Heavy Metal & Video Games - A Wild Genre Retrospective

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When I was a young lad, my devoted Christian mother was utterly terrified of two things: heavy metal and video games. Rather unfortunately for her, all the stern talks and unfulfilled birthday requests weren't enough to put me off. And much to our local pastor's despair, I stand before you as a man who loves all things metal, making his living talking about video games online.

Now, that probably won't come as much of a surprise to you, as these two worlds seem to constantly overlap and share a special kind of relationship that you don't typically see between video games and other forms of music. You can't spend 10 minutes at a festival like Bloodstock or Download before you run into someone dressed as Ryu from Street Fighter or Subzero from Mortal Kombat. And I can't tell you the amount of times I've seen a band come on stage to the sounds of Final Fantasy or Halo. There are endless YouTube channels dedicated to producing metal covers of famous video game songs. Bands that have written entire albums inspired by specific video game series. And conversely, metal-inspired video game soundtracks are now so popular that they might as well be albums in their own right. The simple fact is that if you walk up to someone wearing a Metallica, Meshuggah, or Opeth t-shirt, there's a pretty good chance that you'll be able to get them talking about Resident Evil, Dark Souls, or Zelda.

So, today I want to work out why this is the case and investigate how it is that crashing drums, screeching guitars, and howling vocals became such an unlikely and integral part of the video game industry. But don't you worry, this isn't going to be some dry old academic video essay, as we're going to break up our Metallic Odyssey into a bunch of different sections. Some focused on history, maybe a couple of reviews, a few chapters looking at dreadful licensed games, and a hell of a lot of talk about controllers shaped like guitars. Think of it as a sprawling prog epic, repeating choruses and experimental verses. Lots of weird, distinct parts that make up a greater whole: the chaotic story of how Heavy Metal took over the world of video games.

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But before we get started, a few quick disclaimers. Firstly, thanks to YouTube's copyright system, I can't show off as much music as I'd like. But if you're interested in any of the bands, albums, or soundtracks that get mentioned, there is a playlist down below that contains everything covered in the video. Secondly, I'm going to be using the term "metal" pretty liberally. So, if you find yourself about to write out a comment saying, "This band isn't metal. They're rock or grunge or a punk band," let me give you a preemptive reply: I don't care. This is meant to be a fun video, so all heavy-adjacent music is going to be lumped together. Thirdly, I'm not trying to catalog every single use of metal music in every video game ever made. So, if you think I've missed something that is worth discussing, just drop it down in the comments below where I always try to reply to every single one. And lastly, I need to say a massive thank you to the "I Finished A Video Game" patrons whose support is what keeps this channel alive during such a crazy time on YouTube where view counts seem all over the place and AI shorts are being pushed over human-made videos. If you like the stuff I make, there's a link down below where you can get 50% off your first month and access to a bunch of exclusive videos like a 40-minute deep dive into the development of Chrono Trigger or a retrospective exploring the studio behind Time Splitters. Also, I've been streaming over on Twitch for a few months now, where we're working our way through a bunch of classic PlayStation horror games. So, if you want somewhere to hang out and enjoy the finer parts of the golden age of gaming, you can catch me there every Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. GMT, which is 3:00 p.m. Eastern and 12:00 p.m. Pacific for all my friends across the pond.

So, with rehearsals done, I think we're ready to hit the road, as we've got a lot of venues to hit if we're going to work out what it is that makes heavy metal and video games such a match made in heaven. Now, this wouldn't be a lengthy YouTube video if we didn't start with a solid chunk of history. So, let's kick things off by investigating what video games and metal have in common.

The first point of connection is a pretty weird one, as it comes in the form of a book that was highly influential on the aesthetics of early metal bands and inspired many of the first video games. This is, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien's *Lord of the Rings*, which was first published all the way back in 1954 and provides a rather unlikely common ancestor. Now, elves, hobbits, and magical rings might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Deftones or Korn, but Tolkien's fantasy world had a very different reputation with musicians back in the '60s and '70s. This was the age of the counterculture revolution, where American and European youngsters began pushing back against the strict conservatism of their parents, embracing free love, recreational medicine, and psychedelic new-age thinking. It might be hard to imagine, but during this time, *Lord of the Rings* was extremely popular. As despite Tolkien being a devout Catholic, his book was full of anti-industrialism and an appreciation for the natural world, all of which really appealed to the flower power tendencies of young hippies. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that quite a lot of music from this period took influence from the world of Middle-earth. And there are a ton of high-profile rock bands with distinctly fantasy-themed songs. Pink Floyd had a track called "The Gnome" on their debut album *Piper at the Gates of Dawn*. On Black Sabbath's self-titled album, Geezer Butler penned a track about Gandalf called "The Wizard." And most famous of all, the monstrously popular Led Zeppelin had three different songs – "The Battle of Evermore," "Misty Mountain Hop," and "Ramble On" – all of which made overt references to Tolkien's work. *Lord of the Rings* wasn't seen as a book for unpopular nerds, but something that the coolest people on the planet sang about. And as their influence grew, fantasy in heavier music started to become very common. This was spearheaded by Ronnie James Dio, a diminutive operatic singer whose work with Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow and then on his own solo albums like *Holy Diver* in 1983 essentially set the blueprint for high fantasy-inspired metal. Album covers featured menacing demons and castles in the sky. The lyrics were about all manner of mythological and magical adventures, and the music tended to be on the more progressive side, where big riffs and complex arrangements were prioritized over catchy choruses. Thanks to Dio's work, 1980s metal ended up being completely defined by this high-concept style. And very quickly, bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Manowar, and Helloween started taking things even further. Albums now told cohesive stories that mimicked the ideas of great fantasy novels. Staging and costumes became increasingly medieval. And before long, that original connection to *Lord of the Rings* and the hippies was completely forgotten, as metal imagery and fantasy imagery became one and the same thing.

Now, you might already be asking, "What has this got to do with video games?" And well, the answer is that games went through a very similar process at almost exactly the same time. You see, while many games trace their lineage back to the immediate action of *Pong*, *Space Invaders*, and *Pac-Man*, there is an entire strain of the industry that only exists because of *Lord of the Rings* and how it influenced two young men. Back in 1971, Gary Gygax was working for a board game company called Guidon Games. And after seeing the growing reputation of *Lord of the Rings*, he decided to produce a fantasy-themed module for the company's latest release, a medieval war game called *Chain Mail*. This caught the eye of fellow gaming enthusiast Dave Arneson, who adapted the fantasy version of *Chain Mail* into something that people could play cooperatively. And after showing it to Gygax, the two decided to develop this concept further and ended up making *Dungeons and Dragons*. It proved to be a monster success and catapulted tabletop role-playing into the mainstream, but it also had the indirect effect of inspiring the role-playing video game. In 1979, Richard Garriott signed a deal to release *Akalabeth*, and in 1980, Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead created *Wizardry*. Both of which were supposed to be digital adaptations of *Dungeons and Dragons* and were also heavily inspired by the developers' love of, you guessed it, *Lord of the Rings*. As these two series would in turn inspire the creation of *Final Fantasy*, *Dragon Quest*, and *Zelda*, which would subsequently give birth to four decades of RPG mega-hits. Just like with heavy metal, it's pretty easy to draw a line from the imagery and aesthetics of modern games all the way back to Mr. Tolkien. It means that if you're into swords and magic and dragons and monsters, there is a fairly good chance that both metal and video games scratch that same itch.

But the connections run far deeper, as there is also a shared obsession with the dark underbelly of humanity. For metal, this was present right from the start, as Black Sabbath's debut, which is commonly seen as the first truly metal album, was steeped in occult and hellish imagery, featuring songs about demonic visitations and literally being named after a horror movie. Eventually, their successes pushed this even further. And on top of all the mythology and fantasy, bands like Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and Judas Priest were frequently writing songs about serial killers, vicious criminals, and living dangerously. By the mid-1980s, thrash bands like Slayer, Metallica, and Megadeth, and a growing swell of death metal bands like Morbid Angel, Death, and Deicide, were all engaged in an arms race to be the most extreme band on the planet. And as the riffs were getting faster, the lyrics were getting darker.

This all eventually caught the attention of a host of do-gooder American politicians who were desperately concerned about how this new wave of violence-fueled music might be corrupting the nation's youth. In 1985, spearheaded by Al Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, a Senate hearing was set up where Democrats and Republicans alike worked themselves up into a fever pitch over the covers of Van Halen records and the lyrics in Ozzy Osbourne songs. Now, obviously, just because a song talks about raising the dead or hacking someone to pieces does not mean listeners are going to go out and do that, and I've always been of the opinion that music like this provides an outlet for all the negative energy that life throws your way. But America's politicians were not so convinced. Heavy music quickly became the most dangerous thing on the planet, and parents were encouraged to complain to radio stations and ban their children from buying CDs. All of which only made the music look more enticing and clearly didn't work, as the genre continued to grow in popularity.

Now, funnily enough, this exact process of increasingly intense subject matter and subsequent political backlash was also mirrored over in the world of video games, although it took about a decade to catch up to metal. This was thanks to Nintendo, who dominated the American gaming landscape in the 1980s and were terrified of losing sales because of a potential moral panic. The result was a strict regime of censorship on all their American-published games, which meant no blood, no boobs, no booze, and no blasphemy. All of which gave the industry a very child-friendly feeling during the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Well, all of this began to change when Sega released the Genesis in 1989. They had a much more lax approach to content control and used this to advertise their console as a mature and exciting alternative. A genius marketing strategy that tapped into our collective obsession with blood, guts, and gore. In games like *RoboCop versus The Terminator*, *Castlevania: Bloodlines*, *Splatterhouse*, and of course, the beautifully uncensored *Mortal Kombat* series. The Sega Genesis was able to create the same pull that drew people to extreme forms of metal. And for exactly the same reasons, the industry ended up being hauled in front of the American government.

In 1993, after being appalled by the violence on display in *Mortal Kombat*, Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman announced that he would be opening a series of Senate hearings with the stated aim of bringing heavy regulation to the video game industry. Given such noble aims, it should be no surprise that the hearings were a complete shitshow, with Lieberman completely misrepresenting the games he was supposedly outraged about, making them seem far more vicious and sexually aggressive than they actually were. And in a particularly strange move, he brought in a host of dubious child psychology experts who claimed half of all murders in America were caused by violent TV. Now, given Joe Lieberman would later go on to be a passionate advocate for the war in Iraq and constantly vote to protect private healthcare companies, this level of dishonesty should probably have been expected. But the more surprising aspect was how the video game industry responded. Both Nintendo and Sega were invited to send representatives, but instead of defending the medium and debunking Lieberman's claims, they spent the entire time blaming each other and using the opportunity to continue their console war. This had the impact of convincing all those concerned Christian parents that, just like heavy metal in the '80s, video games were a new kind of soul-destroying menace.

And tragically, we got to see both of these moral panics in action in 1999. That year, two young teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, turned up at their high school in Columbine, Colorado, and shot 14 people dead, shocking the entire world and prompting an American media response that still baffles people to this day. Instead of looking at things like the kids' collapsing mental health or the merciless bullying they were subjected to, the media became fixated on the idea that Harris and Klebold had done this because they listened to Marilyn Manson and made mods for *Doom*. Newspapers ran headlines like "Devil Worshipper Musician Told Kids to Kill." *60 Minutes* ran an entire episode dedicated to the danger of *Doom* and *Quake*. And across the country, *Dungeons and Dragons* and horror movie clubs were shut down, all in the name of protecting the children. It's an absurd reaction when looking back, but it's also the perfect example of how intertwined these mediums had become. By the late '90s and early 2000s, listening to Tool and System of a Down, playing *GoldenEye* and *Resident Evil*, reading *Dune*, knowing about *Akira*, or watching horror movies – these had all become part of the same underground identity. A world of outsiders united in their love of all things dark and intense and weird. A place of comfort for millions, but a set of hobbies that were still treated with suspicion by the clean-cut, straight-laced mainstream.

Now, really, we could go on forever making these sorts of connections, as there is a lot more that unites heavy music and video games. We could talk about how tape sharing in the 1980s, where fans would swap music and help market bands without record deals, and early game studios creating shareware, where games would be released for free in order to build a fan base, are almost exactly the same practice. We could delve into the dedication required to become a top-tier speedrunner or professional gamer and how this mimics the sheer amount of muscle memory that you need to build to master an instrument. Hell, there is even an argument to be made that the booming popularity of multiplayer games is tapping into that same need for shared experience that causes so many bands to form in garages and spare rooms. Clearly, there exists a long and storied connection between the twin worlds of heavy music and video games. But I think that's quite enough of the historical analysis, as it's long overdue that we take a look at the two working in beautiful, chaotic harmony.

