My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal
medium.com
medium.com
Attempting to remove the Reddit post myself
I’d had enough. I grew tired of having the respect I afforded Marty, and his employer, with attempts to resolve the dispute privately, get turned into a giant waste of time, effort and money. The Reddit post had been up for 15 months and attempts to resolve the dispute with Marty had gotten me nowhere. With my patience stretched to the absolute limit, I decided to take steps to remove the Reddit post myself.
Reddit Moderator: I reached out to one of the r/DOOM moderators. We made contact and arranged a call via Discord.
The moderator introduced himself and spoke about his love for the DOOM franchise and its fanbase. Along with the r/DOOM subreddit, he told me he also moderated the official DOOM Discord server.
I told him how Marty’s Reddit post had affected me deeply, both professionally and personally. It was a source of ongoing stress and harm, and I asked if he’d consider removing it.
Much to my relief, he instantly took it down.
But within 12 hours, the post was reinstated. The moderator blocked me on Discord and didn’t reply to my emails.
A few days later, Marty’s lawyers contacted me and said removing the Reddit post had greatly offended him. He was furious and made it clear in the strongest terms that an amicable resolution would be impossible.
I just read some of the article and that's horrible behavior from ID.
You have my support, Mick.
We then got numerous people complaining that we, a bunch of unpaid moderators, didn't try to fight back. I recall one person saying we were "too chicken" to stand up for ourselves against a major US government agency.
If we had stood up for ourselves, the agency would have gone straight to reddit and filed a DMCA (as would be entirely within their right to do in that case), and reddit, inc. would instantly have removed the content (as hosting providers nearly always do, even if there's no grounds for a DMCA takedown[1].) Why are unpaid moderators held to a higher standard than the website itself?
[0]: "three-letter agency"
[1]: yes, this is wrong, but it's how it usually goes when false DMCAs are filed.
Holy hell even the Reddit mods now get death threats.
That's what happens when abusive, toxic people aren't kicked out of online communities the first time they spread abuse around - they learn that their behavior has no consequences and, as a result, escalate.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/yqjvzu/comment/ivppq8...
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.
I've watched it through twice myself, despite not even working in the game or music industry.
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This popped to mind, an unrelated but appropriate song:
He didn’t do the music for DOOM Eternal DLCs and it already shows.
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?
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.
It's not the main topic, but I like to call out attention to this:
"incidences of online abuse escalated at an alarming rate as Marty’s Reddit post led to frustration over my alleged professional failure, and toxic gamers grew openly aggressive.
They shared my personal details via message boards, including Reddit, which meant that abusers could now reach me in more ways than ever. They email-bombed my inboxes, crashing the server and clogging my messaging services, crippling my ability to communicate. They harassed my other clients with attempts to get me fired from their projects. They called my phone numbers around the clock, screaming messages full of abuse.
I began receiving specific expressions of violence, the content so vivid it made me sick. The torrent of abuse telling me how to kill myself, how I’d be mutilated, how they would circulate photos of my body to traumatise my family, how my family would be murdered, how they’d hurt my animals, how they’d shoot up any event I attended, how I’d be raped to death, really started to wear me down in ways I couldn’t previously imagine."
I'm strongly against authoritarian overreach and used to consider trolling a "fact of life", nothing requiring intervention. I no longer believe that. We're talking about a disappointing audio track for a stupid game yet the man and his family have to fear for their lives. And surely Mr Manager Marty looks at it with approval.
A line has to be drawn in the sand. There must be a cost to such threats. A massive fine or some short prison time. Further, those enabling and launching the mob, even if unknowingly, need to carry responsibility too. This isn't just defamation, it spills over into real world danger.
I cannot imagine ever going after someone like that, under any circumstance.
That's why many systems and programs fail, because we can only imagine how bad we are, and not how insanely awful the worst of us can act.
Very few people would do the kinds of things they do behind the screen or wheel of a car when sitting face to face with someone IRL.
We're picturing villains, hateful characters, people with severe mental shortcomings. Deeply traumatized personalities looking for some retaliation.
Nope. It's your neighbor. That kind middle-aged guy walking his dog. The one that is considerate and intelligent enough to know better.
Several years back a dutch TV show proved this point. They did detective work to track down people making online death threats and confronted them at their door. Every single episode ended in the same anti-climax: completely "normal" people.
