After more than ten years of devoted Guardianship, my Destiny 2 time is comfortably behind me. After gathering countless guns, collecting countless orbs, and completing countless rounds of a violent game show for an unfathomable cosmic horse, the Final Shape felt like a natural endpoint. After walking the paths of the Traveler’s pale heart, I was finally ready to turn my attention elsewhere.
If I knew the Scorgan was coming, I’d have never left.
The decade-spanning Light and Darkness saga might have come to a close, but Destiny 2’s still spinning new stories through continuing episodic updates. The current episode, Revenant, sees the return of the Scorn baron Fikrul, enlisting players to face his undead horde of Scorn as gun-toting gothic monster hunters. With the episode’s final act, Bungie added a new exotic mission, where players can storm Fikrul’s haunted fortress to earn the Slayer’s Fang, a shotgun that shoots splintering void rounds.
That’s all well and good, but the main attraction at casa de Fikrul is the Scorgan: a massive, spooky organ running on dark ether and inscrutable Eliksni machinery to make your typical Transylvanian pipe piano look like a Fisher Price plaything.
By shooting keys in specific sequences, players can trigger different effects: unlocking secret areas, kicking off hidden boss fights, and the like. Great. Destiny stuff. Very good. But as budding organists across the Destiny subreddit have been all too happy to show, the Scorgan is made for bigger, better things.
Things like the most nightmarish rendition of Coldplay’s Clocks that you’ve ever heard in your life.
Revenant is an episode full of dark alchemy and arcane ritual, but that all pales in comparison to the eldritch works of Guardians transmuting recognizable songs into hellish space music. Some are as simple as uncut recordings of players pivoting in place to shoot out chilling approximations of the Halo theme. Others are painstakingly edited compositions, stitching together captured clips of Scorgan notes into one of the world’s more demonic takes on Megalovania.
My personal favorite is this arrangement of the theme to Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo—a charming song of childlike glee that, through the unholy workings of the Scorgan, has become a harrowing musical ordeal fit for an apocalypse. It’s terrible. It’s beautiful. It’s an effort nobody should have undertaken but deserves all the praise I can give.
Even if I haven’t hopped into Destiny 2 in weeks, I’m pleased to see it’s still capable of bringing players new sources of joy. My Destiny era might be past, but I hope the Scorgan has a long, bright future.
