Horror stories like this are the main reason I only ever bill by the hour and invoice biweekly. Like, sure, I'll change things to meet requirements but I'm not going to work for free or go without pay for months. It's also much easier to fire bad clients or to stop working when an invoice goes unpaid for too long.
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.
One thing that surprised me was milestone billing with approvals, but moving on to the next milestone without getting approval on previous ones.
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!
> Horror stories like this are the main reason I only ever bill by the hour and invoice biweekly.
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.
Even good lawyers would have trouble bending the obvious. He had no contract to produce the OST (first) and he could have publicly claimed, that he only produced the game music and was not involved in that final mix of the OST.
His name was there without permission effectively, due to the lack of contract, so I doubt they'd try to fight that way. They have the big team but the opposition has an open&shut case, not worth the cost and the risk of subsequent action for wrongful use of the name. They might threaten of course, so he'd still need nerves. Again, reasons why I've always stayed away from contracting!
> 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!
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."
> 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.
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.
Another alternative to hourly billing is value-based pricing with up-front payments. May not work in every industry, but if a client isn't willing to do that, they're probably not a good-faith client anyway.
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.
As an independent developer, I stop working as soon as more than once invoice is outstanding. Anything else is asking to be left holding the bag (or more of it than you already are.)
carmack/oculus were not innocent bystanders. That they couldn't prove it in court is very different than carmack/oculus being innocent. oculus are bigger scum than zenimax.
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.
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).
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Having worked as a contractor ... sometimes, you hope things will get better or at least tolerable, or you go on because still need to be paid because stopping may mean you get nothing (bad contracts).
It's a pretty common topic for contractors.
Perhaps, but he has provided actual evidence that conflicts with Marty's public open letter (late date of contract finalization; work on soundtrack excluding him far prior to being near the deadline).
IDK "game studio doesn't allot enough time to make game, narcissistic manager works very hard to get anyone else to take the fall" isn't at all hard for me to believe.
This dude has screenshots, file metadata, and a contract to back him up. That contract says 12 songs. Sounds like that's all there is to it.
Pre-OST it sounds like he kept interacting in hopes that they would pay him on time. For the OST, I suppose a combination of professional decency and the fact that his name was already attached to the release kept him going.
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.
Quite possibly, but that's a lot of money to put up against a company (zenimax) known for their legal team. It would also mean never working with id/zenimax/bethesda/possibly even Microsoft game studios in general again.
I'm not a lawyer, but this is a difficult road. You can't sue merely because somebody wrote mean or untrue things.
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.
He had a lot at stake a lot of incentives to work something out with them. Not everyone can afford to just hire lawyers immediately and only talk through lawyers and burn bridges even further than they're already burned.
Half of it is that, and half of it is that it is standard procedure for contract artists to not be caught standing in a court of law. Nobody wants to hire people who sue.
Because that gives the studio the reputation of being a deadbeat. All the incentives point towards "keep disputes private and resolve them out of court if possible".
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.
I think it is more of a lobster in the pot situation. Every contractor is used to watching as the business side of an effort fucks everything up and doing their best to deliver despite the best efforts of managers and lawyers everywhere. SOWs not matching the original description? Asking to start work before the ink dries? Actually we dont want to pay for that thing we said we would pay for after all? No b2b transaction goes without at least one of those. In consulting lingo we call it "pricing in some slack" and its a lesson every rookie learns on their first ever contract 100% of the time.
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.
Reading this account, written from a position of hindsight, absolutely.
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!).
Out of curiosity, has there ever been a gag agreement that wasn't put forth by an absolute asshole to cover up their asshole behavior? Like are they ever used for good?
Yes; among the kinds of restraining orders against assholes, there can be provisions against certain kinds of public speech on certain topics (e.g. which would be harassing to someone).
By their very nature, gag agreements tend not to go public. Therefore, we're probably not going to get any stories of "good" gag agreements in the news.
Non disparagement clauses are gonna be common in any settlement where the other party has the legal upper hand. A wrongful termination would be an example, where the settling party would want assurances the manager won't pull a Marty on reddit.
They can be used in court cases to avoid biasing the public/jury before the case is heard to completion. Depending on your perspective you may see this as protecting the assholes involved but its intent is for a balanced and impartial hearing.
Ugh, what a horror story. I mean, crunch is terrible enough, but I can't imagine how exhausting it must be for music production, especially when it's this kind of balls-to-the-wall power-metal stuff that is used for DOOM. While I can appreciate that it's really well done, I actually had to turn it off during the game because it was just too much for my ears.