When pressed for an answer as to why they launched these threats...none could give a meaningful answer. They didn't even actually care about the matter at all.
This is hardly the first incident like this and not even close to the worst. Remember when Reddit decided they knew who the Boston Marathon bomber was, and got his friends and family harassed so bad that the FBI had to go on TV and give away sensitive case information just so they'd see how wrong they were and knock it off?
Or maybe how Near was harassed for being a harmless non-binary furry until they committed suicide?
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Mick's been through some shit, but if it took you this long to realize that maybe the "trolls" of today aren't the cuddly affectionate clowns of the previous millennium then you really weren't paying attention.
I've been on the web since 1996 and am well aware of what people can do. Depravity I couldn't even imagine exists. So no, I didn't just learn that people do really bad stuff.
The reason I used the term "a fact of life" is because addressing this issue can come at an enormous cost to society. Nobody would want anonymity to be illegal or to have every word expressed monitored by some institute. That's the reason for my hesitation, not because I didn't know about several earlier examples of this type of harassment.
I find this specific example of a hate campaign very useful for it is pure. You can't say it was an accident (we had the wrong guy) nor is it clouded by politics: it's fine if it happens to my political opponents or it was in retaliation to them doing the same thing to our side. There's no provocation of any kind either.
The above bullshit excuses are often used to be relatively lax about this phenomenon. To look away, and to see them as rare incidents.
Whilst there's never an excuse, this one doesn't even have a bullshit excuse either. For me that's a tipping point in believing that legislation is needed.
and there are no real conventions about what sites should do when a) one of their members is a target from the outside, b) harassers use their site as an accessory (eg. to communicate, organize, store photos/videos, advertise, recruit)
and obviously it's not a clear-cut issue. mandating sites to somehow filter out harmful messages is not trivial. at the same time it'd be great to provide a few independent clearinghouses for these, it'd be great if users could opt-in to have content aimed at them filtered, etc. (for example it'd be very useful for sites to have a setting for users to only allow receiving private messages from users with some minimal reputation, and so on)
Uh, the Doom eternal soundtrack is widely regarded as one of the absolute best game soundtracks ever created.
I've not actually read this whole thing (am about to), neither was I aware of this whole mess, but I'm a massive fan of Mick and the Doom soundtracks. They have hundreds of millions of streams on YouTube in total.
I'm wondering how you could be on the internet in a post-gamergate world and still be surprised that shit like this really does happen. It's incredibly common - why do you think those calls for stricter moderation started in the first place?
Also, I'd disagree with stricter moderation helping, and actually, we saw the opposite here. He got moderated out of the audience, with no recourse a part from screaming into the void (until he wrote this). Without this massive documentation effort, he otherwise would've been totally recourseless.
If anything, this highlights how problematic moderation can be especially on reddit.
(I'm not arguing that moderation is bad in general, just that this story actually shows that there has to be a balance. A way to watch the watchmen I guess)
The only downside to this approach is when salaried subordinates don't understand this dynamic and rack up billable hours with useless meetings or busywork. Oftentimes when this happens management doesn't realize it until they get sticker shock from an invoice which is why I try to issue invoices frequently.
I agree with you, this project structure sounds… much worse than T&M billing, but if I were going to take on a contract in this structure I would have a simple rule of “I won’t work on the next milestone, without getting approval on the prior one” (for something like this, where the milestones are pretty small, maybe I’d be willing to work one milestone ahead).
But I’d absolutely use the schedule pressure as a tool to get them to care about approvals. Because, from the described contract structure, what incentive does the client have to give timely approvals or rejections? None!
This sort of thing is why I've always kept a salaried position. I could make more, perhaps have more varied & interesting work, and maybe gain other flexibility, if I switched to contracting, but few people extolling these benefits to me ever mention the flip side when things aren't perfect – I'm more than happy to make less to avoid all that.
From the article:
> The contract never showed up.
> but if I needed more time, they would be happy to amend the contract later
No contract, no work. Work starts late because of no fault of mine, including late/no contract? Delivery is likely delayed. Want me to accept an assurance: put it in the contract or otherwise in indisputable writing now. This probably marks me as someone unsuited for contract work, or too difficult to work with as a contractor, ete, and that is fine by me!
