DOOM Eternal Executive Producer responds to soundtrack controversy in an open letter

A few weeks ago, some people have noticed that most of the tracks on DOOM Eternal OST were not mixed by their compositor, Mick Gordon, which sparked some speculation online and even ended with Mick confirming that he won't work on DOOM games in the future.

This all felt really strange, and so people naturally suspected that there is something not-that-great going on behind the scenes, which resulted in tracks being poorly mixed and id Software collaboration with Mick coming to an end. Mick didn't really go too much into details back then, except that he confirmed that he won't work on DOOM games anymore and said that he would have mixed tracks differently.

This led to some fans being angry and even outright aggressive towards developers in id Software, and the rage has been especially channelled towards Chad Mossholder,  Lead Audio Designer at id Software. That's because he was listed as the second person who worked on mixing the tracks for Doom OST, and people naturally blamed him for "bad" quality.

This all has quite escalated in the last few weeks, so much that eventually Marty Stratton, DOOM Eternal Executive Producer, had to jump in with the open letter to the community and explains the whole situations. He posted his open letter on the DOOM Eternal subreddit, and it's quite a long one.

There he explains what's actually happened according to him. The tone of the letter is not particularly defamatory or even negative towards Mick. He praises him as an excellent talent that deserves all of the awards he got for his music and he wishes him all the best but explains that he needs to be better on the business side of things.

• Read more: You can see Doom 2 cover art hidden inside the Doom Eternal soundtrack

Marty explained that Mick has missed the deadline for delivering his versions of mixed tracks for OST several times, justifying it by saying that he needs more time than he previously thought it would be enough. The deadline was important because of buyers of DOOM Eternal Collectors edition, who were promised OTS as a part of Collectors Edition on the game's launch day, and they didn't get that.

Marty says that id Software has had an understanding for him, and gave him another few weeks to finish it up, even promising some bonuses for extra tracks if he delivers them on time, but Chad (Lead Audio Designer) also started to work on his own versions "just in case" because they simply needed to deliver OST to people. The reason for the difference in quality was because Chad worked with compressed files sent for the game, while Mick was working with the original files only he has access to.

In the end, Marty confirms that indeed they won't work with Mick on the music for the DOOM Eternal DLC content, which is a shame, but also a possibility for some new talent to enter the scene or even some already great and established, like Andrew Hulshult, who did a fantastic job for games like Dusk and Quake Champions.