Methods of Destruction was an unofficial audio CD made by Sonic Mayhem for Quake around October of 1996. Much like the original CD, it was composed of 10 tracks with the first being a data track for compatibility with the original game.
This CD was well received by the community, gaining the attention of id Software as well as John Romero, and resulted in Sonic Mayhem performing the music for Quake II.
All tracks were produced by Cyber Age Studios and written by Sascha Dikiciyan. Tracks 3, 7, and 9 were co-produced and written by David Valencia. As was common in industrial music of the era, several samples are used throughout the work, many of them taken from sample packs; some of the ambient noises in Mental Anguish were later used by Kelly Bailey for Half-Life's "Hurricane Strings", and the orchestral opening of Sounds of Decay would later appear as the central hook for Spyro: Rypto's Rage. Curiously, the guitar hook for B7 was recorded by Jürgen Engler of Die Krupps for Front Line Assembly's "Barcode (Re-Assembled Mix)"; Front Line Assembly would go on to collaborate with Sonic Mayhem on the soundtrack for Quake III.
Samples were released on the website in .WAV and Streaming Audio formats. Both were incomplete, being less than 1 minute in size to be simple teasers for the actual CD.
The CD was leaked to Steam on March 29, 2012 after being thought to be lost to history. After two days it was taken down since the original author didn't desire a more public release of the music tracks; being his earliest release, Dikiciyan has felt uncomfortable with the quality of this work.
Kevin Sartori, of Psychotic Leisure Music, successfully managed to get Dikiciyan to agree to releasing the songs to the public in what the author stated was "a moment of weakness". The original CD blended more into one another, most of the tracks had 1/20th of a second on each other, which was fixed up by Sartori.
Note that track 10 is identical in every way to track 04. Note also that, unlike the Quake Soundtrack, there are only 10 tracks (as opposed to 11).
It has since gone up on Youtube and can now be freely heard by the public.
| Number | Title | Track |
|---|---|---|
| 02 | Welcome to Mayhem | |
| 03 | Premonition | |
| 04 | B7 | |
| 05 | Ultimate Rage | |
| 06 | Military Installation | |
| 07 | Methods of Destruction | |
| 08 | Mental Anguish | |
| 09 | Sounds of Decay | |
| 10 | B7 (Reprise) |