Think back to the last time a game’s soundtrack made your pulse pick up before the game had even finished loading. Chances are it was rock, or something close enough, guitars turned up loud and drums that refuse to let up. Metal and gaming grew up side by side. Nobody quite planned it that way, mind you. It just seems to have happened: two subcultures with a huge natural crossover. If anything, the bond between the two has only grown stronger with every console generation.
DOOM Remains The Headline Act
Perhaps nowhere is the relationship clearer than in DOOM. Since 1993, id Software’s demon-slaying series has been inseparable from heavy metal. Mick Gordon’s scores for DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal are still held up as some of the finest game music ever written, the sort that can turn a firefight into something close to a live gig. When DOOM: The Dark Ages arrived in 2025 without Gordon involved, composers Finishing Move Inc took over. They drew on thrash and groove metal to build a soundtrack for the series’ biggest map yet, setting the scene for boss fights that feel like full-blown rock concerts in their own right.
Speaking to NME, the team described pulling inspiration from Metallica, Black Sabbath, Machine Head and Pantera, shaping different textures for different corners of the game. You don’t, mind you, need to recognise a single band name to feel the effect through the controller. The music tells you exactly when to brace yourself.
An Ode To Rock
Brütal Legend most definitely deserves a mention here too. Released in 2009, Double Fine’s critically-acclaimed action game cast Jack Black as a hapless roadie dropped into a world built entirely from heavy metal iconography. It’s all studded leather and Frazetta-style artwork stretched across the horizon. The soundtrack read like a wishlist for anyone who grew up on album sleeves rather than streaming playlists, even featuring Lemmy as a character.
A More Literal Combination
Guitar Hero took a rather different, much more straightforward route into rock fandom. Released in 2005, Harmonix’s plastic guitar controller turned you into the performer rather than the audience. It reshaped, more than anyone quite expected at the time, what a music game could even be.
The series went on to sell tens of millions of units worldwide, spawning Rock Band and countless imitators. It introduced a whole generation to bands they might never have sought out on their own. For plenty of players, mashing through a five-star run of a Guns N’ Roses track was their entry point into classic rock, not the other way round.
The Extreme Sports Link
Then there’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a game remembered almost as fondly for its soundtrack as for its half-pipes. Like the great boarder himself, the ‘99 original pushed the wave of millennium-era punk and skate rock as much as it rode it, giving tracks from bands like Dead Kennedys and Goldfinger genuine cult status.
Indeed, that marriage of beautifully reckless sound and movement gave several bands a fresh audience decades after their first records came out. It also became something of a template, one other extreme sports and action games have borrowed from ever since.
There On Every Level
It might seem like a bit of a stretch until you look closer, but rock’s fingerprints show up way beyond £70 console blockbusters. Heavy music has quietly infiltrated almost every corner of casual and handheld gaming, mostly because a solid riff is the easiest way to give a simple game loop some proper teeth.
Look at mobile RPGs like Iron Maiden: Legacy of the Beast, which turned decades of Eddie lore and album artwork into a full turn-based battler. You see the same thing in digital pinball apps porting physical AC/DC and Metallica tables to phone screens, or indie rhythm shooters like Metal: Hellsinger built around tracks from System of a Down and Lamb of God. Casual gaming platforms and themed jackpot slots online lean on the exact same trick, licensing back catalogues from Motörhead, Saxon, or Alice Cooper to give players a quick hit of nostalgia while they play. It turns out the bond between rock and gaming isn’t just about plastic guitar controllers; it pops up anywhere a turned-up amp can make a quick session feel that bit livelier.
Serious Business
The numbers behind all this are hard to ignore. UK players spent £8.76 billion on video games in 2025, according to trade body Ukie, a rise of 7.4% on the year before. That’s enough to make even the most hardened cynic sit up and take notice, not least when you consider the games sector now supports well over 70,000 jobs, nationwide. Soundtracks aren’t a footnote in that growth. They’re part of what keeps players coming back to a franchise long after the credits roll, humming a riff picked up mid boss fight.
The Story Continues
In Fairness, that pull runs in both directions. A recent look at rock’s most underrated bands is a decent reminder of how many riffs game composers have quietly been borrowing from for years, long before anyone thought to put a demon-slaying soundtrack next to Black Sabbath on a playlist. Rock itself hasn’t gone quiet in the meantime either. Bands still touring and recording today show the genre is still being written rather than simply replayed. One interesting example would be Hillbilly Vegas, a band whose existence was born of a gospel tribute to the founding member’s mother.
A Match Made In Heaven (Or Hell)
Gaming didn’t spark rock’s appetite for spectacle. Nor did rock inspire gaming’s need for tension and release. Put the two together and, somehow, out comes something neither quite manages alone: a soundtrack you can actually play. A culture of subversion. That’s probably why the pairing has lasted this long. It doesn’t look like fading out anytime soon.