Yes, but apparently in Mick's case your name is on the product, and your reputation gets ruined if you don't play ball. A big software company can pay lawyers much longer than you can keep food on the table without pay.
This actually makes you an ideal contractor, you just have to know how to do this tactfully.
The real issue with this situation is working as a contractor on a single project. At the point you're working for one client, full time, as a contractor...you're an employee.
If you've got no other clients, you have no ability to negotiate with the simple statement, "I have other clients I have to tend to and can't dedicate time to this work until the contract is addressed. Let me know when you're ready to resume."
I disagree. I currently work as a contractor for one company more or less fully time. Because I'm a contractor, not an employee, I get to choose my hardware and OS, my own hours, I can take vacation when I want and most importantly, the employer can't force me to work in office.
Contract renewal is coming up soon, my rate is going up, and if they don't agree to it I'll just leave (if anyone needs a senior Java dev, email in bio :)).
> If you've got no other clients, you have no ability to negotiate with the simple statement
You don't need to negotiate, you need to assert you wont do free work and then don't do it.
For some people, that will mean multiple clients. For others, it might just be self confidence or good savings.
why I try to issue invoices frequently.
Although I've found that for this to be effective, you also need to be able to cease work which means you need a sufficiently large financial cushion.
A long time ago, when I contracted, I was essentially living month to month. I invoiced frequently but clients would often pay up in a painfully slow manner. But I had no real leverage because I was unable to cease work.
Kudos to contractors who achieve what I wasn't quite able to.
Absolutely. But this happens wih pay-per-project also, which is why on-demand contract work is much more expensive than salaried.
> no real leverage
You can always look for a new job/client, even while working for the present one. A counteroffer is quite convincing.
Mick, thats not a settlement, thats a payoff for taking a hit so the boss doesnt take the fall.
Marty wanted this to go away so he could continue ladder-climbing the tech industry. that he even attempted to do this strongly suggests hes probably paid these things out before.
It happens way more than you think.
Which leads me to believe this isn't cheap for them at all.
I've seen companies spend tens of hours of multiple employee's time to reduce a one-time cost by $1k, and then because of that reduction spend $10k elsewhere.
Not my budget, not my problem.
1. Companies are not alive. They are synthetic entities made up of individuals. They do not make decisions on their own. Their decisions are dictated by the decisions of the individuals inside of the company.
2. If I work in AP and receive a notice from a company executive to pay a contract that is signed by said executive (if they have clearance in policy to do so) and the person we're paying, we have all of the back end paperwork we need to pay it out, I'm paying it out. My job as AP is not to judge right or wrong. It's to process according to acceptable accounting practices, in general, and corporate policy specifically.
In other words, why do people act like a company is this mysterious creature able to sort right from wrong, and ignore the influence people like actual executives of that company can have on processes?
"Why would this synthetic entity made up of individuals go to bat for these execs that are liabilities?" I'm not sure that it makes the answer clearer.
It's hard to imagine a company w/o the transparency along the chain of command required to detect and prohibit and executive from getting hush-money rubber stamped. At least not one that actually makes money and isn't robbed blind by its middle-management.
On a side note, I've more than once gotten the trademark HN pedantry about "Companies not being people, but made up of them" and it never surprises me that people feel the need to remind me of it. When someone says "Company X made decision Y", it is short-hand for "The people responsible at Company X made decision Y". This is commonly accepted English.
I don't think companies are mysterious creatures able to sort right from wrong, I think they are made up of individuals who can sort right from wrong.
If any exec could just cut (likely many) six-figure cheques for what really amounts to personal expenses while overseeing a project that is allocated too few funds, is way over budget, and over time, then what keeps these orgs afloat?
To reiterate, I'm not saying I don't believe you, I just don't really understand it.
At a certain point this sort of thing does become unsustainable, but most execs stop short of that point. Also, this sort of thing becomes illegal at some point as well; you can learn about cases where people didn’t get away with it, and then maybe extrapolate from there to see how other people might get away with it.
Thanks, this is good advice
Also important - the executive controls processes. Executive level leadership is privy to information that the people who literally process payments are not.