Is it known why this response comes out now, 2-3 years after the “DOOM Eternal OST Open Letter” to which it responds? Waiting until any related NDAs time out?
Mick says in the statement that he feels like he has exhausted every other avenue of addressing the Open Letter and lack of payment for all of the music used in the game, this is pretty much a last resort that he didn't want to have to publish.
Seems obvious to me. Making a public statement is always going to be the option of last resort for a professional. Seems like Mick did everything he could and finally did this as his last ditch attempt to at least rescue his reputation.
The ownership of those works is certainly a complex issue. Contractually ownership would have been assigned to id, but what happens for unpaid work? What about works in progress? Depends on the contract terms and the interpretation of those terms. Sounds like a lot of grey areas, and there can be significant repercussions for making spurious DMCA claims.
As an amateur it sounds a bit like copyright with a lien or caveat attached. They legally own it now, but can't legally use it since it was rejected and not paid for. It's not as clear cut as if I personally ripped BFG Division to put in my indie game.
The post explains it quite well, I suggest reading it. I know it is a long read, but there is zero fluff or wasted space on much personal musings in there, all pure factual content.
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.
Almost all the biggest subs, or popular subs tied to a commercial product, have shitty moderators. They're either modding dozens of subs or have conflicts of interest with said products.
This is so widespread it really lends to the conspiracy (almost certainly true) that most viral reddit content is astroturfed. Perfect example, one of the premier journalists in esports, Richard Lewis, cannot have his excellent and often-ground-breaking content posted to the LoL subreddit because the mods are in bed with Riot.
It's sad any time I see fellow proletariat or PMC doing free work for billion dollar companies and to the detriment of other people just trying to make a living.
Unfortunately, abusing artists in media companies has become the norm.
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.
John Carmack had no hand in DOOM (2016), and was out of iD Software for quite a while by that point, so I have no idea why you felt the need to bring him up.
id Software has a long history of dysfunctional management that goes back to its inception. It’s probably not fair to single out John Carmack but there was plenty of backstabbing. All four founders left the company on bad terms.
Oh damn, I actually had no idea. I stand corrected, thanks for pointing it out.
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.
"Afterwards, he offered me a six-figure settlement to never speak about it."
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.
Tangent, but I always wonder how these kind of payments are paid for. Would it be out of pocket money for Marty, or would he let Mick bill some phantom hours and have the company pay for it?
Why would companies go to bat for these execs that are liabilities? Why not pay out the settlement and send Marty to Zenimax's St Helena division to prevent having to pay this sort of thing out again? (or worse, risk the damage of having someone not willing to take hush money like Mr. Gordon).
Having been in a similar situation on a lot smaller and insignificant scale, I wish I could say something coherent: I wrote and re-edited a long rant here, before ultimately deleting it. But then I see the Adam Neumanns et al. of this world still continuing to be successful despite their numerous public and not so screw-ups that add up to billions, and realize that it's the usual "A times B times C equals X".
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.
>Why would companies go to bat for these execs that are liabilities?
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.
Not that I'm denying your claim, but if there's that little oversight on the allocation of funds, I fail to see how any of these orgs not get looted before the opening bell rings.
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.
The expense is at least prima facie legitimate. On paper you’re just paying a fee to a contractor in exchange for a NDA protecting the company from liability. If you cover things up well enough, it won’t raise suspicions and nobody is going to go out of their way to investigate their boss.
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.
> 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.
You focused on the wrong part of that. Yes, it's semantics, but I think having a common definition is important.
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'm not saying that some person in Accounts Payable is meant to launch an inquisition on every cheque that goes out and blow a whistle.
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.
Truly insane. It's a shame Mick had to go public on this so hard, I feel it has undoubtedly hurt his professional career. But what Marty/id Software did here is completely unacceptable and absolutely disgusting. What a mess.
I don’t think he is going any hard in-fact all of his post is completely focused on his treatment. He could’ve exposed Marty’s/id’s treatment with others. I think he still is trying to avoid confrontation in court, maybe settle outside.
”The same thoughtless disregard for basic music fundamentals that plagued the preliminary edits ended up on the final OST.”
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.
It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon. See the section starting at "id Software approved my mastering". The alleged "disregard for basic music fundamentals" appears to have introduced more dynamic range, although not in a way that's pleasant to listen to.
Lowering the volume does not equal introducing more dynamic range. It was just done to avoid clipping when pasting two bits of track on top of each other.
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.