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So, let's get into our first chorus, which is going to be a series of chapters where we take a look at some prime examples of metal video games. Try to work out what it is that makes a video game earn that reputation. Now, in order to do that, we need to first establish what it even is that makes a video game feel metal. Because while it might sound obvious, I actually think it's quite a complex thing to unpick.

For example, is *Dark Souls* a metal video game? After a cursory glance at social media, it seems like the general consensus is that yes, it is. But I'm not convinced. While it's got the dark atmosphere, the twisted monsters, a story about ruined worlds, and more blood and gore than you could possibly want, it's missing two key components. First, while Motoi Sakuraba's soundtrack is absolutely incredible, it's largely made up of lush orchestral arrangements, haunting piano melodies, and a huge amount of choral music, which suits the game down to a tee, but isn't exactly metal. Similarly, I think speed has always been a big part of what sets metal aside from other forms of music. And while later FromSoftware games like *Sekiro* and *Elden Ring* would really embrace this, *Dark Souls* is more of a slow and considered action RPG, especially if you're creeping around corners hiding behind a shield. So, while it's nailing the aesthetics and the tone, it's missing the galloping pace and the actual metal music. So, in my view, no, *Dark Souls* does not count. And the same goes for a bunch of other games that are commonly referred to as being metal. *F-Zero* has got the speed and the music, but it's one of the most colorful games ever made. *Symphony of the Night* is dripping in gothic horror and wailing guitar solos, but it's very easygoing in terms of difficulty. And while *Resident Evil* might be a tension-filled nightmare, it's a slow kind of darkness that creeps up behind you rather than thrashes out of control.

So, in this video, for a game to be truly metal, it's got to hit that perfect blend of aesthetics, music, speed, and intensity. So, let's get started with the first ever game to nail all four. This is, of course, *Doom*, a generationally influential first-person shooter released by id Software in 1993. Now, there isn't much to say about *Doom* that hasn't already been said a million times before, but in the interest of setting the scene properly, let me set the scene. Its Software had been formed in 1991 by programming genius John Carmack, unrelated artist Adrian Carmack, and two game design savants, John Romero and Tom Hall. And after enjoying some moderate popularity thanks to their side-scrolling *Commander Keen* series, they burst onto the scene in 1992 with *Wolfenstein 3D*. This was the first ever fast-paced, good-looking first-person shooter. And thanks to Romero's clever design and Carmack's coding brilliance, it ended up being a massive commercial and critical success. But rather than diving straight into a sequel, the guys at id wanted to do something even bigger. The result was another first-person shooter, but one built with much more advanced technology, much more complex levels, much more detailed graphics, and a far more compelling idea: that of a space marine trapped in a life-or-death battle against the forces of hell.

Now, *Doom* ended up being an even bigger success than *Wolfenstein*, and was so popular that for a long time, all shooters were called "Doom clones." But rather than examining its video game legacy, we want to look at its chops as a bastion of heavy metal. Let me tell you, there is a lot to unpack. The most obvious place to start is the aesthetics. Although, the funny thing is that the setting of a Martian base isn't actually something you traditionally associate with metal, which doesn't typically lean into sci-fi nearly as much as it does fantasy and mythology. Luckily, this is entirely offset by the foul hordes that we battle against: a near-infinite army of possessed zombie soldiers, demonic imps and ghostly specters, cybernetically enhanced abominations, and a particularly metal set of monsters called the Barons of Hell. Along with looking like they've leapt straight off the cover of a late 1980s death metal album, the sounds they make on death and in battle give the game a real primal energy that any fan of extreme metal will immediately recognize. And in fact, the further we push into *Doom*'s levels, the more the environments embrace the kind of hellish imagery that we spoke about in the last chapter.

Now, along with the aesthetics, I think the speed and tone speak for themselves. As a big part of what made *Doom* so popular was the fact that it took the blood and guts and fast-paced shooting of *Wolfenstein* to a whole new level. The pace is absolutely relentless, even in earlier levels. And while most of the maps are based around finding colored key cards, the endless waves of demons to slay and the constant pounding of shotgun shells keep the focus squarely on action rather than navigation. You're not here to find the most efficient way to each exit or hunt for secrets or discover snippets of lore. You're here for immediate bloody gratification. And I think that mirrors what people want out of metal: an in-your-face experience that is bold and brash and doesn't let up.

The final piece of the puzzle is the music. And here is where *Doom* gets particularly interesting. Because while it's well recognized for embracing the sounds of early '90s metal and rock, the story of its creation is really quite strange. You see, originally id Software didn't have any employees who knew anything about programming music. So, the responsibility for this was passed over to their publishing partner, Apogee Entertainment, who went about solving this problem in a most baffling way. Rather than hiring someone with any reputation, CEO Scott Miller logged onto an early '90s message board for MIDI enthusiasts and simply asked if anyone wanted to work on a video game. A crazy solution that actually worked, as it put him in touch with a man named Bobby Prince. Now, Bobby was big into making music with computers. And luckily, it turned out that Carmack and Romero really liked his work. So, he became not only id Software's go-to composer, but was also placed in charge of their sound effects, like the gunfire and voice lines in *Wolfenstein 3D*. He was a great fit and produced a lot of iconic work for the team. But when it came time to lay down some tracks for *Doom*, Bobby ran into a pretty large problem. You see, John Romero had a pretty specific vision in mind. He wanted something inspired by modern metal that could match the pace and intensity of the gameplay and would set *Doom* aside from all the bouncy chiptune and pseudo-orchestral music that was common at the time. It was a great idea, but the issue was that Bobby Prince didn't know the first thing about metal or rock, having never really listened to them or composed music in that style. So, Romero put together a mixtape of all the team's favorite metal songs. But rather than using them as inspiration, Prince just lifted the riffs that he thought fit best and dropped them straight into the *Doom* soundtrack. Amazingly, no copyright or legal issues ever emerged from this, presumably because either the bands never noticed or because the sequences aren't long enough to constitute plagiarism, but it's led to this strange situation where *Doom*'s music has such an iconic reputation, largely because it's made up of tracks that were already iconic. For example, the game's legendary first track, "At Doom's Gate," which plays in Episode 1, Map 1, and might as well be *Doom*'s official theme song, is built around a riff that's likely been taken from either "No Remorse" or "Master of Puppets" by Metallica. Similarly, there are levels based around "Raining Blood" for Slayer, "Big Gun" by AC/DC, "Behind the Crooked Cross" by Slayer, "Sergeant D" by S.O.D., and in the unused MIDI data, people have even found more tracks that sound exactly like "We Die Young" by Alice in Chains and "Sex Type Thing" by Stone Temple Pilots.

Now, the funny thing about all this is that *Doom* had proved to be so popular and so influential that many other companies started copying its ideas, which led to a wave of "Doom clone" shooters, most of which launched with similarly metal-inspired soundtracks. Everything from *Hexen* to *Blood* to *Rise of the Triad* was taking some degree of influence from the world of heavy metal. But the standout successor was *Duke Nukem 3D*, whose iconic guitar-slamming theme tune was eventually covered by thrash metal royalty Megadeth. Since then, metal has become the de facto soundtrack to first-person shooting, which makes it all the more funny that it emerged from a composer who barely knew the genre and a game designer who just wanted to hear his favorite bands. Despite this, it's impossible to deny that *Doom* is just the perfect example of a heavy metal video game. It's got the demonic look, it's got the raging speed, it's got the dark tone, and it's got the heavy tunes. And as we'll find out later in this video, it's got a pretty long legacy to match.

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So, let's get back into some history, as I want to take you on a journey through the frankly baffling world of metal and rock bands being adapted into video game form. That's right, you didn't hear me wrong. There are games that don't just incorporate heavy music into their soundtracks or take influence from its aesthetics, but are literally supposed to be a piece of merchandise. And let me tell you, it is as weird a subgenre as you would expect.

Now, the earliest example I can find isn't exactly metal, but is still worth a look, as it perfectly illustrates the sort of depths that video game companies were willing to sink to in order to cash in on a band's fame. 1982's *Journey Escape* for the Atari 2600 and *Journey: The Arcade Game*. It's hard to know what exactly motivated their creation, but given the title of the Atari game, it's pretty obvious that the massive success of Journey's 1981 album *Escape*, which yes, featured the infinite mega-hit "Don't Stop Believin'," was the primary driver. So, how exactly do you adapt a pop-rock band into video game form? Well, if you're Data Age working on the Atari, the answer is that you put together an autorunner where you have to play as the band and race each member to the spaceship from the album's front cover in order to fly over to the next concert. It is tenuous in the [music] extreme, and thanks to all the rudimentary 2600 sprites, which are apparently meant to be groupies, promoters, and roadies, it feels less like a serious video game and more like a pixelated dream that you might have if you fell asleep with the band's music on.

Now, as for the arcade game, this is no less perplexing, as it actually began life as an experiment with camera technology, where the player would take a photo of their face and then play through a set of mini-games as themselves. Apparently, testers kept using the camera to take explicit photos. So, its developer, Midway, decided to rebrand the cabinet, and for some reason, they turned it into a Journey tie-in where you control low-fi pictures of the band. Each level involves a different sort of platforming or shooting challenge that is supposedly themed around each band member's instrument. But beyond a couple of the band's hits recreated in 8-bit form, there really isn't much going on here that was going to challenge the likes of *Donkey Kong* or *Space Invaders*. The simple reality was that the technology in the early '80s wasn't really at the point where you could adapt a band's catalog or aesthetics in a meaningful way. But even as consoles and PCs got more powerful, video games that were overtly metal were still incredibly strange.

For example, let's take a look at *Crüe Ball: Heavy Metal Pinball*, which released in 1992 for the Sega Genesis and was developed by a small company called New Frontier. The original idea was to produce an over-the-top pinball game called *Twisted Flipper*, but the game's producer decided that it would sell far better with a popular band attached. So, a deal was struck with the icons of 1980s debauchery, Mötley Crüe. Now, this might sound like another bout of licensing madness, but there is actually quite a long tradition of heavier bands lending their likeness to physical pinball games. So, for New Frontier to go after Mötley Crüe, who are coming off the back of their biggest ever album, 1989's *Dr. Feelgood*, well, it makes a lot more sense than you'd initially think. The problem here is that despite being named after the band, *Crüe Ball* has almost nothing to do with Mötley Crüe. When we fire up the cartridge, we see a guy coming home late at night and waking up the neighborhood by playing a chiptune version of "Dr. Feelgood." But then we're straight into the crazy action pinball gameplay where the band and their music are nowhere to be seen. We do get to hear that version of "Dr. Feelgood" again during the bonus stages. And during the credits, we're treated to an adaptation of "Home Sweet Home." But outside of this, all of the songs are original tracks created by New Frontier. And really, beyond the name, there isn't anything here that would indicate that it's even got anything to do with Mötley Crüe. It's obviously a game that was designed without the license in mind. Although, in a strange twist, this actually means that *Crüe Ball* is pretty good. And when you're chasing high scores while destroying demon pinball monsters, it's pretty easy to forgive the lack of 16-bit rock and roll.

So, if pinball didn't work, what about an arcade-style beat 'em up? A genre of old-school video game that was renowned for being able to adapt everything from *The Simpsons* to *Sailor Moon*. Well, also released in 1992 was *Motörhead* for the Amiga ST, a side-scrolling brawler where you play as Lemmy Kilmister, the hard-drinking, hard-smoking lead singer of the eponymous band Motörhead. The aim is to battle your way across six levels, which takes the form of very basic *Double Dragon*-style combat where you bash foes, pick up power-ups, and fire off special attacks with the goal being to rescue your kidnapped bandmates in time for Motörhead's next show. Now, on top of just being a baffling idea, the whole game has an extremely weird tone. Instead of licensed Motörhead tracks, the music is a sort of bouncy mixture of chiptune, blues, and funk, rather than an art style that would pair up with the band's intense look. Everything is extremely colorful and cartoony. I can't exactly imagine anyone who loves "Overkill" or "Ace of Spades" being into this sort of experience, but oddly, developer Kiteu Software have done a surprisingly good job of capturing Lemmy's "live fast, die old" ethos in an extremely strange set of mini-games. In one, we've got to smash up a hotel room before a timer expires. And in another, we've got to drink as much beer as we physically can, all while Lemmy's absurdly large tongue lolls out of his head and he eventually turns green. When you're trying to grab dancing girls as they leave the country club or driving an oversized chopper down the highway, it's kind of hard not to enjoy this perplexing take on Motörhead. And despite the game making absolutely zero impact on the band's legacy, I can actually see Lemmy finding the whole thing pretty damn funny.