As I said; if the paperwork is in order, AP will cut the check. They do not evaluate right/wrong. They evaluate allowable and/or appropriate based on common accounting practices and specific institutional policies. Many private companies have people who, because they are executives, are absolutely able to take advantage of the company, because they are the ones deciding what is right and wrong for the company.
What I'm saying is, the person processing payment for executive level leadership is not, generally, in a position to ferret out the right or wrong of the various contracts. Unless the contract comes across and says, "this is to keep Loughla's dirty damned mouth shut," I would bet most AP offices would never catch this sort of thing.
I hope that's clearer.
What I'm saying is that I don't understand how a company does not get looted by its execs if they can unilaterally and w/o consequence cut six-figure cheques to what amounts to a personal expense. Someone like Marty sounds like the type of person to have to cut these regularly.
Surely these execs have a responsibility to their shareholders and their board to turn a profit and not misappropriate funds. Marty might be an exec but he's a cog in the ZeniMax/Bethesda machine. You'd imagine someone up the chain would notice that their project is way over-budget and over-time and look at the many zeros on the legal budget allocated to various settlements attributed to one of their rough-shot execs.
To be clear, I'm not saying what you claim isn't true, what I'm saying is that I don't understand how its in the interest of the Powers That Be at ZeniMax to do anything but bury folks like Marty by sending him to the cloud spotting division on the roof.
As a musician and music-lover, seeing how they brickwalled [1][2] Mick’s tracks in the screenshots only serves to add to the heartbreak of his entire saga.
[1] Loudness War https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
[2] The Loudness War https://youtu.be/3Gmex_4hreQ
The masters delivered by Mick Gordon were meant for use in the game. I'm not an expert at game audio engineering, but the brickwall mastering may have been intentional to make the music stand out over the rest of the game audio. Either way those masters were approved by id Software for use in the game so nothing was wrong with those.
The problem is that those exact same masters were then used to produce the OST. To do a proper OST, you would have to go back to the source materials, remix them and produce a new master that is suitable for playback as an album. One that isn't as brickwalled and maintains more dynamic range. This is the important part that was skipped by Chad Mossholder and not caught by id Software's internal QA. If you take an already mastered piece of music meant for a different context and just cut it up and splice it back together, without regard for volume leveling, tempo adjustment or proper balancing, then you're inevitably going to produce garbage.
If you overlap two tracks, and reduce volume to avoiding clipping, the combined track has spikes in volume where they overlap. This is increased dynamic range. But like I said, it is not musically pleasant to listen to, and it's certainly reasonable to complain about it.
In order to increase the dynamic range of a mastered track you would have to uncompress/master it in the first place. If you are just decreasing/increasing the overall volume, you would have the same dynamic range just at a quieter or louder listening level.
Yes, mastering engineers work from track-level dynamic range (usually achieved with slow-response compression) to transient-level dynamic range (fast compression/limiting), and the range in between. When the context for this discussion is about "brickwall limiting", we're talking about very fast, transient-level compression, and your comment mistakes slower dynamic range for the transient-level dynamic range everyone else is discussing.
So, no. In this context, what you're talking about isn't increased dynamic range.
I do not see a single complaint from Gordon about the dynamic range, only the editing. But there is a paragraph in the article suggesting the dynamic range was intentional:
"Marty says that Chad, apparently working in a hurry, only had my supposed “bricked” in-game score to work with. He points to my so-called “bricked” score and adopts that as the reason behind Chad’s poor editing. But not only is Marty confused and clearly doesn’t understand the mastering process, but he also seems ignorant of how Chad’s editing introduced significant problems."
Note that there is no objective definition of "bricked". I personally tend to prefer higher dynamic range, but I've heard plenty of recordings with higher dynamic range than I would like. It seems very likely that some people prefer lower dynamic range than I do. Arjuna attributed the dynamic range to some unknown "they". There is no evidence for this in the article, or in Arjuna's linked Twitter thread. I believe the most reasonable interpretation is that Gordon deliberately chose low dynamic range as a stylistic choice. If you disagree, how about providing evidence?
But your point about "increased dynamic range" due to the editing errors is a distraction from your claim that Gordon applied a mastering limiter (which he clearly did). It creates ambiguity, because you're using it in a way that's not aligned with common usage in this context. That's part of why you're getting pushback.
