If you were making a sequel to Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun and wanted to inject a bit of extra boom into the boomer shooter, then you probably wouldn’t look any further than Mick Gordon. The legendary Aussie composer has been soundtracking videogames for about two decades, but it was his face-melting work on 2016’s Doom and 2020’s Doom Eternal that really established his monster guitar riffs as the perfect way to fire up fans of first-person shooters. It seemed a no-brainer, then, that developer Auroch Digital would enlist Gordon to add his signature heavy touch to the climactic boss fight at the end of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2. Ahead of the game’s release this week, IGN caught up with Gordon to get an insight into how his curtain-dropping contribution to the shooter sequel’s soundtrack came about.
IGN: How did you come to be involved with Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2? Were you familiar with the first game?
Mick Gordon: Yeah, definitely. So, I sent the team an email after the first Boltgun, and I said, “Hey, this game is really cool. There are a lot of boomer shooters out at the moment, but I think what you guys have done with it feels really good. It feels really fun to play. And you've obviously combined this pixelated, sprite-based, first-person shooter boomer shooter thing with the Warhammer 40K universe in what seems to be the most obvious idea that nobody else had ever thought of. Really, really great job.”
So, I had a bit of a relationship with them from that moment. And when they were doing the sequel, they shot me an email. They're like, "You know what? We've got this giant boss battle at the end, and it's on a scale that did not appear in the first game, and we want to have some music for it that kind of matches that scale, something that's really big and bombastic and silly. Would you like to do it?"
And of course, I was like, "Yeah, I'd absolutely love to." I've always wanted to, but I've never been involved in the Warhammer universe. I've always wanted to stray into that territory, but I've never [been] given an opportunity to until this one came along. So, there's the first-person shooter aspect, there's the Doom-inspired first-person shooter aspect, there's the pixelated aspect, there's this giant evil-looking demonic battle boss battle thing, and then there's the Warhammer thing. So, I mean, how would you not say yes to that? It's like a match made in heaven, really, isn't it?
IGN: When something like this kind of falls in your lap, do you start completely from scratch or do you have a folder on your MacBook that's labelled "Sick First-Person Shooter Riffs" and you just kind of scoop some of those out and start sculpting with them?
Gordon: No, definitely not. My job on every single project is to try to come up with a unique voice that suits that project and that project only. I like to think about these things as something that I come up with exists in a sphere in the universe, and that sphere belongs to that thing and that project, and that is unique in that space. When I'm coming up with something else, I can't push that sphere into the space that that other sphere exists in. Do you know what I mean? I have to come up with something that takes up its own space.
Now, of course, people will say, "Well, we've listened to your music. It sounds like you did this, sounds like you did this, you did this." I know you can never completely divorce yourself from your own tastes and input. So, I understand that. But my goal is to try and work with the team to come up with something unique that fits the music's purpose for that specific project alone. So, I don't just have like a bunch of [pre-existing] riffs or ideas that I would put into this game, and this game, and this game. That's not my job. My job is to sit with the team and try to find what makes their thing unique and really just explode that out [in an] extreme sort of way musically.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/mick-gordon-on-how-he-helped-to-make-warhammer-40000-boltgun-2s-climactic-boss-fight-big-and-bombastic