So, at this point, you might be thinking, "Well, surely a lot of this weirdness is down to the technology. As without being able to put the music of a band into the game, what's the point of even attempting an adaptation?" Well, I can assure you that this limitation was not the problem. As when we arrive in the glorious world of high-storage CDs and 32-bit arcade boards, if anything, the music license games get even weirder. Take *Revolution X*, a non-stop action roller coaster of arcade rail shooting produced by Midway that revolves entirely around Aerosmith. You see, back in 1991, Midway had put out a *Terminator 2* arcade shooter. And thanks to the monster success of the film, the game had raked in a ton of money and even briefly surpassed *Street Fighter 2* as the most profitable cabinet in America. This gave their executives a taste for that easy licensing cash. So, they went looking for more. But after a series of deals with other big movies fell through, they ended up settling on a confusing agreement to take the music and likeness of Aerosmith and twist it into an arcade game. The result was *Revolution X*, a hyper-fast-paced shooter where you battle the New Order, a totalitarian anti-music organization who kidnap the band and who have to be rescued by the player over the course of six extremely hectic levels. Everything is constantly exploding. There are half-naked girls everywhere. The pace is absolutely unrelenting. And really, *Revolution X* is already doing everything you want from a '90s arcade shooter before we even get onto the Aerosmith stuff. Steven Tyler has recorded a bunch of weird voice lines that constantly play over the action. We get little clips of the band encouraging us to defeat the New Order that play between each level. >> "These guys are maggots. They're putting [music] chemicals in all our food." << All of the music is formed out of remix versions of the band's greatest hits. And best of all, when you finally beat the game, we're treated to a full-on *Mortal Kombat*-style performance of "Walk This Way." Despite the fact that it is impossibly hard and was obviously designed to chew through quarters, it's actually a pretty fun game in its own weird, zany way. And this is why it's so sad that *Revolution X* has ended up with a pretty poor reputation thanks to its home console ports. Not only did none of them support light guns, which is a baffling move for a game all about pointing and shooting, but every version has had to dramatically slow down the action in order to fit in all the audio. A trade-off that keeps the Aerosmith license intact, but sucks out all the crazy energy that actually made *Revolution X* fun.

So, given that nothing we've spoken about so far made much of a mark on the wider industry, I think we need to take a moment and try and unpick why these sorts of games were even being made. When it comes to the developers and publishers, I think the explanation is pretty straightforward. During the 1980s and '90s, licensed video games were big business. And if you could hitch your game to a big show like *The Simpsons* or *X-Men* or a big summer movie like *Aliens* or *Indiana Jones*, you could end up with a very successful game that you barely even had to market. Now, considering how poor the games often ended up being, you might wonder why bands like Motörhead and Mötley Crüe were happy to sell out to this. But the explanation here is also pretty simple: they wanted money. You see, while selling albums and touring is all well and good, bands have to split the profits with lots of other parties like distributors, venues, contractors, management, and producers. But by signing a contract with a company that produces branded merch, they could cut out these groups and rake in all the benefits. By the early 1980s, this had become the model for getting rich while playing rock and roll. And bands like the Rolling Stones, Kiss, and AC/DC were actually making more money from selling t-shirts than anything to do with their music. So, if a video game company approached you and offered to give you a bunch of cash to turn you into an arcade shooter or a side-scrolling brawler, there was very little reason to say no. For most of the games we've covered, this is exactly what they were: a payday for the band, which were almost immediately forgotten and are barely remembered by even the most ardent of superfans.

This is why our next game is so curious. A PC game called *Ed Hunter*, which was put out by the legendary godfathers of modern metal, Iron Maiden. And of all of the licensed games we've just discussed, it is probably the best known. The idea is very simple: you play as a private detective who's been tasked with tracking down Iron Maiden's mascot, Eddie, the zombie character who features on all their front covers and merchandise, and who is on the run through a series of arcade shooter levels themed around various Maiden albums. We've got ancient Egypt in the style of *Powerslave*, a mental asylum based on *Piece of Mind*, a futuristic city influenced by *Somewhere in Time*, and you start to get the picture. Now, beyond this, there isn't really much to *Ed Hunter* at all. Outside of a handful of hilariously low-fi CG cutscenes, there's basically no plot whatsoever, only a handful of chiptune tracks to listen to, and most curiously of all, absolutely no peripheral support, which means you're just clicking on the screen rather than actually shooting. In short, it's really not very good. And considering it released in 1999, a whole year after *Half-Life* and two years after *GoldenEye*, it's gone down in history as a very strange misstep in the band's otherwise fabled catalog. So why on earth did it even get made? Well, to answer this question, we simply need to look at the context in which it was released, as *Ed Hunter* was never intended to be a standalone video game. You see, in 1999, Iron Maiden had just got back together with their iconic singer, Bruce Dickinson, after almost a decade apart, and their record label wanted to capitalize on all the newfound interest in the band by getting some sort of product onto shelves that they could sell. With the band unwilling to dive straight into the studio, it was decided that a greatest hits album would suffice. But as they had just released *Best of the Beast* three years earlier, they needed some sort of unique gimmick to help sell the CD, and eventually landed on a cheap pack-in video game. It means that sure, compared to *System Shock* or *House of the Dead* or *Turok*, *Ed Hunter* is obviously extremely poor quality, but as a fun little bonus that you ended up with because you bought an Iron Maiden reunion album, I actually think it's a pretty fun idea.

Now, at this point, it might feel like there is no hope for video games based on metal bands, as everything we've covered either doesn't do the bands proper justice or simply are just bad games. And yet, there exists one final curio that somehow managed to buck this trend, despite sounding like it absolutely shouldn't. In the year 2000, American developer Third Law Interactive released *Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child*, a *Quake*-inspired first-person shooter based on the 1970s glam rock band. Just let that sink in for a moment. A fast-paced, high-intensity shooter where you fight horrific monsters and explore haunted gothic environments. And it's based on the band Kiss. It sounds like something that was made up as an April Fool's joke, but incredibly, it very much exists. And the story behind its creation makes far more sense than it has any right to. The first thing you've got to understand is that Kiss were the kings of merchandising. And back when they'd been ruling the airwaves in the '70s, they were one of the first bands to understand just how much money you could make selling branded stuff. They would slap their name on everything from t-shirts to figurines to lighters. And in 1977, they managed to secure a comic deal with Marvel, which led to a surprisingly successful series of limited-edition annuals. So, fast forward to the 1990s, and they were approached by Todd McFarlane, who had discovered that Kiss's bass player, Gene Simmons, was a big fan of *Spawn*. One thing led to another, and the two signed a deal to co-produce *Kiss Psycho Circus*, a monthly episodic horror series based around some ideas for an upcoming tour that the band had been kicking around. Essentially, the Psycho Circus is a sort of supernatural carnival that appears to people in traumatic situations. And through its four patron gods, which are of course based on the four members of Kiss, the circus grants strange powers to help them get revenge. It's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but thanks to its dark subject matter and its surprisingly good art, it actually does do a pretty good job of transforming an otherwise very kitschy band into something dark and disturbing. And if you can believe it, *Kiss Psycho Circus* was fairly successful, running for 31 issues over the course of 3 years. So, as with anything that sees a modicum of popularity, video game publishers began circling, and the rights were eventually handed over to New York-based Gathering of Developers, who specialized in niche, medium-sized PC games. The only stumbling block was finding a developer. And this is where the story takes a very strange turn. As the *Kiss Psycho Circus* video game ended up being contracted out to a new company called Third Law Interactive that had just been set up by a bunch of Ion Storm developers, who had walked out in protest at John Romero's management of *Daikatana*. So, not only is this a first-person shooter based on a Todd McFarlane comic based on the band Kiss, but it's also a game built out of the ashes of one of the most notorious video game failures of all time. A complete mess of strange ideas that really should not exist.

Now, what's even more baffling is that *Kiss: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child* is actually sort of good. And while it's not doing anything crazy original, it has fairly decent graphics and music. It has a huge variety of weapons to use. There are a ton of enemies on screen at all times. It all controls and runs pretty well. And it even incorporates the band in a pretty interesting way. The concept is that a monster called the Nightmare Child is poisoning reality. You have to play as four chosen champions as they undertake four distinct quests to become avatars of the band, which is apparently what's required to defeat the apocalyptic threat. It's extremely silly watching yourself turn into Ace Frehley or Gene Simmons. But considering shooters like *Duke Nukem* and *Serious Sam* have always embraced the more absurd side of the genre, it really doesn't feel that outlandish. When you're blasting away massive hordes of demonic monsters and exploring weird gothic temples, it does feel like this could be some long-lost *Quake* expansion or some cult classic fan mod. Sadly, even though the game was ported to the Dreamcast, it never really caught on with shooter fans and has since slipped away into the world of vaguely remembered licensed games, where it's pretty much exclusively spoken about as "that weird first-person Kiss game."

So, anyway, what's the lesson from all this band license game nonsense? Well, I think the reality is that it's pretty obvious that adapting bands is just something that doesn't really work. Unlike with movies or novels or comic books, there just isn't enough that can be twisted into video game form outside of the music itself. And it leaves the developers having to essentially make an original game and then find places to paste the band in. A move that rarely ends up with a cohesive end product. Sure, it's pretty fun to see Steven Tyler looking like a *Mortal Kombat* character or Lemmy Kilmister drinking pixelated beer or Gene Simmons in first-person demon-slaying form, but it's not exactly the sort of stuff that makes for timeless video games.

So, on that note, let's turn our attention to another soaring chorus, as we're going to explore a video game series that doesn't just look, sound, and feel like heavy metal, but has a history absolutely full of classic metal clichés.

Everything starts, as it so often does, with two guys that don't like authority and don't like being told what to do: David Jaffe and Scott Campbell, a pair of rebels working at Sony's American Testing Office in Los Angeles in the early '90s. They were notorious for tearing Sony's games apart for not taking enough artistic chances. And eventually, everyone got so sick of them that they were told to put their money where their mouth was and make a game that would live up to their own standards. So, they were both shifted out of testing and into production, where they were paired up with a small studio out in Salt Lake City called Single Cell, who made military simulation software and had zero experience making games. The only requirement was that the project needed to be in 3D, as it had to launch on the upcoming PlayStation. But luckily, Jaffe and Campbell arrived with a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to do. After sitting in LA traffic one day, the two had discussed blowing up all the other cars in their way with guns and missiles. An idea that they took out to Utah. First as an arcade racer called *Battle Cars*, and then after a bit of refinement, *Twisted Metal*. The result was basically *Mortal Kombat* in cars in 3D. And just like *Doom* before it, *Twisted Metal* is an excellent example of a true heavy metal video game. One that delivers on every one of those four key factors. You've got the speed, which is absolutely critical to any game based around cars and makes chasing someone down or escaping an ambush feel completely exhilarating. There is, of course, the intensity in the form of the sheer amount of violence, where you're using missiles and flamethrowers and machine guns to destroy your opponents, all while causing tons of collateral damage as you run over bystanders or crash through parts of the environment. Also, the soundtrack is a crazy blend of high-octane rock and roll and 1980s hair metal: all wailing guitar solos, driving drum beats, and fast-paced riffs. All of which perfectly complements the non-stop action gameplay and gives it a very wild energy. But it's in the fourth characteristic, its aesthetics, where I think *Twisted Metal*'s heavy metal credentials really come through. Because in order to justify all the vehicular mayhem, David Jaffe came up with a surprisingly cool concept. You see, *Twisted Metal* is actually the name of the tournament.

You're participating in. And unlike in something like Mortal Kombat or King of Fighters, this isn't a battle to save humanity, but something far more mean-spirited. The tournament is run by a mysterious man named Calypso, who offers the winner a single wish, but it almost always comes with a brutal cost that punishes your character's greed.

You see, the cast of Twisted Metal are meant to be a gang of nasty buggers. Vicious bikers, outlaw cops, high school dropouts, an avatar of the Grim Reaper, and of course, an evil clown called Sweet Tooth, who would become the series de facto mascot. Basically, it's a bunch of maniacs trapped in a vicious competition of bloodshed and destruction, all for the pleasure of a monstrous demon who doesn't even give them what they want if they win. A premise that you can only describe as metal as.