In any case, if we want to try to answer the question of why the OST has low dynamic range (in the mastering limiter sense), I am somewhat receptive to ndepoel's argument - it seems reasonable that in-game tracks could be mastered more aggressively, and with lower dynamic range, than what would be appropriate for a proper OST release. Caveat: I haven't done mastering work in the context of game audio so I can't say if that's common practice, but it seems a little more likely than not.
Where are you getting this? His in-game music was perfectly fine, and the only instances of brickwall mastering were present within the "official OST" (that was mixed by Chad, splicing together the in-game music poorly). Which Gordon had no hand in whatsoever, outside of providing the source material, i.e., the in-game music.
Gordon explicitly singled out those instances. He didnt say "the track as a whole has a DR brickwall through and through." He mentioned a complete lack of crossfading being the massive contributor to the brickwall and weird tempo changes, and it all checks out.
These edits are a few hundred ms to a few seconds at a time, so it doesn't make sense that Gordon would refer to them as "brickwall".
(Another problem here is that evaluating a mastered waveform's dynamic range by eye is extremely subjective, and I would argue next to useless most of the time. The way these waveforms are shown in the post, we'd be hard-pressed to tell 9db (hyper-compressed) from 14db (pretty good) by eye. Professionals have software and metering to measure this; that's a much better approach.)
Bottom line: do these clumsy edits contribute to brickwalling? Really doesn't look like it, but I don't have the raw files to measure to know for sure. Are the edits good? Not in a million years.
You have access to the official OST of Doom Eternal (which is claimed to have the brickwalling), as well as access to the in-game versions of those tracks (which you can rip out of the game or find the already-ripped ones on youtube easily). I can certainly confirm by playing the game and listening to the ripped files myself that there was no brickwalling in the in-game tracks. However, it becomes very obvious in the official OST.
”His edits are riddled with these clearly visible mistakes. Anyone comparing my original tracks to his edits can hear (and see, by looking at the waveform [1]) the unmistakable errors introduced during the editing process.”
[1] https://twitter.com/DoominalCross/status/1251690243389927424
In the same tweet, the waveform image on the right is Chad’s edited version of Mick’s track for the Doom Eternal OST, entitled “BFG Division 2020.”
The comparison is valid, because it is Mick’s music, and it also serves to demonstrate the audio engineering expertise on the Doom 2016 OST, which was hailed as a masterwork soundtrack in the genre.
However, Mick did not mix this particular track for the Doom Eternal OST, and this is the critical point of this specific waveform comparison; that is, as Mick expresses in the article (and the waveform comparison demonstrates), the Doom Eternal OST is not entirely representative of his actual work, or the full depth of his audio engineering expertise.
This is due to decisions and modifications that were made without his input (e.g., the aforementioned editing).
> [...] Doing so caused dramatic amplitude spikes at the edit point. Chad didn’t bother to crossfade the transition: both files play simultaneously (causing spikes at double the volume).
> To compensate, he “remastered” the edited song by normalising it to 0dBFS — a rudimentary error.
That's why the OST is so incredibly brickwalled.
This was Mick's entire life for two years, but was just another contractor Marty was (badly) juggling. One of them will have a far clearer memory of what's going on.
My guess would be Marty made promises to upper management and things fell apart due to mismanagement. If this was JUST Mick and Marty interacting without some level of outside force I doubt Marty would act this stupidly.
It all makes sense after reading Mick's statement. Chad was tasked with the OST for the original release date back in August 2019, and he was supposed to use the game music, including the parts that ended up being rejected for the game. This is why Mick was ignored for months when asking about the OST. They only went back to him in March 2020 when it was apparent that the studio is not up to the task.
What's more, the announcement of the OST has some ambiguous wording. They announced it as Mick Gordon's DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal original soundtracks. This stuck out to me immediately as a combination of Mick Gordon's DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal. Mick cites this in his medium post as Mick Gordon’s original DOOM Eternal soundtrack but I think that is (understandable) wishful thinking.
I'm also worried that he apparently hasn't sued or settled yet. At least based on his story, it looks like he may have some amazing claims here, and any plaintiff-focused contract/IP firm worth its salt would be beating down his door to get this case. But some of his claims are likely state law claims that are subject to a statute of limitations that has either run at this point or is about to run, and settlement negotiations generally don't toll the statute of limitations. Get on it!
