Anyone who has played the 2016 DOOM reboot or its successor DOOM Eternal will likely agree that the games just feel so incredibly, deliciously satisfying. There are many reasons for this, but today we’re talking about that soundtrack, and oh boy, is it great. But why is the soundtrack so dang good?

Obviously we can appreciate that the music itself is just really really cool, regardless of how or when it plays. But there’s more to it than that. When you take a closer look (and listen), you’ll realize there are some pretty unique features to the sounds you’re hearing.

Lots of thought went into bulking up the entire gaming experience of DOOM, with the aim of making it as big and intense as possible. A hallmark feature of the game - one which contributes greatly to its sheer level of deliciousness - is that smooth, incredibly fast-paced gameplay that continually pushes you forward as you hungrily chase after more action. And a lot of that flow is instilled by the game’s soundtrack.

Composer Mick Gordon wanted to find a way to tailor the game’s music to the gameplay, to make it so it is dynamically in sync with the player’s movements. And that’s exactly what he and DOOM’s devs managed to accomplish. Furthermore, they did it to a profound extent that hadn’t been accomplished until then.

Gordon’s technique to accomplish this entailed creating musical pieces which include the usual chorus, verse, build-up, and transition structures but which “hand [those changes] over to the player’s actions.” He broke the music up into chunks with lots of different variants on those chunks, which then randomize as the player performs certain movements and actions.

The result is a feeling that the music is actually responding to those actions, as opposed to merely looping passively in the background. And why is that particularly cool? Well, because there are few things as satisfying as when a sequence of events or movements are timed perfectly to the beats, riffs, rises, and falls in an accompanying track of music, right? That’s exactly what seems to happen in DOOM. 

This satisfaction is deepened even further thanks to the dose of nostalgia woven subtly into some of the tracks in 2016’s DOOM. Gordon cleverly borrowed the foundations of tracks from the original 1993’s DOOM - such as “The Imp Song” and “Hell’s Keep” - and built on them, making them “bigger and bolder” and thus more fitting for the series’ reboot. You can hear the echoes of these original tracks in Gordon’s “Rust, Dust, And Guts” and “Vega Core” tracks, respectively.

So, you knew that DOOM’s soundtrack is tasty, but now you know a little more about why it’s specifically tasty. The fact that the game’s popping visuals and smooth movements are paired with deliciously epic, bass-heavy sounds that feel dynamically tailored to your gameplay, means that you’re left with that quintessential Doom-type satisfaction.

Source: YouTube