Now, thanks to all these good ideas, Twisted Metal was very successful when it was released in November of 1995, selling 1.5 million copies against a tiny budget and winning a host of glowing reviews, which included Game of the Year from EGM. The funny thing was though, David Jaffe actually thought the game was pretty poor and has since described it as a sort of messy Garage Band project. It had slightly wonky controls, didn't really have much content, and they only included multiplayer just before the game was due to launch. Despite that being what Twisted Metal would become best known for, like so many legendary debut albums, it's a product of youthful passion and creativity, but it was also messy and unpolished.

And when Sony came looking for a second installment, the team knew exactly how they wanted to tighten up their sound. In interviews, Jaffe claims that the production of Twisted Metal 2 was actually pretty straightforward, as they just took the foundation laid by the first game and cranked everything up to 11, pumping out a much superior game in just a single year. The graphics were far more detailed. The controls were far more responsive. Levels were much bigger, and now they took place all over the world. There were more characters to play as, more weapons to use, special moves that had fighting game style inputs, and they even managed to make comic book style cutscenes to help tell the story.

This is really where Twisted Metal came to life. As not only did Single Track perfect the gameplay, but they managed to turn the heavy metal tournament concept into a set of memorable horror stories where we watch Spectre's quest for fame end with his face being stretched across the sky, or Axel tearing himself out of his wheel machine in order to confront his father. All of which give the game way more identity outside of the action. Essentially, the team had followed in the footsteps of Black Sabbath, Alice in Chains, Dream Theater, Megadeth, and so many others and put out a stone cold classic on the second attempt. But while the studio enjoyed even higher sales and even greater critical acclaim, dark times lay ahead.

Let me ask you a question. What is the one thing that has destroyed more successful bands than anything else? It is, of course, the allure of a solo career. You see, Single Track was so taken with this newfound fame that they decided to split from Sony and sign a deal with another publisher who would give them a bigger cut of the profits, which meant that they couldn't work on Twisted Metal. Similarly, while David Jaffe had won lots of recognition for his ideas and writing, he wanted to prove that he could also design systems and engines, which led to him leaving the studio in order to set up his own team, where they started working on a top-down arcade style shooter.

Obviously, Sony weren't about to let their car combat golden goose fade away, so they handed it off to a studio called 989, but the results of this breakup were pretty damn disastrous for everyone involved. Without Sony to back up their work, Single Track's next game, Rogue Trip: Vacation 2012, was a big commercial flop. And Jaffe's space shooter, Dark Guns, never even made it out of production and was, by all accounts, absolutely terrible. Even Twisted Metal didn't emerge unscathed. As while 989 were best known for EverQuest, a profoundly influential and successful MMO, their track record on home consoles was absolutely awful. And their last game before taking over the series was the notoriously terrible Spawn: The Eternal. They ended up producing two Twisted Metal games, three and four, both of which got substantially worse reviews and are generally seen as a big step down in quality. Not only because 989 used their own wonky engine that was poorly suited to vehicle combat, but because they did away with a lot of the more intense subject matter and visuals. Ironically, the only metal thing about them was that Sony licensed a ton of tracks from shock metal legend Rob Zombie. And to be fair, destroying your opponents to the sounds of "Super Beast" and "Meet the Creeper" does suit the series down to a tee. So, while 989 sequels still made money, the spirit of Twisted Metal wasn't really there. Almost like a band continuing to tour without their lead singer, playing the same songs in the same way, but missing that spark.

But if there is anything more inevitable than a band breaking up, it is a band getting back together. It all began with Sony setting up a new studio in Santa Monica, California, that was going to focus exclusively on making games for the upcoming PlayStation 2 and would house lots of different small internal teams. One of these was called Incog Inc. and was set up by none other than Single Track vet Scott Campbell, who managed to not only convince most of the old Twisted Metal team to join him, but also persuaded David Jaffe to come back to car combat after his failed solo project. Now, not every reunion is entirely successful, and for every Iron Maiden, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden, there's a Guns N' Roses or Van Halen. But luckily for fans of demonic car tournaments, 2001's Twisted Metal: Black was an absolutely glorious return to form.

According to Jaffe, they really wanted to emphasize the "twisted" part of the series' identity. Taking influence from horror films like Seven and Jacob's Ladder and turning out the PlayStation 2's very first M-rated game. Gone was the globe-trotting visual variety, the cast of zany characters, and the tongue-in-cheek writing. And in their place, we got a dark and brutal game featuring storylines about self-mutilation, familial abuse, and religious delusion. In Black, the contestants are now patients at Blackfield Mental Asylum, preyed upon by a particularly evil version of Calypso and often responsible for each other's torment. Like how the new Jason Voorhees-inspired Sweet Tooth is a serial killer who murdered Axel's wife and drove him insane. We see panic-stricken SWAT team members shooting innocent women, war veterans so traumatized that they resort to cannibalism, and undercover agents losing their minds and becoming terrorists. All of which terrified European ratings boards and, just like back in the '80s and '90s, prompted a wave of heavy censorship.

Now, that being said, Twisted Metal: Black wasn't all suffering and storytelling, as the chaotic gameplay had been wound even tighter. And thanks to the improved graphics and the jump to 60fps, it was and still arguably is the greatest car combat game ever made. Really, this would be the perfect heavy metal video game were it not for one glaring fault, which is that for some reason, instead of pulse-pounding metal, Incog Inc. opted for an orchestral soundtrack where strings and percussion are the backdrop to all of the chaos. Call me a purist, but this is a game that riffs, breakdowns, and solos would have fit like a charm. And it means that despite all the darkness in its heart, Twisted Metal: Black doesn't quite match up to the metal perfection of Doom and games to come.

Now, sadly, this glorious reunion wasn't to last. As shortly after Black's release, David Jaffe was pinched by Santa Monica to direct the first God of War game. And while Scott Campbell and his team produced a couple more PS2 games, nothing ever really caught on like Twisted Metal had. They would eventually get back together again for a second reboot in 2012, this time just called Twisted Metal, but studio interference really ruined what could have otherwise been a cool project. Jaffe and Campbell had intended this to be a small, online-only, multiplayer-focused game. Essentially a little retro throwback for hardcore fans, but Sony caught wind and decided that they would rather the reboot be a full-fat $60 release. Unfortunately, their team wasn't really in a position to deliver this properly. While the foundation of a modernized, high-definition version of Twisted Metal was a pretty great idea, it was badly marred by a weak single-player mode with barely any characters and the inclusion of racing levels which were clearly meant to pad out the small amount of content.

Now, strangely, this wasn't the end for Twisted Metal, as it would end up being adapted into a surprisingly successful TV show in 2023. But as of the writing of this script, the video game portion of the series is deader than Sweet Tooth's victims. It's a real shame, as the popularity of the show proves that there is still interest in the IP, and I would imagine that a surprisingly complex car combat brawler full of disturbed characters and captivating worldbuilding would surely be a slam dunk. It might not be the height of originality, but I think Twisted Metal deserves its old-age nostalgia tour. A big party where we can hear the hits again and feel like we're back in the golden days. A time when a group of misfit rebels could throw together a game in a single year and accidentally end up making one of the most metal series of all time.

[music]

Now, interestingly, there is a little feature of Twisted Metal 2012 that we conveniently skipped over. That is how it incorporated songs by actual metal bands into its soundtrack. Video game practice that has a long and storied history that is much more interesting than it sounds. If you can believe it, it all begins with Blizzard Entertainment, or at least Silicon and Synapse, which is what Blizzard were originally called when they were set up in 1991. Back then, World of Warcraft and Overwatch were but a distant dream, and the company was getting itself off the ground thanks to a deal with Interplay, which saw them produce their very first game, RPM Racing, a top-down arcade style racer for the SNES.

Now, RPM Racing was a perfectly fine game, but the team at Silicon and Synapse felt they could do better. And so, when Interplay asked them to produce a sequel, they decided to try and make something with much more personality.

"Let the carnage begin!"

"It's about to blow!"

"Shreds into burst!"

Racetracks transformed from boring dirt roads into alien highways. The racing was dramatically sped up. Weapons were introduced to give it a destruction derby feel. You could upgrade your car between races. A crazed announcer provided commentary in real time. And most importantly of all, they licensed a bunch of classic heavy metal tracks and used them for the soundtrack. The result of all this was 1993's Rock N' Roll Racing, an absolutely wild SNES racer that is the very first instance of licensed metal songs being used in a video game and a perfect example of why it would become so popular. As you're tearing around the tracks, blasting your opponents and leaping over gaps, your ears are assaulted by "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf, "Highway Star" by Deep Purple, and "Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood. All classic tunes that have been lovingly recreated in 16-bit form and frankly sound amazing. Essentially, it's a great soundtrack to an even greater game. And thanks to a host of high-profile awards and sales numbers that were big enough to help turn Silicon and Synapse into Blizzard, Rock N' Roll Racing would prove to be very influential indeed.

In fact, we can see this in the very next year as Electronic Arts took the licensed music model and applied it to their fledgling 3DO racer Road Rash. On top of boundary-pushing visuals and animations, which took advantage of the console's new CD format, the publisher also struck a deal with A&M Records and included a whole bunch of heavy grunge tracks. Two by Hammerbox, two by Therapy, three by The Gits, and four from the mighty Soundgarden. This was a seriously big deal, as grunge was still dominating the airwaves in the mid-'90s and it gave Road Rash a real cool factor that it wouldn't otherwise have had and helped make the game quite a big success on a console that was otherwise pretty unpopular.

Obviously, the more companies did this and the more success they had doing so, the more copycat behavior spawned. And as CDs eventually became the norm, licensed music started to crop up in pretty much everything that wasn't a platformer, an RPG, or made by Nintendo.

Now, the real watershed moment came in 1999 when video games, heavy licensed music, and skateboarding culture combined in an almighty phenomenon called Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Funnily enough, it was originally envisaged by its publisher, Activision, as a cheap project that could cash in on the fame of the X Games, but fortunately for us, they entrusted the project to a small Californian studio called Neversoft.

[music]

Who had far more ambitious ideas. Rather than racing around tracks or going back and forth on a halfpipe, the team designed free-roaming gameplay where players would skate their own lines and try to build combos of different tricks. A system that encouraged creativity and pretty much perfected the video game skateboarding formula right out of the door. Obviously, Pro Skater was a damn fun game, but a large part of what made it such a hit was how it tapped into early 2000s underground culture. As not only was it named after the first man to ever do a 900, but its soundtrack felt more like a punk and hard rock mixtape. According to studio lead Joel Jewett, his team were well aware that bouncy synths and RPG-style orchestras would be a horrible fit. So they convinced Activision to stump up some cash and filled the game with the Dead Kennedys, Primus, Suicidal Tendencies, and of course, Goldfinger's "Superman."

This ended up being a pretty big deal for the band, as Pro Skater sold almost 4 million copies in less than two years and essentially acted as a ridiculously potent form of marketing, which in turn led to a frantic scramble by record labels to get their band's music on the sequels. It really can't be overstated how impactful this was for younger kids desperately trying to get hold of punk and metal music, especially in countries that didn't have access to college radio or frequent tours or MTV. Here in the southwest of England, where heavy metal shows were outnumbered by church fairs by about 10,000 to one, each new Tony Hawk game was like mana from heaven. And it's no exaggeration to say that without these games, it would have been basically impossible to find out about bands like Anthrax, CKY, or System of a Down.

Anyway, with the roaring success of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater providing a blueprint that basically every other kind of licensed game could follow, it led to a raft of copycats, especially in extreme and arcade sports games. You'd be smashing your rivals off the road in Burnout to the tune of Bullet My Valentine and Funeral for a Friend, carving up the slopes in SSX while Thrice and Queens of the Stone Age blared out of your speakers, or banging your head to trivia while throwing touchdowns in Madden. It was such a popular idea that it even began to creep into non-sports games, where famously Ubisoft licensed the Godsmack song "I Stand Alone" for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, where the chugging nu-metal stomper would play as the Prince was chased by the monstrous Dahaka. Really, it was a golden age of heavy guitar-driven licensing in games. While I'm running the risk of sounding like a nostalgic old boomer, it's hard not to look back with longing for a time when you could buy a mainstream sports game and hear Avenged Sevenfold on the soundtrack.