>Lowering the volume does not equal introducing more dynamic range. It was just done to avoid clipping when pasting two bits of track on top of each other.
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.
That wouldn't increase the dynamic range, it's just preventing the overlaps from clipping. Both tracks would still have the same dynamic range, the relative overall volume might be different for the track you lowered/increased to match the other one, but I doubt the transition between the two would be considered increasing the dynamic range.
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.
You're making an extremely pedantic distinction, which is only correct in a purely technical sense. Which is the worst kind of correct.
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'm well aware of the difference, as acknowledged by my first post in this thread ("not in a way that's pleasant to listen to"). But it is not pedantry, and it is relevant to the context, because this unusual form of dynamic range provides evidence as to when the dynamic range compression was applied. If it was applied after the edits described in the article, I do not think we would not see the volume spikes.
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?
Yes, it's clear Gordon has applied a mastering limiter to the tracks he delivered to Bethesda, and given that the style of the music involves heavy processing/effects and multiple levels of compression, a somewhat aggressive mastering limiter seems appropriate here.
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.
> It seems the brickwall mastering was intentionally done by Mick Gordon
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.
The edits described in the article have no mention of additional dynamic range compression. The music in the OST is described as "normalized" to 0dBFS, which means simply adjusting the gain. This suggests that the dynamic range was already compressed (which is not unreasonable for game audio, because it will make the sound effects easier to hear).
The edit described in Gordon's post talks about overlaying tracks with zero crossfading done and instruments clashing, all being done hastily by hand. That alone is a massive contributor to the dynamic range brickwall.
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.
Overlapping without crossfading is strange and very likely wrong, but it cannot contribute to brickwalling unless further dynamic range processing is applied, or unless it causes clipping, which is avoided by the described normalization. No further dynamic range processing is described in the article, and no evidence of such processing is visible in the screenshots.
"Brickwall" limiting is about very short-term transient compression; to oversimplify things, those limiters are operating at the timespan of 1-30 milliseconds, more or less.
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.
Now, applying a mastering limiter to sub-tracks? Extremely novice mistake, and could be described as brickwalling. Certainly within the realm of possibility given the novice quality of the editing here.
> Really doesn't look like it, but I don't have the raw files to measure to know for sure.
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.
Interesting. My initial comment was discussion of the article only. This additional information, which is not mentioned in the article, makes it seem that the brickwall mastering was not done by Mick Gordon.
”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.”
This is comparing Doom 2016 with Doom Eternal. It shows strange production in Doom Eternal that is very probably an error (overlapping without crossfade), but it provides no additional information as to why the Doom Eternal OST has low dynamic range.
In the tweet, the waveform image on the left is Mick’s original “BFG Division” track from the Doom 2016 OST.
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 not what "normalising" means. Normalising is just changing the gain of the whole track so the peak level matches your target. And this is obviously what it meant, because if it somehow actually meant dynamic range limiting, we would not see the volume spikes.
As a musician I understand his desire to deliver a finished work that everyone could be happy with even after he was given strong incentives to just bail on it. It is a shame that the OST he wanted to release wasn't able to happen.
This is so sad. I was unfamiliar with this whole dispute, but I've been a huge fan of the Doom 2016 soundtrack ever since that game was released. The music was absolutely essential to the game and it's amazing to me that they apparently didn't realize that and didn't treat the author as essential to the game development process.
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!
I would expect this story from a struggling indie game dev startup but ID Games, Zenimax, Mick Gordon and Stratton are all huge players in the game dev industry -- thus this looks bad for the industry as a whole. I was always curious about why the Doom Eternal OST never really showed up on Spotify. This story explains that.
On the contrary, after the horror stories coming from Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard, sometimes requiring the government to intervene, my expectation is really low. If anything this is a dull affair since nobody got killed or sexually harrassed.
This would never happen with an indie studio because they wouldn’t have the deep pockets to legally strong arm the contractor. If both parties were small businesses then the threat of legal action from either side would keep them both form misbehaving.
This is a really long read.
If you want a summary the Factual rebuttal at the end and the TL;DR are good.
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.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
And the Oculus lawsuit
And… so on.
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].
0. https://youtu.be/oKzYf1JW7kE
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOJcY3iMZG8
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.
I feel you.
This dude has screenshots, file metadata, and a contract to back him up. That contract says 12 songs. Sounds like that's all there is to it.
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!).
He's not kidding. This thing has a table of contents.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
a sad lesson in contracts and work. don’t get upside down, ever. save the good faith for church.
really sorry, Mick
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.
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.
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.