The industry has almost always been terrible for decades now, this situation is just another drop in the bucket of terrible stories.
Basically, people who wanna make games do so mostly out of personal passion, and that means they get pretty screwed in negotiating compensation.
He should have come down on them like a ton of bricks as soon as they announced an OST with his name on it, but that hadn’t been contracted (which both parties admit, so it’s definitely not he-said she-said).
What a waste of time for everyone involved, they certainly won't find anyone better for scoring the next ID games.
I hope he lands on his feet, whatever he does next.
This is what we are lampooning.
That explains why there was so much hype for how good Snap Map (the level editor) turned out. I remember playing with it for a bit, and it seemed both powerful and super easy for someone with zero experience in it to get something simple but fun going.
The behavior of Marty in the way it's described comes across classic narcissistic behaviors. Hopefully Mick has learned to recognize this early on in future engagements and to tread very carefully. This applies to all people in power in companies. Do not trust until that trust is earnt, no matter how friendly or forthcoming they appear.
I learnt this early in my career and can (hopefully) can spot these people quickly before they gain too much leverage. Give them nothing that can be used against you because there is a good chance it will come back to bite.
Hollywood and the Music industry set the example for how to extract maximum value from an artist while keeping them desperate for money. Unfortunately, those Hollywood behaviours seem to have jumped to game development.
It's disgusting.
Since the early 1920s.
Mick's work on the soundtrack is such a huge component of what made these games great. His dedication to the final product and the fans is admirable. I hope he doesn't have to go through something like this again. The stress alone is not worth it.
So I watched the Noclip hoping to understand the design choices better. Marty was disgustingly smug and assured about it all, coming across like a victim for being a misunderstood creative genius. Several times he implied the 2016 breakout hit he was following up on was dull and repetitive.
That helped me understand where it all went wrong. I'm devastated but not surprised that Mick got treated this way. Props to him for choosing to get the word out instead of taking a payoff. I hope there are professional repercussions for Marty.
Very glad Mick made this thorough post.
A lot of things can be more understandable when you are a single-digit employee count company running on a shoestring budget (which iD Software was at the time), especially when no intentional malice was present. It is another thing when you are a large dev company that has a massive financial backing of a massive publisher, and you appear to be intentionally malicious towards a single contributor who did nothing wrong and was instrumental to your success.
In my early career I lamented not going into games development but goodness what a bullet dodged.
Though even if it is a well-managed studio, you'll still have to deal with occasional crunch to meet holiday deadlines and such, plus the pay is often lower than similar positions in other sectors.
Hate to break it to you: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53391689
Activision, Blizzard, Ubisoft, and now Zenimax, Bethesda, and id are on my "do not buy or play" list for games.
I feel you.
These relationships always have a hugely asymmetrical power balance. As a contractor your reputation is so critical and the games industry is a small place. And there are far more artists than jobs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33535123
Reading through this particular situation though, he was in a unique position to negotiate due to all of management bungles.
1. Original soundtrack author.
2. Conference announcement that he would be producing the sound track as presales exploded.
There were others as well.
I'm a very patient person, but one thing I've learned over the years is that you can't drag your feet when people are intentionally stalling you.
Within 2 weeks of the E3 announcement after multiple attempts to get it resolved, you have to make it clear that you can't continue working without a contract in place.
I'm sure it's a "hindsight is 20/20" situation, but it was hard to read through all of that management abuse without seeing him put his proverbial foot down.
It is very easy to find a lawyer who will take your money, however.
You need your own agreements. You need somebody to review agreements presented to you. If there are IP concerns you need to have clear legal language present around that as well.
To get there, it's worth it to network in attorney circles. It's well worth it.
It's one thing if you're signing the bog-standard real estate deal paperwork, it's another if you're doing custom contracts related to work.
There are no standard contracts, and there are especially no standard contracts you're signing for the first time.
I have a 'custom' contract with a company I work for and it's 4 pages long and easy to understand.
If the contract were instead structured payment on delivery, then iD is in trouble if Mick delivers substandard work.
Even if Marty's side of the story were 100% true (which seems doubtful), throwing a hissy-fit on Reddit basically stating "I hired a terrible person to do the music so don't blame me" is a bad look.
If iD drags their feet on approving the tracks,
then Mick is in trouble.
