HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

This is really disappointing to read. Mick's soundtrack was a huge part of making DOOM 2016 and Eternal such great experiences.

His talk at GDC where he goes into some of the process of creating the soundtrack is fantastic, so much fun to see the creativity he brought to the game's music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

The next DOOM will be a little less DOOMy without him.

⬐ test1235

For the longest time, that GDC video was the most watched on their channel. Even now, it still appears to be a close second.

I've watched it through twice myself, despite not even working in the game or music industry.

⬐ sgjohnson

> The next DOOM will be a little less DOOMy without him.

He didn’t do the music for DOOM Eternal DLCs and it already shows.

⬐ runevault

His sheer enthusiasm in this video is incredible. Also the glee when he adds 666 to the music lol (or maybe it was a pentagram, or both? Been a while since I watched).

⬐ agentwiggles

The spectrogram stuff you're referencing was one of my favorite parts, and also the description of his crazy array of pedals he used to get the signature sound.

⬐ filoleg

Gordon's YouTube channel is amazing. His videos about creating the sound of DOOM (2016) are stuck in my head very strongly. The guy clearly is extremely passionate about his work, and he loves going into the nitty gritty of the process.

His very short video about the old soviet hardware synth he managed to find and pretty much had to reverse-engineer to make use of was very memorable[0].

0. https://youtu.be/oKzYf1JW7kE

⬐ somat

It was a great soundtrack, perfect for doom. but that talk left me confused.

what I got out of it. he did not want your normal heavy metal soundtrack so he deconstructed music down to it's core, created a bunch of noise, layered it up to make the songs... but it sounded bad, so he had to add the heavy metal back in.

At the end I am like... so your whole process... was for nothing?

⬐ tehbeard

I mean, learning a hypothesis doesn't work isn't for nothing?

And unlike previous entries in the series, iirc, during gameplay the soundtrack reacts to the player's progress rather than just being there in the background.

⬐ danuker

> DOOMy

This popped to mind, an unrelated but appropriate song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOJcY3iMZG8

⬐ ilaksh

We've had enough DOOMs. Let him work on something new.

⬐ musha68k

The soundtrack for Eternal was the only thing that felt special about this sequel IMO. Doom 2016 was and is amazing though, instant classic including the congenial soundtrack.

I’m even less excited about any further sequel now.

Too bad John Carmack didn’t want to put up more with the business side of things. Zenimax are slowly becoming the worst of all the gravedigger big gaming companies.

⬐ WorldMaker

Zenimax became a part of Microsoft soon after Doom Eternal. Don't know if the management changes after that help or not.

⬐ musha68k

Wow, we do live in a strange reality at this point. Masters of Doom clearly a distant past.

⬐ filoleg

I am glad you mentioned Masters of Doom. I've read it on the bus commute during my internship at Microsoft back in college ~6-7 years ago, and I cannot recommend this book enough.

I didn't want to work in gamedev at the time (due to being fairly familiar with how awful working in that industry was), and I still don't. Neither do I have a strong emotional attachment to the original DOOM, I was way too young to appreciate it back when it was released, and I didn't live in a country where it was a cultural hit. I still have no interest or fascination with working in gamedev industry now.

However, that book was something else, and it rocked my world. It is about as strong of a book rec as I can give. Both Carmack and Romero created something very special there, and it is fascinating as hell to read it. Especially since Carmack and his current endeavors are still very relevant to the world of today.

P.S. The last sentence wasn't meant to be a dig at Romero at all. I just don't see him being mentioned in the news much anymore, especially compared to Carmack, and I honestly have no idea what he is up to. But that doesn't diminish his contribution to the story of DOOM and beyond at all.

⬐ agentwiggles

I liked Eternal, I know that a lot of people felt the new mechanics were too much of a departure from 2016, and I'm sympathetic to that, but I had a hell of fun time beating the game on Nightmare.

It turns it into something like Hotline Miami, where there's a room full of guys who can kill you almost immediately, so you wind up playing the encounter over and over until you have the perfect path of devastation through the enemies.

The main thing I disliked about Eternal was the added story elements, the very minimal story in 2016 was so perfect (it's basically: you wake up, you're badass, you hate demons, go rip and tear). Eternal tried to go for some sort of Doomslayer lore - spelling it out makes it lame.

Overall, both games are great, and I very much enjoyed them.

⬐ fknorangesite

Totally agree. I didn't like Eternal at first, but then suddenly the combat loop just clicked and I couldn't get enough.

⬐ barbariangrunge

They added too many mechanical things to fiddle with and it drowned out the positional combat aspect. It felt like playing starcraft in the mid to late game

⬐ agentwiggles

It definitely gets more mechanically heavy in the late game, in a way that kinda diminishes the pure combatness of the whole thing. At first it feels sorta like "you've given me a small set of murder tools, and I need to use them to build a glorious rampage", and towards the end you have so many options that it feels less artful. I still had fun but I definitely understand the thrust of the criticism - especially given how perfectly DOOM 2016 lets you compose a symphony of destruction with just the guns you have.