Now, that being said, it wasn't all down to greedy publishers chasing underground sales, as there were also some studios trying to be more clever about how they used licensed music and better incorporate it into the actual game experience. Nowhere was this done better than in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto, which really blew up in 2001 when its third entry went 3D. And thanks to two even more successful sequels, Vice City and San Andreas, GTA quickly soared to the top of the industry and has pretty much never looked back. Obviously, it was wildly popular for a whole bunch of reasons. Its embrace of video game violence and edgy humor, the extremely groundbreaking open-world design, and even its cinematic storytelling. But I think how it used licensed music is a really underrated part of its success.

Rather than random tracks playing in menus or when you hop in cars, Rockstar went to the effort of creating in-world radio stations, each dedicated to a specific genre and hosted by a DJ who'd introduce the tracks and segue into funny little commercials. This was incredibly novel in 2001, as it made Liberty City feel far more alive than the gameplay could do on its own. But it wasn't until Vice City in 2002 where the idea really came together. You see, in GTA 3, most of the radio music was made up of original tracks commissioned by Rockstar. And so, in the sequel, they pushed the boat out and signed deals to include 103 licensed songs, all with the aim of creating a proper 1980s atmosphere. This meant that Vice City ended up with a huge dose of metal and hard rock in the form of Radio V-Rock. An hour-long loop of Slayer, Judas Priest, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, and Megadeth. All hosted by DJ Lazlow, a wannabe rockstar who constantly has to deal with callers complaining that he's a poser.

"You're on live with Lazlo."

"Hey, son. Who is this?"

"Uh, it's it's Lazlo, aka DJ Hard Rocker."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it, but I thought this was a rock station, son. And all I'm hearing is girls music. What are you doing? You got personal problems? You sort them out, son. But don't drag the rest of us down with you, you hear?"

Along with a bunch of hilarious ads that play in between songs, the whole thing is just such an immersive vibe. And just like with the Tony Hawk games, it introduced a whole new generation to the high-pitched vocals and chainsaw guitars of 1980s metal. Thanks to the sheer weight of GTA's influence, it wasn't long before every other open-world game was doing the same, which meant that you could listen to Machine Head in Sleeping Dogs, Deftones in Saints Row, and Ministry in Watch Dogs. Amazing for fans of heavy metal, and even better for fans of immersive design. So, while adapting bands into actual video games might not have been that successful, the practice of incorporating their music was very fruitful indeed.

But there is another area where metal and gaming crossed over with pretty wild results. Just think about it. If including the music of a popular band was enough to get people interested, what would happen if you got a popular musician to compose music specifically for your game? Well, while this wasn't all that common in the 1990s, it did happen a few times with pretty incredible results. There have always been rumors that Michael Jackson secretly helped Sega with the music on Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but the first real high-profile instance is the Quake soundtrack, which was put together by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails in 1996. Apparently, the idea was floated by id Software designer American McGee simply because he loved Reznor's music. And by sheer chance, it turned out that the industrial rock icon was a big fan of Doom and agreed to produce the soundtrack entirely for free. The result was one of the most iconic suites of music in video game history. A pulsing spread of industrial ambient tracks full of creepy, distorted textures and sinister mechanical sounds that do so much to elevate the horror of Quake's world. And importantly, proved that non-gaming industry musicians could do just as good of a job as company composers.

Now, obviously, not every studio had access to an electronic rock legend willing to work for free. So, this didn't spark a wave of imitators. But, if we fast forward a few years to the mid-2000s, video games were starting to get big enough that they could draw in famous musicians with the promise of greater fame. It really kicked off in 2004 when Bungie and Microsoft went all out for the Halo 2 soundtrack and managed to secure not only Steve Vai, who produced the iconic shredding solo over the top of the game's theme, but disco icon Nile Rodgers to produce the game soundtrack and a series of original songs by two massive alt-rock bands, Breaking Benjamin and Incubus. In fact, "Blow Me Away" by Breaking Benjamin would end up being a huge hit in its own right, cracking the US singles charts despite being written for a video game and ultimately racking up over a hundred million streams on Spotify, which means it's become a staple in their set list where they play it in front of footage from the Master Chief Collection. Basically, if a band and a game were hot enough, these musical crossovers provided a way to connect with a whole new audience.

And in the wake of Halo 2, it started to become increasingly common to see video game exclusive singles. Ubisoft were the first to follow suit when they contracted nu-metal giants Korn to produce a song to tie in with their upcoming PS3 Halo killer, Haze, which was very creatively also called Haze. And just a few years after that, Sony commissioned an entire EP from metal specialists Roadrunner Records. This was God of War: Blood and Metal, a six-track record that was included with the special edition of God of War II and featured all new songs from big metal bands like Killswitch Engage, Dream Theater, and Opeth. All of which were themed around the Trials of Kratos, and some of which, like Trivium's "Shattering the Skies Above," would go on to become fan favorites in their own right.

Now, this trend really came to a head in late 2010 when the biggest video game series on the planet, Call of Duty, got in on the action. Considering the hundreds of millions of dollars that Activision would spend developing each entry, advertising them with an exclusive single is actually something that makes a lot of sense, as it's something that blockbuster movies had been doing all throughout the '90s. So, in order to do this, they turned to Avenged Sevenfold. Now, Avenged have always been a fairly controversial band, as their style of Guns N' Roses-inspired, gun-toting glam metal, has always had critics from fans of a more hardcore sound. But it's inarguable that in 2010, they were on a serious upswing. Their latest record, Nightmare, had just gone to number one on the US album charts. Their last three albums had all sold over a million copies, and they had a really strong video game pedigree, as their music had been used in everything from Madden to NHL to SSX and about five different Guitar Hero games. So, given that the team at Call of Duty developer Treyarch were also big fans, Activision decided to bring them on board. And the result was the song "Not Ready to Die," which was released alongside Black Ops DLC Call of the Dead and wound up being so popular that it landed on the US singles chart.

Now, as Black Ops was also a ridiculously massive success, making Activision over a billion dollars in profit, the two decided to run it back for the sequel, where Avenged put together another catchy thrash epic called "Carry On." Although this time, rather than being in a piece of DLC, it was featured in the main game. Amazingly, when you beat the campaign, Treyarch serve up a fully animated version of the band playing the song alongside Black Ops 2 characters Menendez and Frank Woods. A completely baffling thing to see in a Call of Duty game and a real reminder of how much less seriously that series used to take itself. "Carry On" proved to be an even bigger hit than "Not Ready to Die," and currently it sits at 100 million plays on Spotify, which is quite a lot for a metal band, and a number that prompted two more collaborations between Avenged and Activision. Two songs called "Jade Helm" and "Mad Hatter," which featured in Black Ops 3 and 4.

Sadly, as the 2010s came to a close, this partnership came to an end, as the series started to move away from this sort of music and Call of Duty's marketing became a mess of hip-hop, EDM, and a particularly annoying tendency to produce really contrived cinematic covers of 1980s pop songs.

Now, considering that all tastes eventually change and even the most popular bands eventually fall out of fashion, you might think this is the part of the video where we start to talk about the death of heavy metal. But before we get to that, we need to address a couple of pretty big elephants in the room. Let's start with the undisputed king of all heavy metal video games, Brutal Legend. An absurdly strange mixture of metal music, metal aesthetics, extremely metal gameplay, and one of the most unlikely development stories you're ever going to hear.

It begins with a man called Tim Schafer, who you might recognize as the brains behind a host of classic '90s LucasArts games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. He was a brilliant video game writer with a very unique imagination, but his games never sold particularly well, and in July of 2000, he split from LucasArts after they decided to start chasing mainstream action games. So along with a couple of developer friends, he set up a small studio called Double Fine, where they threw themselves into making a zany action platformer called Psychonauts, where you dive inside quirky characters' minds and explore levels based on their psyche. Sadly, Psychonauts sold extremely poorly, but Double Fine was saved by its glowing critical reception, which had resulted in a host of Game of the Year nominations and convinced publisher Vivendi to give them another shot.

Now, obviously, they weren't going to be making Psychonauts 2 anytime soon. So, Schafer decided to put together a game he'd been dreaming of for years. You see, he had been obsessed with all things metal since he was a little kid, being shown Black Sabbath records by his older brother. And he had long wanted to make a game which took the genre's attitude and aesthetics and used it in something that wasn't an RPG. Now, because this is Tim Schafer, his mind went to a very strange place as he came up with a combination of Army of Darkness, the third Evil Dead movie where Ash Williams goes back in time to fight the undead in the Middle Ages, and Herzog Zwei, a Sega Genesis game where you control a Macross-style mech while building and commanding an army. Basically, he wanted to make a console real-time strategy game set in a fantastical heavy metal world where you fought alongside your soldiers. And for some reason, Vivendi loved the idea and decided to back it with a pretty big budget.

Now, at first, development went pretty smoothly as the team produced a ton of concept art inspired by 1970s album covers, which the designers twisted into all sorts of soldiers, monsters, and vehicles that were separated into three distinct factions: Death Metal Demons, 1980s Headbangers, and 1990s Goths. Early tests of the multiplayer were pretty positive, but the real draw was Tim Schafer's world-building and writing, which had quickly begun to focus on the story of a time-traveling roadie called Eddie Riggs, who was based on and voiced by Jack Black. Now, this was a pretty big get for Double Fine, as by the late 2000s, Black had already been in quite a few major movies like King Kong and Tropic Thunder. And thanks to his band Tenacious D and his breakout role in School of Rock, he didn't just bring a recognizable face, but a lot of rock music legitimacy. Vivendi apparently really liked his involvement from a marketing perspective. And this led to Double Fine being put in touch with a bunch of other metal megastars like Lemmy from Motörhead, Judas Priest's Rob Halford, and most impressively of all, the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne. In interviews, Tim Schafer would often talk about how despite their crazy reputations, all three were extremely fun to work with. Ozzy improvised his own lines, Halford voiced multiple characters for free, and as it turns out, Lemmy loved video games and regularly played Star Fox Assault on the Nintendo GameCube. Alongside Vivendi funding the licensing of an astounding 107 classic metal songs, Brutal Legend was shaping up to be a monster celebration of all things heavy.

But unfortunately, things quickly started to go very wrong. Problems began when the team decided that they needed to have a more robust tutorial in order to teach players all the RTS systems. So, they put together a little prologue sequence where we play as Eddie after he's sucked into the past and have to complete a series of missions in a small open world. As soon as they saw this, Vivendi got very excited and started pushing for more single-player content. And before the team knew what was happening, Brutal Legend transformed into a Frankenstein's monster of a video game. There was the RTS with its three factions, its strategy systems, and its online multiplayer. And then there was the story of Eddie Riggs with lots of cutscenes, an open world, a hot rod you drove around in, and lots of adventure game-style mechanics. Famously, this clash of genres confused a lot of people when the game eventually released, as all the trailers and the demo made Brutal Legend look like a sort of heavy metal Zelda, only for it to pivot halfway through and become third-person Starcraft.

Now, this probably could have been overcome, but a [laughter] confused direction wasn't the only issue that Double Fine ran into, as they also really struggled with the jump to high-definition consoles. And by Tim Schafer's own admission, they didn't have anything like the manpower or knowledge to handle a game of this ambition. By late 2007, it became clear that Vivendi would have to sign off on a pretty massive delay if Brutal Legend was ever going to be finished. But rather than saving the day, this ended up throwing Double Fine into an even worse situation. Early the following year, Vivendi were purchased by Activision, who promptly cancelled the game with CEO and notorious ghoul Bobby Kotick telling Eurogamer that Brutal Legend was late, overbudget, and not very good. It was a huge blow to Schafer and his team, who only found out when they read the news in a press release. But by sheer dumb luck, they were able to convince EA to step in and take over publishing before the studio ran out of money. This should have given them a clear run to release day, except that Activision then filed a lawsuit against both EA and Double Fine, which not only tried to get back the publishing rights, but saw damages to make up for the delay that Vivendi had signed off on. Obviously, it was utterly ridiculous. And after a judge signaled that he'd be ruling in EA and Double Fine's favor, Activision agreed to settle for minor compensation. But the whole process ruined the last few months of development as Schafer and his team had to prep for a court hearing while also desperately trying to get their game finished. Really, with its strange blend of genres, the mess that was its development, the last-minute change in publisher, and the lawsuit, Brutal Legend probably shouldn't exist. But thanks to the all-powerful will of the metal gods, it very much does. And let me tell you, it is glorious.