If the contract were instead structured payment
on delivery, then iD is in trouble if Mick delivers
substandard work.
Aside from extremely trivial stuff (and maybe not even then) contracts and lawyers aren't perfect magic armor for either side.
You still need both parties to act in relatively good faith or somebody is going to be screwed over to some extent.
A sub-contractor did terrible work, and took out a mechanic's lien on our house nearly immediately after completion. One of their workers then assaulted my wife when she yelled at his mother (his mother apparently handled the finances and was trying to pressure my wife into signing something she didn't agree with about the quality of work).
On the other hand, mechanic's liens exist specifically for the case where the general contractor is not being timely with payment to subs; it's basically the only lever they have. In this case the lien was improper, and the AG told us we should sue if we didn't have evidence of it being lifted by EOD. I do wonder how many people just capitulate and pay for shoddy work just to make them go away.
I remember a certain animation studio based out of NYC that worked on an entire animated series for 9 months after only getting paid for the first episode and then their client had a meeting with them and said "Jesus told me not to do this project". That was the end of the project and the studio. Nobody got paid. They were already constantly 6 months behind paying their animators before taking on that job...
fantastic read, and I hope things go better for Mr. Gordon going forward.
one specific part that stuck out like a sore thumb to me—despite being ultimately a pretty minor thing—was that part where there's goop on the ground that prevents you from jumping. when I got to that part, I was like, oh neat, ok, here's a new gameplay element. now I'm gonna have to consider if there's goop on the ground in combat encounters or something going forward, cool. but no, instead, it was just used in that one sequence so you have to trudge through some goop and avoid a few stationary tentacle monsters, and then it never appears again. this stuck with me because it shows how far they've strayed from the classic DOOM design ethos, of giving level-builders tools to design interesting experiences. instead everything felt very setpiecey, very specifically-designed-for-this-encounter.
the lore stuff too felt overwrought as well—I really enjoyed how DOOM (2016) felt in that regard, it felt like you just got plopped into (the cancelled) DOOM 4, but instead of becoming immersed and participatory in the story, Doomguy didn't give a shit about anything except, goddammit, these moron scientists in yet another alternate universe once again did experiments with Hell shit and whoops yet another demonic invasion has arrived as a result—well, you know what to do, time to kick some demon ass regardless, it's what you do best! it was a good twist on the Half-Life 2 worldbuilding formula, sort of leaning on the fourth wall without totally breaking it, recognizing that players don't want a Half-Life-style DOOM 3 again, but rather, they just want to shoot some damn demons.
but then DOOM Eternal decided to play it straight and make all this overwrought lore and crap that I just could not for the life of me be arsed to care about at all. and they could've toned down the fanservice in the hub world to about 20% of what they shipped and it would've been nice without being over-the-top.
1) To call this Marty character shit would be an insult to shit. Mick made the mistake of considering him to be an honest individual who can be reasoned with. It’s disgusting that Marty’s employer hasn’t fired him so hard that he goes into orbit.
2) Mick should have a ruthless business manager interfacing to clients and handling contracts and payments.
He's not kidding. This thing has a table of contents.
And the Oculus lawsuit
And… so on.
Mick is such a legend. I'm sorry this happened to him.
I wish we got to hear the original original sound track, not some last minute Chad edit. I wouldn't be surprised if he deleted it all.
Geez management sucks almost without exception. Almost.
Tl;dr: very messy legal proceedings and multiple settlement offers (including a proposed gag order that ZeniMax's legal team was trying to force upon Gordon) are the reason for why. And those legal negotiations started less than 2 years ago, after the release of the game. And throughout that whole post, it is evident that Gordon (despite being wronged multiple times in a row) pretty much kept giving them second, third, fourth, etc. chances to resolve it amicably, as he believed it was in the best interests of the projects ultimately succeeding. Only to get taken advantage of and being stabbed in the back multiple times by the same person he decided to give those extra chances and forgiveness to.
When the principals of a game studio known for innovating and having fun leave, the studio seems to morph into an ugly, EA-shaped default.
Really damning account regarding Id's management and Marty Stratton in particular, and it seems like he's got a rather thorough paper trail to back it up. The worst I feel is him not being paid for half the music used in game that he produced and then discredited by lies on social media, and those are things he can clearly prove with the payments that were made and legal contracts he signed.
