the waveforms that I’m making music with,” Gordon posits. “That’s why I set up some really crazy pedal chains and sent all sorts of things through them. I would try to find the purest sounds that I could, and then send them through various bits and pieces to corrupt the pureness of it. That, to me, was representing what this Argent energy would do to things … that and recording chainsaws, screams, and all the stock standard sort of hellish stuff.”
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