Mick Gordon, the Australian composer who scored 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal, said in a PAX Australia interview with IGN that he would return to compose for id Software’s iconic shooter series “within a heartbeat” if the right conditions were met.
“There are a lot of dominoes that would have to fall in a very specific way for that to occur,” Gordon told IGN. “If those dominoes ever fell in that way, I would. Of course. Within a heartbeat.” Gordon declined to elaborate on what those dominoes were. But the dispute between the composer and Doom Eternal’s executive producer Marty Stratton is almost certainly one of them, and it has never been publicly resolved.
In a lengthy 2022 post on Medium, Gordon accused id Software of failing to pay him for half of his work on the Doom Eternal soundtrack. He singled out Stratton as a “recurringly abusive” presence throughout his work on the score and the OST. Gordon’s PAX comments suggest the experience has not dimmed his love for the franchise itself: “I had a whole list of ideas where I wanted to go with Doom,” he said. “And I’d love to explore that one day, for sure.”
The future of Doom is murky regardless. Microsoft laid off 136 members of staff at id in July as part of its ongoing cuts to the Xbox business. At the time, lead services programmer Chris Hays was quoted saying, “It’s hard to make a game that is AAA, that’s like we’ve done before, with half the people. And by hard, I mean impossible.” Those cuts have already reshaped the wider Xbox launch slate, including Gears of War: E-Day’s $70 launch price point and the post-launch DDoS attack on E-Day’s online services.
Gordon has been keeping busy outside of Doom. He composed the final-boss theme for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2, which launches October 14 and is on our Release Calendar. He is also producing the full soundtrack for Defect, a squad-based cyberpunk shooter from veterans of Doom and the Call of Duty series. In 2027, he returns to Doom’s music at least in performance, headlining the UK’s RADAR music festival and performing the Doom and Doom Eternal soundtracks live with a full band for the first time.
Our read: Gordon’s “in a heartbeat” line is the headline, but the real story is the unresolved Stratton dispute. Until id or Microsoft addresses it, any future Doom soundtrack with Gordon at the helm stays hypothetical. The id layoffs raise a separate question: even if Gordon does come back, who would he be working with? The Doom 2016 and Eternal soundtracks were a tight collaboration between Gordon and id’s audio team, and that team is significantly smaller now. For comparison, the same cuts at Xbox hit the development pipeline behind Squadron 42’s long-delayed launch on Steam, which is part of the same shrinking-AAA story.
Sources: Gordon’s quotes are from a PAX Australia interview with IGN’s Tristan Ogilvie. The 2022 dispute is documented in Gordon’s Medium post (linked via IGN). The id Software layoff figures and the Chris Hays quote come from IGN’s reporting on the July 2026 Microsoft cuts.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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