Celebrated video game composer Mick Gordon has revealed that he is working on his first full video game soundtrack in five years, for the upcoming FPS game Defect. The cyberpunk-themed asymmetric shooter will see Gordon bring his skills to the game, and for this project, he’s aiming to push the music to the very edge of what’s possible using his signature talent for heavy sounds and distortion.
“It’s celebrating that deformity, almost like some form of rebellion,” Gordon said to PC Gamer. “I’m always trying to push it, always trying to push it more. Like, how heavy can we get it? I’m really exploring the extremes of distortion with this project. How distorted can you get it, where you lose the musicality, and then bring it back.”
Gordon added that he’ll make use of synthesizer sounds traditionally associated with the cyberpunk genre, and he has a few ideas of how to put his own spin on those instruments. “Setting that background theme against this dystopian cyberpunk world gave me all sorts of ideas, especially with regards to synthesizers, and how synths should resemble analog machinery in a way,” Gordon said. “Something that’s palpable and tangible, and it must be alive within the sort of grimness of the cityscapes that this game takes place in.”
One surprising influence for Defect’s soundtrack comes straight out of the 1990 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, with Gordon remarking how one scene in particular featured a track during the Foot Clan recruitment drive that caught his eye–or ear, to be more precise. While Defect marks the first full soundtrack that Gordon will be working on since Doom Eternal–a project that ended Gordon’s collaboration with developer Id Software after a dramatic falling out–he hasn’t been sitting idly by.
Gordon helped compose a large chunk of the Atomic Heart soundtrack and contributed to Absolum, DotEmu’s new fantasy-themed beat-’em-up that recently launched. Between those games, Gordon also did “production role stuff” with several metal bands.