An actual contractor horror story, this will probably make future composers be very careful when signing anything with Id Software as long as management remains the same there.
I feel sorry for anyone who ever has to work or deal with Marty Stratton or Bethesda.
I think the real sad part is that Mick wasn’t able to identify Marty’s personality type at the outset, and seemed to keep falling for his lies, gaslighting, and manipulation, and under estimated the degree to which someone like him would throw someone under the bus at a moments notice.
Mental heal of corporate America definitely needs more examination, because with this type of wealth and power, it often ruins lives both big and small.
I think the real sad part is that Mick wasn’t able
to identify Marty’s personality type at the outset
They're not obviously creepy jerks hiding in the bushes near a playground wearing filthy clothing, leering at the children and planning an abduction. Nobody wants to work with people like that and they almost never become successful.
The ones who do climb the ranks generally have a lot of positive traits. That's what makes them so dangerous. One minute they're doing something legitimately good. The next minute they're pulling sociopathic moves.
Somebody like Jeffrey Epstein is a great example. Accomplished socialite, donated to great causes and institutions, personable, even had a close female friend so he couldn't be an abuser, right? Except he was, obviously. The lesson for me was not that people were gullible, it was that some of these predators are simply that good at cloaking themselves.
(To be crystal clear, I'm not saying Marty is as bad as Epstein, or directly comparing them in any way whatsoever. I'm just saying: successful jerks are usually a complex mix of good and bad traits. In Marty's defense he's in a high pressure role with a lot of money on the line and lots of crap to navigate and perhaps is trying his best but has come up short. I don't know.)
It's the system itself, as well as the Zenimaxes and Martys of the world, that I blame.
But lawyers don't do those things on their own. They're doing it at the express direction of ZeniMax. They may even be direct employees of Zenimax, who knows.
I'm not totally absolving lawyers from blame, but they're much closer to being a symptom than the problem.
The problem is, every lawsuit - even if the facts are on your side - still has a chance of going belly-up at least partially and making you responsible for even a part of the opposing party's lawyer costs as judges have quite a bit of leeway in many jurisdictions on distributing cost between parties. Big companies routinely abuse this threat scenario because they know 99% of people can't afford paying big lawyer companies that earn five digits an hour.
a sad lesson in contracts and work. don’t get upside down, ever. save the good faith for church.
really sorry, Mick
He probably should just have sued them to pay for all the music and to not put his name on the OST...
And why in the world would you trust that marty guy after talking with him on the phone. That just ... Also it would probably helped his reputation, to write some of this (the part about the OST) earlier in the doom reddit as response to marty.
Example:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Doom/comments/yqjvzu/mick_gordon_po...
(I use Apollo but I was looking via the old. site; I wonder if that might be the cause?)
Mick Gordon's been a household name thanks to his legendary DOOM(2016) soundtrack, so I'm not surprised he was trying to keep it up. A musician can really live or die by their name recognition and that open letter did a helluva number to his reputation.
couldn't he have sued on the basis his name was attached to it?
You have to prove that they're untrue and that they caused you harm.
In Mick's case, that harm would presumably take the form of lost income in form of work he didn't receive from other companies due to Marty's false claims. That's difficult (read: expensive) to prove in court.
Also, as others have noted, suing iD/Zenimax would also be some level of professional suicide. There are way more talented arts than there are paying artist gigs. That means game companies have hundreds or thousands of artists to choose from, and they consciously or subconsciously filter out the "risky" ones.
so why bother ever paying one?
Obviously, if the studios never pay, then nobody agrees to work for them, and the whole system of creative production just collapses.
Related note: iD is going to have a harder time hiring composers now that this is public.
He just didn't notice when it became irredeemable because hey, he's been working with DOOM for decades at this point and it's always worked out.
But when you're in the thick of it, involved with a project you really want to succeed, and which has an impact on your reputation, it is so, so easy to convince yourself that it's all a misunderstanding and you just need to keep trying. Particularly if you are a good-hearted person yourself. I've certainly suffered from this (and very few people who know me would agree that i need to be more of an arsehole!).
I would compare Mick Gordon's contribution to the Doom game here to that of Howard Shore in Lord of the Rings. The experience is fundamentally limited without the music.