"Yeah, they're definitely our fans."

"Now, let's start with the game's metal credentials, which pretty much blow any other heavy metal pretender completely out of the water. You've got Ozzy Osbourne as the guardian of metal who sells you upgrades. Rob Halford voicing the hair metal villain, General Lionwhyte. Lemmy in a starring role as a bass-playing shaman, along with all sorts of smaller cameos like Kyle Gass as a freakishly big-handed minion and Lita Ford as the game's love interest, Aphilia. Of course, the star of the show is Jack Black as Eddie Riggs. And while he can often be a bit of an acquired taste, I think his over-the-top style really suits Schafer's writing, which isn't trying to be super intense, and instead is more of a loving, ironic take on the absurdity of the genre."

"Another thing Brutal Legend nails is the soundtrack, which features songs from almost four decades worth of metal bands. Everything from old-school stompers like Diamond Head and Budgie to the late '80s thrash of Testament and Anthrax, along with a ton of modern classics like Mastodon, In Flames, and Cradle of Filth. While they mainly play as you drive around in the open world, what's cool is that Double Fine have also used a bunch of these during cutscenes. And despite the graphics being pretty simplistic, hearing 'Children of the Grave' as Eddie learns to fight or 'Through the Fire and Flames' as you race out of a collapsing castle, well, it's extremely cinematic."

"Now, while the gameplay might initially look like a bit of a mindless brawler, which, let's be honest, would still be fine by typical Metal game standards. There are some clever ideas sprinkled in that really use the subject matter to full effect. Alongside his trusty battle axe, Eddie quickly gets hold of a magical guitar. And by progressing the story or discovering them in the world, he can learn solos which act like spells. Doing things like pumping up your troops to fight harder, melting enemies' faces with his dazzling speed, or even calling in a giant lightning zeppelin to destroy the battlefield. What's cool about these is that not only were all the solos custom-written by Glenn Tipton of Judas Priest, but they each require a little Guitar Hero-style input, which actually does a pretty good job of making you feel like you're shredding up a fretboard in the heat of a melee. Between the cool cameos, the creative gameplay, quite a bit of mission variety, and a captivating story about ancient metal-worshipping humans trying to liberate their homes from the clutches of the demonic emperor Deviculus. The first half of Brutal Legend is genuinely fantastic, and then halfway through everything changes. This is where Brutal Legend starts to become much closer to what Schafer and his team had originally imagined. An asymmetrical, three-faction, heavy metal-inspired real-time strategy game. And while I love the idea and the ambition, the execution does leave quite a bit to be desired. The idea is that each team needs to capture fan points which generate a resource that you can spend on troops. And once you got a big enough army, you head over to the enemy's base and try and tear it down. It's a pretty typical RTS setup, but the intrigue comes from how active you can be on the battlefield as you get stuck into the fighting yourself. Use your guitar to unleash all manner of spells and team up with your troops to pull off special combos. With three different tech levels and all manner of different troops to fight with, Double Fine have clearly put a lot of effort into trying to make a complex strategy system. But the truth is, it's all held back by the controls and the perspective. As you're stuck playing with a controller, the commands you can issue are very basic: just follow, attack, and hold. And as there's no mini-map and you have to do everything from third person, it's often hard to see what's actually happening or manage individual units. Now, that doesn't mean it's not fun, as seeing the masked forces of death metal clash with a militia made up of undead emos and goths is a novelty you can't find anywhere else. But it doesn't really hold up against the best in the genre or even the best RTS games that consoles have to offer. In interviews, Tim Schafer always said that he hoped people would see Brutal Legend like a kind of modern remake of ActRaiser, a Super Nintendo game that also blended strategy ideas with in-your-face action. But sadly, it wasn't to be. When Brutal Legend released in October of 2009, it received pretty warm reviews, typically around an 8 out of 10. But its strange genre clash and unique aesthetics didn't really connect with audiences. In its first month on the market, it shipped just 300,000 units. And while this did eventually climb to 1.1 million, it was nowhere near enough to make back the money that its absurdly long and messy development had cost. Obviously, this meant that EA were uninterested in a sequel. But the real tragedy was that it put Tim Schafer and Double Fine off of producing these sorts of games for the better part of 15 years, as they shifted towards much smaller-scale, self-published projects that didn't carry quite as much risk. They did eventually return to big-budget development with Psychonauts 2 in 2021, but alas, Schafer has always maintained that he's not sure he would ever want to make another Brutal Legend. Largely because the game he dreamed of and the game people fell in love with are really two very different things. The sad truth is that while Brutal Legend is easily the most metal game of all time, this disconnect means it will forever be a standalone album. A completely insane piece of art that represents everything that can go wrong in video game development, but also celebrates everything that makes heavy metal video games so great."

[music]

"So, by this point in the video, I know there is a burning question that you're all screaming at your computer or phone or whatever it is you watch YouTube on. When the hell is he going to talk about Guitar Hero? Well, my friends, this is where I get to surprise you. As while we are indeed going to talk about the incredible rise and fall of Guitar Hero and its plastic instrument cousins, we're also going to do a bit of myth-busting along the way. Now, we'll start with where the whole concept came from. As video games that try to make you feel like a rockstar have been around for a hell of a lot longer than you might realize. As far as I can tell, the very first example comes from 1994 when a small company called Virtual Music Entertainment had the bright idea of combining full-motion video, CD-quality music, and a unique plastic peripheral called the VPIC. The idea was that you plug the pick into your computer's printer port and then strum along with a song either on something like a tennis racket or your leg. You'd have to match your hits with a little animation at the bottom of the screen. Much like in Guitar Hero, your notes form part of the song, so it does sort of feel like playing an instrument. But that's about where the comparisons end, as VME had very strange ideas about how to use this concept. For starters, in their first game, Born to Rock, all the tracks are original compositions put together by VME. So rather than playing tunes you already know, you're strumming along to the mediocre pop-rock of 'Growing Into You' or the bafflingly named 'This Cracker Soul.' As if that wasn't odd enough, the games are also entirely single-player and surprisingly story-heavy. The idea is that you're an up-and-coming guitarist who joins a local band trying to make it big. While that isn't a particularly novel setup, the way VME presents their story certainly is, as it is a wild mash of awkward FMV, random cartoon-style animation, and utterly unhinged acting."

"ALL RIGHT, CRAWFISH TIME. PLAY THAT NEW ORLEANS SOUND!"

"Our rehearsals are interrupted by someone dressed as an old woman offering to wash our underwear."

"Oh, I forgot to ask you if it was all right to wash all that underwear that's collected under your bed."

"We meet a slimy agent screaming about how he's going to make you bigger than pizza."

"Keep breathing. Stay cool. BIGGER THAN PIZZA. THINK."

"And we regularly have to fight in guitar duels against a rival who looks like he just arrived from Lazy Town."

"But go ahead and try." [laughter]

"It's just utterly perplexing. And it gets even weirder when we jump into Born to Rock's sequel, 1995's Quest for Fame, which somehow revolves around Aerosmith, who appear for the second time in 1990s digitized graphical form. Here, the songs have been replaced with just three Aerosmith tracks that you play over and over. And quite predictably, the story revolves around being spotted by the band while playing a gig and then joining them on stage for a big climactic show. Now, for some reason, Namco saw all this insanity and decided to purchase VME for $16 million, which led to the release of a PS1-compatible VPG and the Japanese exclusive rhythm game Tomoyasu Hotta's Song. Considering VME's previous games are so niche that they don't even have Moby Games pages, this might sound like a confusing thing to do, especially as in 1999, Namco were on top of the industry thanks to Tekken and Soulcalibur. But there was method in the madness. You see, during the late '90s, the Asian video game market became obsessed with musical rhythm games like PaRappa the Rapper, Um Jammer Lammy, and Bust a Groove. All of which were big hits on the PlayStation 1. In the arcade, the genre was even more popular. And here, the undisputed king was Konami, who had risen to the top of the scene thanks to Beatmania, a DJ arcade game where you'd hit buttons with your left hand and scratch a record with your right. This proved to be such a money maker that the Japanese publisher began pumping out all sorts of variations, birthing a generation of Dance Mat lovers with Dance Dance Revolution in 1998 and then following it up in 1999 with GuitarFreaks."

"Now, GuitarFreaks is a very interesting game to discuss because it isn't so much an ancestor to or an influence on Guitar Hero as much as it literally is Guitar Hero. You play by holding a plastic guitar controller and tapping notes with your left hand while strumming with your right, all while trying to time your hits with notes on a scrolling chart that mimics the guitar lines in a song. It is so similar that it even has a mechanic where you lift up the neck of the guitar in order to trigger an audience applause, which gives you a higher score. And really, outside of featuring original tracks rather than licensed songs and having three buttons rather than five, GuitarFreaks is Guitar Hero. So, what exactly is the deal here? Why was there a Japanese version of Guitar Hero knocking around for 6 years before it appeared in America? Well, to be totally honest, I don't really know. And I think that confusion is partly why we got Guitar Hero instead of GuitarFreaks. You see, while Konami's series was extremely popular and got an incredible 11 sequels in just 5 years, the publisher clearly didn't think the idea would work outside of Asia, which left an opportunity for two savvy American businessmen called Kai and Charles Wang. They ran a small company called Red Octane, who made most of their money manufacturing dance mats, which meant they were familiar with the rhythm game market, and they couldn't believe that Konami weren't localizing GuitarFreaks. So, they decided to do it themselves. Luckily, they had a relationship with a small developer called Harmonix, who had previously made abstract rhythm games like Frequency and Amplitude for the PlayStation 2. And so together they went about creating a version of GuitarFreaks that would not only appeal to Americans, but was just different enough that they could avoid a potential lawsuit."

"This finally brings us to Guitar Hero 1, which was released in November of 2005 and was immediately greeted with stellar reviews and sales numbers that blew away Harmonix and Red Octane's expectations, which in turn led to an explosion of rock and metal-themed plastic guitar games. Now, while I can totally understand the appeal here, I have to admit that I am not actually a particularly big Guitar Hero fan, largely because while it was at the peak of its popularity, I was extremely into writing music and playing in bands. So, I never really saw the point of learning a chart version of 'Raining Blood' or 'Cherub Rock' when I wanted to play the real thing. In fact, I actually think knowing how to play the songs can make Guitar Hero a lot less fun. As while the button combinations and charts all do a good job of imitating guitar riffs, it's really hard to convince your brain to do something different when you know how your left hand should be moving. Regardless, it's close enough that unless you're a loser guitar nerd like me, it makes you feel like a rock star. And along with soundtracks that really tapped into the popularity of rock, punk, and metal in the mid-2000s, the series became an industry juggernaut virtually overnight. Guitar Hero 1 sold almost 2 million copies in just a year despite only being available on the PS2. And then its sequel, Guitar Hero 2, which released 12 months later, not only doubled its physical sales, but made a huge amount of money from downloadable tracks as it was also released on the Xbox 360. By this point, the rhythm game cat was out of the bag, and even Harmonix and Red Octane splitting up as they were both purchased by Viacom and Activision, respectively, wasn't enough to derail the world's growing plastic guitar obsession. In 2007, Guitar Hero 3 released. Now being developed by Tony Hawk veterans Neversoft, and thanks to a slightly edgier look, a more fleshed-out single player, and master versions of the songs rather than covers, it was a colossal hit. The game made over $1 billion in profit, and was the bestselling game of the year, managing to outsell."

The twin first-person juggernauts of Halo 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Now, obviously, for the bands who featured on the soundtrack, this was a huge deal, as they were getting an absurd amount of exposure without having to tour or write new music. And nowhere was this more pronounced than the game's effect on DragonForce. Their song, "Through the Fire and the Flames," appeared as one of Guitar Hero 3's hardest tracks and quickly spawned an entire subgenre of YouTube videos where people would attempt to clear the song without making a single mistake. Almost like a proto-version of modern-day speed and challenge runs, but based around a lightning-fast power metal song. This was obviously incredible for the band. And as of the writing of this script, the song currently has over 300 million plays on Spotify, which might not sound that impressive compared to big pop hits, but remember, this is a 7-minute long metal epic with four different guitar solos and vocals so high-pitched they could smash glass. It should be absurdly niche. And yet, thanks to the enduring influence of Guitar Hero 3, it's a stone-cold internet culture classic.