⬐ TheRealDunkirk

> It turns it into something like Hotline Miami, where there's a room full of guys who can kill you almost immediately, so you wind up playing the encounter over and over until you have the perfect path of devastation through the enemies.

I call it Mario-ization, and I hate it.

I also hated Eternal. It wasn't Doom. It was a "first-person jumper."

Based on the previous game, I pre-ordered the deluxe whatever version, and then couldn't stand the game, even on the easiest setting. This was the game that finally ended pre-ordering for me.

As always, TACMA and YMMV, etc., et. al. I wish I could enjoy these kinds of games, since a lot of effort is devoted to them these days.

⬐ castlecrasher2

>Based on the previous game, I pre-ordered the deluxe whatever version, and then couldn't stand the game, even on the easiest setting. This was the game that finally ended pre-ordering for me.

Same here. 2016 was perfection in so many ways that Eternal is just...bizarre by comparison. Nearly every aspect of Eternal was just plain mediocre or bad to me.

⬐ remarkEon

After finishing Gordon's essay, the jagged and at times uneven feel of DOOM Eternal seems to make a lot more sense now. This circular creative process (give me the music so we can design the level ... no, you give me the level design so I can write the music) seems to explain what felt so wrong about DOOM Eternal, this "fantasy platform puzzle" idea that Id was driving toward.

I feel the same way about pre-ordering AAA games, but FWIW I think pre-ordering is really context dependent. Pre-ordering the next DOOM? Hell no. Pre-ordering KSP2 or something like that? Yeah probably.

⬐ shkkmo

Really? KSP2 is not being made by Squad. Squad got bought by Take-Two and Take-Two is having a different studio build the game... or was until they cancelled the contract and poached most that studio's talent. This is a project that seems like it has a high likelihood of failing to capture what made the original one great. I'd wait to see some demos and lets-plays before putting your money down

⬐ remarkEon

Whoa … perhaps I’ve been living in a cave, but I was not aware of all of this. When did this happen?

⬐ shkkmo

Take-Two bought Squad in 2017. Here's a couple of article that cover some of the key events.

https://screenrant.com/kerbal-space-program-2-delay-2022-sta...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-03/kerbal-sp...

https://www.eurogamer.net/after-more-than-a-decade-developme...

It looks like Squad did get re-involved in KSP2 once they closed out development of KSP with v1.12

I'm not saying people shouldn't check out KSP2 and I have high hopes it will be a worthy sequel. It just isn't the sequel I would call out as a specific example of a safe one to pre-order.

Doom came out right when I left univeristy. Loved that game. I like the new Dooms too. I think they're fun. Way more "doom like" than anything else I've played since.

The "New Doom" music/sound producer gave a pretty good GDC one hour talk about the music came about. Some fun stories there ( the sound easter egg story was fun). Its more than about just the sound, its about process and change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

⬐ phaus

He's definitely talented and I did watch his talk a while back. It was a pretty good talk and pretty enlightening. I didn't realize how much effort some musicians put into setting up like 40 different pieces of equipment to achieve a single effect for a small part of a song.

The Doom soundtrack to me constitutes excellent video game music. I didn't enjoy it enough to listen to the OST like many folks did. I'm a metal head but it didn't quite do it for me like Mr. Bungle/Meshuggah does. I do listen to the parts of the Dusk soundtrack once in a while though.

⬐ acomjean

I appreciated the sounds in that game, especially after getting better speakers.

Mr bungle... wasn’t that a 90s faith no more offshoot that was like crazy circus music? I’ll have to check them out again.

⬐ phaus

They just re-recorded their first album which was a pretty straightforward but still weird trash album from 85 that's arguably as good as anything else from the era. It was recorded by a kid on a 4 track though so the quality of the original was too bad to really understand how good it was.

Dave Lombardo (Slayer Drummer) and Scott Ian (Anthrax Guitarist) joined three of the original members for the re-recording. Scott Ian was a fan of it back in the day and thinks it was more musically complex than what they and most of the other big metal bands were doing at the time. And it was written by 15-17 year olds inspired by Slayer's Reign in Blood.

But yes Bungle did a later album that was crazy circus metal and eventually they did a really great album of music that was less heavy (not metal at all) and more accessible called California.

I love all of it. Search for the 2020 version of Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny for their new stuff. Easily the best album released this year IMO. RTJ4 was also pretty good though.

Bungle wasn't really an offshoot of FNM, it was the lead singer Mike Patton's first band. FNM is also criminally under-rated. Their only really famous song "Epic" isn't really representative of the rest of their work. IMO the follow-up album Angel Dust is the best album of all time. They experiment with lots of genres and its still weird stuff though so its not gonna be everyone's cup of tea.

Sample of the Re-Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5ZKKxqUzY

I had a dx7 in college. Its an FM synth, an from the little diagrams on the top, it was fascinating. I could make my own sounds, but I never could get the time to get programming (beyond detuning the sound and doubling it to make a "fatter" sound, the dx7 had a gray matter mod chip). Lamentably in the 90s information about this stuff was harder to come by, plus the 2 line led screen to input things wasn't ideal.

