One of the year's best video game soundtracks is now available to buy—but its rippin', rockin' qualities aren't the only reason you should care. Doom 2016's soundtrack is just as notable for its path from video game to MP3.

During the late-'90s rise of CD-ROM gaming, Nintendo stubbornly held onto cartridges for many reasons. One lesser-known reason was the company's fondness for dynamic soundtracks. Nintendo wanted MIDI songs in N64 games that could transform based on action and player location, with elements like tempo and instrumentation changing on the fly. (Super Mario 64 introduced this concept, and Banjo-Kazooie ultimately perfected it.)

We haven't had a dynamic soundtrack that good in years, but the closest probably came in this March's surprisingly awesome Doom reboot —whose backing tracks are composed as sections that can turn ominous, eerie, or outright violent based on gameplay moments, such as whenever one of the game's memorable "monster closets" opens up, thus causing demons (and guitar riffs) to spill out.

The soundtrack quickly excited fans of '90s-era industrial rock with its mix of quiet, intensity-building passages and outright brutal guitar and synthesizer riffs, courtesy of one of the gaming world's rising music-composition stars, Mick Gordon (his tunes were a highlight of the Killer Instinct fighting series reboot as well).

Until now, there has been no official way to sample Doom's rollicking soundtrack outside of the game itself. The game didn't come with an official soundtrack album, either as a CD or a direct download. Fans have tried to chain the in-game audio snippets together in unofficial YouTube song "gamerips," but the soundtrack's dynamic nature has made it difficult to capture the one, "true" version of the song, independent of gameplay vagaries.

That's all in the past now, though. Gordon's thrilling soundtrack came out on Tuesday on iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify, and it's a two-hour thrill-ride of dark synth-rock that will delight anybody who ever had a jones for Nine Inch Nails or Stabbing Westward. The sequencing here is pretty divine, and anybody who enjoyed the ambient passages of NIN's Quake game soundtrack from 1996 will appreciate how Gordon has timed the tension-building stuff between the album's grittiest riffs.

Rip and tear to your heart's content, rockers.

Listing image by Mick Gordon