So, that might be how it all blew up, but let's take a step back. Because if people were loving the games, fans were loving the exposure, and publishers were loving the money, what exactly went wrong? How did Guitar Hero go from being on top of the world to fading out of existence altogether? Well, in my view, there are a few different reasons. The first is fairly obvious. The genre became crazy oversaturated, as Viacom and Activision flooded the market with every single possible version of the formula. In the wake of Guitar Hero 3, Activision pushed out a staggering 11 more Guitar Hero games in just 3 years. And while a few of them were fairly popular, like two themed expansions based on Aerosmith and Metallica, the sheer pace of releases started to impact their quality. And by Guitar Hero 5, most people had begun to check out.

Now, this fatigue was helped in no small part by Harmonix and Viacom, who had produced Rock Band in 2007, a game that took the original Guitar Hero setup and added drums, bass, and vocals. Much like Guitar Hero 3, it was a huge hit, selling over 4 million copies despite all the pieces costing just shy of $200, and prompting a flood of numbered and band-themed sequels, which Activision then began copying with their own band-themed plastic. Basically, while there was a market for playing along to Ozzy Osbourne and Tool on a guitar controller with a couple of friends, there probably wasn't enough interest to warrant two annualized series that were both pumping out new peripherals like the money would never dry up. In fact, this strategy seems even more ridiculous when you consider that in late 2008, the US financial and banking industries completely collapsed, which triggered a global recession so severe that we are still suffering the consequences today. The idea that people would be able to shell out $100 on endless new plastic instruments when they were losing their jobs and homes is peak publisher insanity. And clearly, it came back to bite them, as Guitar Hero and Neversoft were shut down in 2010. And while Harmonix managed to keep Rock Band alive until 2014, its sales were a shadow of its mid-2000s peak.

Now, typically, everything we've just discussed is seen as the sole explanation. Publishers got greedy, the quality began to drop, and everyone ran out of money. But I think there is another element that people often overlook. You see, if we rewind back to Guitar Hero 1 and what made the concept so ingenious, it's that you were allowing people to jam along with classic songs that they otherwise wouldn't be able to play. Half of the appeal was in feeling like Tom Morello, Randy Rhoads, Slash, or Jerry Cantrell. And I think the more the games moved away from that and started focusing on playing in a full band, the more they became glorified karaoke machines where the metal and rock didn't really matter. You can actually see this in the track lists of later games like Rock Band 3 and Guitar Hero 5, which had songs from Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Amy Winehouse. A clear attempt to try and expand the audience and draw in people that were more concerned with singing than shredding. To be totally blunt, the killer blow was that Guitar Hero and all its plastic brethren stopped being cool. And if there is one golden rule that dominates both the world of video games and heavy music, it's that there is nothing quite as terminal as going out of fashion.

If you cast your mind back to the very first chorus of this video, we spoke about a game that perfectly embodies what it is to be metal: a pulse-pounding sci-fi horror shooter called Doom. Well, for our final chorus, we're going to return to this legendary series because not only do the Doom reboots take the heavy metal ideas of the original and bring them into the 21st century, but they also tell a truly tragic story about the dark side of video game music.

So, let's return to id Software, who by the 2010s had become a very different kind of company. All of the famous founding members had left or retired. They'd been purchased by ZeniMax, so were no longer independent. Doom and Quake had long since slipped from being at the top of the industry, and their latest game, Rage, had only released to moderate success. In short, they needed a real shot in the arm. So, at the suggestion of Bethesda chief of product Pete Hines, the team decided to take Doom 4, which had been in development hell for almost a decade, and transform it into a reboot that would try to get back to what had made the original Doom so great.

Now, this job was entrusted to two men. Director Hugo Martin, an imaginative concept artist who designed the mechs in Pacific Rim and was overflowing with love for all things pop culture, and producer Marty Stratton, whose background was in business development and who will become very important to the story in just a moment. Under their leadership, the team at id quickly honed in on what they wanted to do, which was to ditch the slow-paced horror and environmental storytelling of Doom 3 and produce a shooter that embraced the non-stop action of the series' roots. The result was an incredible video game, a first-person shooter unlike anything else in the HD era, where the player is rewarded for being as aggressive as physically possible. And the main character, the Doomslayer, couldn't care any less for worldbuilding, exposition, or talkative NPCs.

Now, what makes Doom 2016 so great is that it's not just cool-looking violence and endless gore, but that it has real systems underpinning its gameplay that reward more than just good aim. You have to use glory kills to refill your health, manage your chainsaw fuel to take out elite demons, learn your weapons' strengths and weaknesses, and move around battlefields at hyper-speed, never looking back and always pushing forwards. It is still one of the best first-person shooters ever made. And when it was released in May of 2016, critics and fans immediately hailed it as a huge return to form. And it sold 3.5 million units in less than a year and ended up being nominated for a raft of different awards. Considering they had never made a game before, you can imagine that Hugo Martin and Marty Stratton would be very pleased with themselves.

But they couldn't take all the credit, as the monster success of Doom 2016 also owed a huge debt to a man named Mick Gordon. Now, Mick is an Australian composer who'd been working in the industry for quite a while, providing music and sound design for games like Destroy All Humans! and Need for Speed. But he'd gotten his big break when he produced the soundtrack for Microsoft's big-budget reboot of Killer Instinct in 2013. This had led to him being signed up by MachineGames to create the soundtrack for Wolfenstein: The New Order. And thanks to the stellar job he did there, where he combined electronic ambience with classic cinematic flourishes, he ended up being hired to work on id's Doom reboot.

Now, ironically, when Gordon first met the team and talked over what they wanted for their game, he was told in no uncertain terms that they didn't want to hear any guitars, as apparently they were concerned that it might make Doom feel dated. So, Mick Gordon went back to his studio and used all manner of crazy pedals and synthesizers to create a pulsing collage of sinister electronic music. But when the game was first previewed to fans at QuakeCon in 2014, the only negative feedback was that it didn't really sound like Doom. This led Marty and Hugo to conclude that maybe a few guitar sounds here and there might actually be a good idea. So Mick bought the thickest nine-string guitar he could find and then laid down a host of utterly crushing riffs that would have made Mötley Crüe proud.

Now, as funny as that is to say, this actually proved to be critical for the identity of Doom 2016. As without a substantial story to drive the player forward, it was the music that added purpose and tone to all the mayhem. When the guitars kick in as you're tearing through a Hell Knight or unloading your Super Shotgun into a Baron of Hell, it is just the most satisfying sensory assault that you can ever experience. A beautiful collision of heavy metal and video game violence that won huge acclaim from every critic that covered it. Not only did Gordon's soundtrack win Best Score at The Game Awards, where he was invited to perform during the ceremony and famously ignored his stage directions to "Stand Still," but the album version ended up being a massive breakout hit in its own right. Shortly after Doom's release, Mick put together a really cool album of its music that alternated between crushing battle themes and ominous electronic ambience, all tied together with biblical-sounding monologues about the legend of the Doomslayer. It was so well put together that it even connected with people that hadn't played the game. And it ended up being so popular that it is still sold in mainstream record shops and has genuinely absurd streaming numbers. Two of the tracks, "Rip and Tear" and "BFG Division," both have over 100 million streams on Spotify. And despite the album releasing almost 10 years ago, Mick Gordon's artist page still gets over a million and a half monthly listeners. Numbers that would be fantastic for any well-established metal band, let alone a video game soundtrack.

So, obviously, given the runaway financial and critical success of the Doom reboot, a sequel was inevitable. But sadly, this marks the point where our story transforms into a tragedy. As in many situations, the problems began from a place of good intentions. As while he was extremely proud of his work, director Hugo Martin couldn't shake the idea that Doom 2016 had a few big issues. It didn't really have that many different kinds of environments to fight in. Players had encountered all of the enemies and weapons by around the halfway point. And while it was all extremely gratifying, it could be quite brainless, as you never really had to mix up your tactics. While he wanted to make a sequel that kept all the absurd intensity, he also wanted to create something with much more variety. And this led to the very challenging three-year development cycle of Doom Eternal.

While it might look very similar, Doom Eternal is actually quite different to Doom 2016, as rather than all-out power fantasy warfare, it takes the classic Doom formula and twists it into a frantic dance of resource management, complex movement, and fast-paced decision-making. It has a ton of interlocking systems, like how enemies are weak to specific weapons, which prompts you to change guns constantly during battle, but then also always has you on the cusp of running out of ammo, so you have to be on the lookout for enemies that you can chainsaw, as this now restores your firepower. There's a new armor system that requires you to set enemies on fire, a dash to avoid specific attacks and move around faster, new types of gear that introduce crowd control, two types of melee attack, a ton of new enemies, all with their own unique tactics, and a story that takes the Doomslayer to Earth, Mars, Heaven, and Hell. To be frank, Doom Eternal is probably the most complex first-person shooter that has ever been made. While it did put off some fans who just wanted more straightforward violence, for many people, myself included, the sheer satisfaction of mastering all its mechanics makes you feel like a demon-slaying god. Unsurprisingly, this led to even better review scores and even higher sales numbers.

But it's in all this newfound complexity that things started to go very wrong for Mick Gordon. You see, Mick's contract for Doom Eternal specified that he had to produce two tracks per month that could be used in the final game. But because development was all over the place as the team tried to work out how all these ideas would fit together, Mick often had no idea what he was supposed to be scoring. Rather than getting to sit down with proper slices of gameplay, he had to deliver tracks totally blind. And this led to the team at id rejecting a lot of his work and causing him to have to produce almost double the amount of music that he was originally contracted for. This was very frustrating and made the process far less enjoyable. But as the final soundtrack turned out great, there was no reason to believe anything nefarious was happening. That is until April 2020, when people began to notice that the official Doom Eternal soundtrack album was absolutely awful. It was compressed to hell. The mixing was all over the place. There were lots of strange clipping sounds. And when he was asked about this on Twitter, Mick Gordon surprised everyone by revealing that he had barely been involved in the construction of the album.

This was very strange to hear, and quite a few video game websites began running articles about both the poor quality soundtrack and Mick's apparent exclusion. But the situation hit nuclear levels of confusion just a few days later. On the Doom subreddit, series producer Marty Stratton published a lengthy post in which he laid out a series of allegations against Mick Gordon, accusing him of extreme unprofessionalism, as he had apparently failed to deliver the soundtrack on time, which had forced lead audio designer Chad Mossholder to throw something together at the last minute. It was a shocking thing for a high-profile game executive to come out and say about a colleague, which meant that the post soared to the top of Reddit's front page, triggering a wave of speculative news articles, gossiping YouTube videos, nasty social media posts, and the effective destruction of Mick Gordon's reputation. Despite being one of the most recognizable names in video game music, responsible for two of its greatest ever soundtracks, Mick Gordon almost completely disappeared from the public eye, which of course meant people started to believe that Marty Stratton had been telling the truth.

That is until May 2022, when Mick Gordon finally issued a reply, an extremely lengthy post on Medium that rebuffed all of Marty Stratton's claims and brought indisputable evidence that the id Software producer had been lying through his teeth. You see, Gordon's two-year silence stemmed from a long-running legal battle where he was not only seeking a retraction and apology from Stratton, but payment for all of the rejected music that he'd provided id, which they had ended up using without his consent. Now, to make matters even worse, not only had the studio attempted to rip him off, but Gordon had hard proof that it was Marty Stratton that had messed up the Doom Eternal soundtrack and had made the Reddit post in an extremely pathetic attempt to deflect the blame.

Back when Doom Eternal had been announced, Stratton had stood on stage at E3 and gleefully revealed that the $200 collector's edition would come with a copy of the soundtrack produced by Mick Gordon. But he'd done this before a contract had ever been signed. When Gordon heard about this, he asked Stratton to send over an agreement so he could get to work. But Stratton never did this, claiming it would be a distraction from his work on the game. And when he eventually did send it, it was just two weeks before the game and the album were due to be released. This made it impossible for Gordon to put together a two-hour long concept album. So Marty suggested that they use Chad Mossholder to fill in any gaps. But then two days before the album was due to be submitted, Stratton threw out all of Gordon's work and told him that Mossholder would be doing everything. To Gordon's horror, he discovered in the soundtrack metadata that Mossholder had already been working on the project for six months, which pretty much confirmed that Stratton's plan had always been to produce something cheap at the last minute and then slap Mick's name on it.