You can see the top of the keyboard images here: https://soundprogramming.net/synthesizers/yamaha/yamaha-dx7/

But the internet abounds with sound making tools!

ableton has a synth basics online class/demo kind of thing:

https://learningsynths.ableton.com

visual programing sound machines in pd

http://www.pd-tutorial.com/english/index.html

Also the GDC talk by the sound designer of doom (the new one). He's using sine wave, and a bunch of effects boxes (some in parallel) to generate all those sounds. There is also a sound morph tool they used to combine sounds with a chainsaw sound... The talk starts a couple minutes in after a doom sound trailer thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

⬐ bdickason

Dx7 is such a rad synth!! I had a few vintage synths when I lived in New York but sold them due to space. Just started getting back into it and there is some really cooo hardware out there. Especially digging the Elektron line right now. Picked up a Digitakt which is a funky sampler / drum machine / sequencer. Has allowed me to drive my synths via midi without using software or a laptop. Very refreshing and a totally different workflow.

⬐ munificent

You aren't alone. Almost no one could figure out how to program the DX7. Even today with the resurgence of FM (Digitone, FM8, Volca FM, etc.), it's still just a really unintuitive way to build sounds.

That's not to say it's a bad, or powerful way, it's just really hard to build a correct mental model of how changing parameter X will affect the sound in the way you want.

⬐ dharma1

There is a new, very nice sounding open hardware FM synth running on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA chip that I really want to build (by René Ceballos, creator of z3ta+) - https://www.futur3soundz.com/

But yes - it has 400 parameters, programming the sounds isn't going to be easy!

I wonder if you could use a neural network to map many parameters into a reduced set of useful controls. Advanced physical modelling synths can have the same issue - too many parameters to meaningfully control while playing.

⬐ kmill

I'm vaguely remembering a talk I saw at Microsoft Research in 2013 by someone who studies psychoacoustics at a university I can't recall. They created an acoustic model that predicted certain qualities of a sound (wetness, harshness, brilliance, etc.), trained with data where subjects assigned such qualities on a scale for many example sounds. They used this to create 2D synth controls using the salient parameters. I believe this ended up being a somewhat popular VST plugin.

⬐ fit2rule

Aphex Twin figured out how to program his:

https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/aphex-twin-midimutant

⬐ acomjean

wow..

That is a good use of a pi. Though the button labels are a little odd (given that its a genetic algorithm..)

⬐ munificent

I can't tell if that's an argument in favor or against my claim. :)

If you have to have a brain like Richard D. James to grasp it, what hope is there for us?

⬐ rch

ALM makes some eurorack modules that are fun to use and sound great. This one provides 4 operator digital FM using ‘new-old-stock’ Yamaha ICs:

https://busycircuits.com/alm011/

⬐ dreamcompiler

I was something of a synth expert in the 80s. Built my own analog synths using Paia kits, used giant wall-sized modulars with rats nests of patch cords, programmed Arps, owned a few Korgs. Later I learned the Fairlight, hooked two of its channels up to galvos and did laser shows with it.

But I could never figure out the DX7.

⬐ acomjean

>Later I learned the Fairlight, hooked two of its channels up to galvos and did laser shows with it.

That seems neat. I did some poking around about how that could work.. Oscilloscope music. fun.

⬐ zabil

> ableton has a synth basics online class/demo kind of thing

This course is really good and fun! It made me appreciate the synth.

⬐ musicale

I am a huge fan of FM synthesis; it's wonderful for making growling bass sounds as well as drum/wood/metallic sounds as well as keyboard, brass, harp/guitar and string sounds and bizarre screaming out-of-tune noises. And of course the (in)famous DX7 "piano" sound.

If you want to keep it simple you can use it similarly to subtractive synthesis - instead of using a lowpass filter you can just reduce (or increase) the amount of FM on a single carrier oscillator.

I had never owned a hardware FM synth (though I was intrigued by the Volca FM) but after making many dozens of sounds on iOS FM synths I actually bought a vintage Yamaha TX81Z for cheap on eBay just so I could have fun with a hardware instrument. It's Yamaha's simpler 4-op design (with extra waveforms to compensate) and it's a fantastic instrument if either a) you can deal with the tiny display or b) you program it over MIDI using an external editor program. I think it was designed as a rack ensemble of sorts as it is 8-voice multitimbral. It also came with a cassette tape (!) containing the sysex data for its factory patches. ;-)

For anyone who wants to try out a free/open source DX7-like software instrument, you may want to check out Dexed: https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/

The DOOM: Behind the Music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY) talk is amazing if you like DOOM 2016's music.

Here's one of the instruments from the Baschet workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g6i7KUu2Lg

Mick Gordon–who scored the previous Wolfenstein game–did a great presentation on the instrument design for the Doom 2016 soundtrack, which is in my opinion one of the best (the best?) game soundtracks of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY

⬐ 35bge57dtjku

Does the trench coat make it sound better, or is he in a melting Fortress of Solitude?