Mick Gordon to perform Doom soundtrack live for the first time at Radar Festival

Mick Gordon is headlining Radar Festival in the UK next summer — and it will be the first time the Doom soundtrack has ever been performed live in full. Although Gordon played a medley at The Game Awards in 2016, this Radar set is a different beast entirely: a full-length performance with a live band, orchestra, and complete production.

Gordon is bringing the Doom Machine — the custom analog effects and audio-routing rig he built specifically to compose the Doom and Doom Eternal soundtracks — to the stage. Tracks like Rip & Tear, BFG Division, and The Only Thing They Fear Is You, which have racked up millions of streams and become fixtures on game music playlists, will finally get the live treatment they were built for. The collaboration came together after years of failed attempts, until Radar Festival organizer Joe James approached Gordon directly with the opportunity. Gordon says the festival's blend of metalheads and gamers makes it the ideal venue: "For a long time, I've wanted to take what I love about video game music and put it into a live setting that matches the energy you would get from a live rock or metal show … Radar feels like the absolute perfect [festival] to do it."

The performance carries extra weight given the turbulent history between Gordon and id Software. After Doom Eternal shipped on March 20, 2020 — straight into COVID lockdown, killing any promotional momentum — Gordon publicly distanced himself from the project, and the split raised real questions about whether he'd ever be able to perform these tracks live again. That he's now headlining a festival with them is a significant turnaround. Gordon describes his compositional approach as that of a "musical archaeologist" — the music is already there inside a franchise like Doom, and his job is to uncover and polish it rather than impose something from the outside. Since Eternal he's scored Atomic Heart and Routine, with a cyberpunk FPS called Defect next on his slate.

Gordon says he hopes the Radar show proves something to the wider industry: "The game isn't just that gap between the player and the television." He wants publishers and developers to see live festival performances as a genuine extension of game music, not a novelty. Given how long fans have waited to hear BFG Division shake a real room, the appetite is clearly there.