So, the album came out. Everyone hated it. And Gordon found himself in a call with the producer, who strangely accused him of unprofessionalism for telling people that he hadn't mixed it, while also begging him to come back and save his ass with a new soundtrack. Amazingly, despite the disrespect for his work and the ongoing lack of payment, Gordon agreed to start working on an all-new version, only to discover a few days later that Stratton had instead decided to go on Reddit and blame the whole thing on him. So he hired a team of lawyers and tried to fight back, only to be met with two long years of gaslighting, delays, and threats from id Software and ZeniMax, both of whom refused to acknowledge that Marty Stratton had done anything wrong at any point in the process. Eventually, they did agree to settle the suit for a six-figure sum, but only if Mick would sign an NDA, gagging him from ever talking about the incident. So, being the honorable artist that he is, he turned down the money and exposed Stratton for the scumbag businessman that he truly was.

Now, sadly, as of this video, Mick Gordon has still not been paid for the rejected music that id used in Doom Eternal. And not only has Marty Stratton never apologized for his behavior, but his Reddit post is still publicly available. As if this wasn't tragic enough, while he did eventually manage to clear his name in the court of public opinion, Mick Gordon hasn't produced a video game soundtrack since Doom Eternal. And I would imagine how poorly he was treated by id has a big part to play in this. Thankfully, we've not been totally robbed of his unique talent for distorted electronics and hyper-heavy riffs, as he has contributed a few songs to games like Atomic Heart and Absalom, and rather impressively has done some production work for legitimately big metal bands like Bring Me the Horizon, Motionless in White, and Architects. Obviously, I would still prefer him to be scoring video game chaos, but it's satisfying to know that he's been able to step out from the shadow of his past employer and become a respected musician in his own right.

So, if you find yourself playing Doom: The Dark Ages, wondering why the music doesn't quite pack the same punch, or confused about why you can't find the Doom Eternal soundtrack on Spotify, you can thank Marty Stratton, the only man in the world who didn't realize how important Mick Gordon was to the heavy metal madness of Doom.

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So, with tired legs and ringing ears, we find ourselves stumbling into the finale of this video where we should probably try to work out what all this means for the future of heavy metal in video games. Now, there is a real temptation to go with the obvious conclusion that heavy metal is dead and that the video game world has long since moved on. The industry that produced quirky license games like Motörhead, Revolution X, and Kiss: Psycho Circus, well, that disappeared decades ago. And as video game development has become something measured in tens of millions of dollars, I doubt there are many studios or publishers keen to bring it back. Along with the games themselves, we've also seen licensed metal and rock music almost entirely vanish from AAA soundtracks, largely because they were supplanted by hip-hop and EDM in the 2010s, but also thanks to the rise of time-limited contracts. This is a hyper-annoying practice where a song is only licensed for a set amount of years, and often it results in games being pulled from digital distribution when these contracts run out, famously so in the case of Alan Wake and Alpha Protocol. And of course, it massively puts publishers off from doing the kind of licensing that was so common in the sixth and seventh generation. Even away from meta-analysis of the modern industry, Guitar Hero is long gone. Rock Band doesn't exist anymore. Brutal Legend never got a sequel. Mick Gordon split from id Software. And to be totally blunt, metal simply isn't as dangerous as it was back in the '80s and '90s when it was frightening politicians into Senate hearings and creeping into violent video games.

We could just end the story here, but I think that would be wrong. As in fact, the beautiful romance between thunderous heavy metal and imagination-bending video games has never been stronger. And many of those dead ends are actually alive and kicking.

Let's start with rhythm games. Because while Activision and Viacom might have squeezed the genre into dust, it is still here in the form of Clone Hero, an incredible project put together by a solo developer called Ryan Foster, a big fan of the series who'd become fed up with how it was being treated. His idea was to take the UI of Guitar Hero 3 and pair it with software that would allow fans to put together and share their own charts, which spawned a whole online community that keeps the spirit of the series alive through tens of thousands of custom-made songs. As it's compatible with virtually every peripheral ever produced and is entirely free, it's everything you could ever want from a modern fan-developed Guitar Hero successor. And incredibly, it's even produced a ton of viral videos thanks to people playing crazy meme songs like "Master of Puppets," but at speeds that increase every time he says "master."

Now, if that's a lovely example of fans keeping heavy metal video games going, let's switch it up with an example in one of the biggest games of all time: Fortnite. Considering the game's reputation for live-service IP crossover nonsense and exhausting Zoomer streaming culture, you might be wondering what the hell I am talking about. But trust me, this is actually quite cool. On June 22nd and 23rd of 2024, Fortnite hosted a playable Metallica experience that took six of the band's biggest songs and twisted them into a crazy mixture of intense action gameplay and mind-bending visuals. You race dragsters at 500 miles per hour to the tune of "Lux Æterna." Leap between platforms made of twisting gears to "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Battle the hideous Master of Puppets, who's been transformed into a Destiny-style raid boss. And then finally celebrate with a hellish version of "Enter Sandman." Sure, it is only 10 minutes long and probably could have included a lot more songs, but if you put aside your cynicism for the game that it sits inside, I actually think this is a pretty cool idea, and I would imagine it helped introduce a lot of young kids to a heavier kind of music, just like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater did back in the 2000s.

Funnily enough, this isn't even the only piece of heavy metal inside Fortnite, as through a strange turn of events, Epic ended up buying Harmonix in 2001. And while they did support Rock Band for a few years, the developer was eventually tasked with bringing their rhythm gameplay into Fortnite as a little mini-game called Fortnite Festival. While most of the music available is pretty bog-standard pop like Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, and Bruno Mars, there is a pack of Metallica songs. Although without the ability to play with a guitar controller, I do sort of wonder what the point is. Regardless, it's still the biggest metal band of all time getting a headline slot in one of the biggest games of all time. And really, it's amazing that after 40 years of video game band crossovers, these types of games are still being made.

Now, while this is all very cool, it's in the grand old tradition of metal bands writing new music for video games where all the really special stuff is happening. We've had Greek black metal legends Rotting Christ put together a haunting soundtrack for Mortal Shell. Poets of the Fall writing a 10-minute theatrical rock epic for Alan Wake 2. A genuine hit song in the form of Death Stranding's "Ludens" by Bring Me the Horizon. And in just the last few weeks, Capcom released a song by Igor and Max Cavalera of Sepultura and Soulfly all about Street Fighter's Zangief. Everywhere you look in the modern video game industry, there are marketing campaigns, promotional tie-ins, and seasonal events, all featuring metal and rock bands.

So, before we sign off, I want to talk about my two favorites. The first comes from a little studio called CD Projekt Red and a monster of a game called Cyberpunk 2077. Now, I could talk for hours about this game: the crazed story of its botched launch, the ridiculous depth of its world-building, its imperious DLC, or how its tie-in anime is one of the best TV shows I've ever seen. But I'm going to exert some self-control and keep it to the music. This is a particularly cool part of the game because it touches on lots of different things we've covered in this video: curated licensed soundtracks, in-game radio stations, and original songs. But what makes Cyberpunk different is just how much care has been put into them. There is, of course, a radio station called Ritual FM which plays extreme metal as you drive around Night City. But it's not just a random mixtape, as all the bands featured were asked to write music that they thought people would be listening to in 2077, which gives everything a really unique, experimental vibe. On top of this, the actual plot of Cyberpunk heavily revolves around a hardcore band called Samurai, who are fronted by the anarchist rockstar Johnny Silverhand, who lives inside of our protagonist V's head throughout the story. Now, any other studio would have written around Johnny's backstory, maybe showing him after a gig or hanging out with bandmates, but CD Projekt Red wanted Samurai to feel like a real band. So they reached out to Swedish hardcore legends Refused, who agreed to write an entire EP of futuristic, corp-hating punk. Obviously, the songs are featured heavily in trailers and marketing, but they also appear in-game as we experience Samurai gigs from first-person, and it's all led to the band becoming legitimately popular in their own right. As of this video, Samurai actually have substantially higher monthly listeners than Refused. And the EP's big single, "Chippin' In," has a whopping 50 million plays on Spotify and another 26 million on YouTube. Cynics out there might say, "Well, Cyberpunk was a really popular game, so what do you expect?" But to that, I would point to the game's other big tie-in song by Run the Jewels, who are a pretty great hip-hop duo. But their song, "No Save Point," only has 35 million plays across all platforms. The simple fact is that there is something about the energy and intensity of heavy guitar-driven music that just fits the dark and twisted world of cyberpunk. And in a funny way, I think it's apt that a band that only exists in digital form is responsible for its most iconic tracks.

So, if Cyberpunk is the ideal example of a video game using the sounds and aesthetics of metal, our final game is where metal comes to life in gameplay form. A totally unique first-person shooter called Metal: Hellsinger. The idea is simple. It's a fast-paced, hyperviolent shooter where you play as a demon attempting to break out of hell. But the twist is that all of your actions have to be done to the beat. You see, while you tear through legions of enemies, zip around battlefields, and fight bosses, there's a pulsing timer in the middle of the screen, which changes depending on the weapon you have equipped. And the aim is to shoot, dodge, reload, and use special moves in time with the music, which ramps up a combo and increases your damage. Creator David Goldfarb said that Hellsinger came to him while listening to Meshuggah and playing Doom 2016, as he found himself trying to fight in time to the music and realized that this was putting him in a sort of flow state where the music, and violence, and shooting all became one.

Obviously, it is a very cool idea for a video game, and thanks to the fact that it's executed really well and feels extremely rewarding to rack up a massive combo, Hellsinger likely would have been well-received if this was all it ever was. But surprise, surprise, there is more to the story. You see, Goldfarb's studio, The Outsiders, wanted to make sure that the music was perfect. So they reached out to the composer duo of Elvara Björkman and Nicholas Herbug, better known as Two Feathers, who had worked on series like League of Legends and Warhammer and were really passionate about producing something big. At first, the idea was for the songs to just be instrumental tracks that built up as your combo got larger, but Two Feathers wanted to push this further and include vocals, which Goldfarb agreed to despite having some reservations about costs and how they would convince anyone to take part. Well, rather fortunately, Björkman's mother worked with the girlfriend of Mikael Stanne, the iconic rasping singer of Dark Tranquillity and The Halo Effect. And through this contact, he agreed to come to the studio and lay down some vocals. With Stanne on board, the team were then able to get hold of Trivium singer Matt Heafy, who jumped at the chance to be involved with a video game. And from there, the snowball began gathering pace, as the more singers they got on board, the more singers they were able to approach. By the time it came to start marketing Hellsinger, they'd managed to sign Randy Blythe from Lamb of God, Alissa White-Gluz from Arch Enemy, Serj Tankian from System of a Down, and clearly having enjoyed his time on Cyberpunk, Dennis Lyxzen from Refused.

When the game's publisher, Funcom, caught wind of this, they got very excited and incredibly began putting together a live concert for Gamescom 2022 that would not only show off the game's music but feature the actual singers and be live-streamed out to an audience of hundreds of thousands. This proved to be marketing gold dust, as the songs quickly racked up millions of views on YouTube and led to Metal: Hellsinger selling over a million copies when it finally released, which is extremely impressive considering it was The Outsiders' first ever game.

Considering just how much time we've spent discussing the peaks and troughs of heavy metal video games, I think this is a lovely note to end on, as Metal: Hellsinger is a testament to everything that can be achieved when these two worlds come together. So with that, I think it's safe to say that both heavy metal and its role in the future of the video game industry looks about as rosy as it ever has. And I would not be surprised if in a few years there are a handful of metal video game choruses that really feel like they should be in this video. A wise man once said that no one can destroy the metal. And seeing as how it is still filling out stadiums, still selling millions of t-shirts, still cranking out endless new innovations, and yes, even still selling video games, after 55 long years with no end in sight, I think you might well have a point. Thanks for watching.

So, just before the lights go down, I want to say another big thank you to my patrons, as it's their support that keeps this channel alive. And that is something that I will never stop being thankful for. You've probably all noticed that YouTube has been getting seriously weird this year. Pushing AI-made videos as a feature, drowning out long-form content with brain-rot shorts, and doing everything possible to make the subscription system feel as irrelevant as possible. I've sort of come to terms with the fact that videos like mine just aren't what the platform wants moving forwards. So, the fact that there are people willing to go to an entirely different website and pay money to keep the ship sailing, well, really, it is an incredible honor. As for the next video, we're going to stay in the world of weird themes. Although, what that theme is and how it relates to 35 years of strange video game adaptations, well, I'll leave you to ponder what that means. In the meantime, thanks for watching, thanks for supporting, and I'll see you on the next one.

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