KILL SCREEN 046: Greg Puciato of BETTER LOVERS Reminds You to Enjoy Games Responsibly

Photo by A.J. Kinney

“It’s funny,” our player character remarks. “As we’re talking about this, I’m packing up a hotel room right now and I’m putting away the Xbox.” Calling into the Kill Screen arcade is Greg Puciato, the seasoned road warrior who currently claims membership to underground supergroup Killer Be Killed, brooding synth stars The Black Queen, grunge royalty Jerry Cantrell’s solo live performances, his epnomyous industrial-leaning project, and newly forged metalcore alliance Better Lovers. It’s easy to deduce that such an active career in the music industry—one that stretches the entirety of Puciato’s adult life, starting with his long and storied tenure in the Dillinger Escape Plan—has left him little time for much else. It’s actually in the middle of a nearly two-month tour with Cantrell’s camp that we find the good-humored vocalist stowing what has become a necessary part of his nomadic lifestyle and reflecting on our discussion up to that point. “[My publicist] was like, ‘This interview is going to be about video games.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t have much to say.’ But yeah—I do, actually.”

Puciato’s story is one many in our world can relate to. Having grown up under the neon lights of ’80s arcades, Nintendo’s home console revival and subsequent publicity war with main competitor Sega, video games were hugely influential on the future creative mind. Over time, childhood pastimes unconsciously gave way to adult aspirations with continued success propelling him ever forward. It was only in looking back on his childhood—lubricated in part by access to alcohol—that the frontman rediscovered a piece of himself that felt like home, even as he spends so many days in transit. In support of Better Lovers’ October 25th release of debut full-length Highly Irresponsible, we link up for an in-depth conversation on one of modern society’s greatest productivity killers. And though the co-nerds should have taken the hint to wrap up the interview while Puciato was wrapping up an HDMI cord, it was impossible not to press on, however irresponsible it may have been.

Looking for even more video game love? Pick up a copy of our November issue (dB241) for an exclusive excerpt on why a T-800 floss dancing on Chun Li’s grave is a technological marvel.

What was your first gaming experience?
I was born in 1980, so I remember the Atari 2600. My parents had an Atari 2600 and I was obsessed with it. Really, my first gaming experience that I can remember was an Atari 2600 game called Towering Inferno. There was another called Spider Fighter, Yars’ Revenge, shit like that. I was really, really into the Atari 2600 when it was out. It was supposed to be for my parents—it was theirs, obviously—and I was just glued to it. Atari 2600 into the NES and MTV and arcades were the obsessions of my single-digit years.

The Atari 2600, obviously by modern standards, would look maybe a little bit different to some younger people, but it captured your attention. Was it a bit of imagination that really hooked you or was it [that] you were just so excited to be playing the games and they were fun?
I have ADD, right? I didn’t know that at the time, but video games are like crack to someone with ADD, especially those kinds of games where it’s just very fast-paced, high score-based. The other thing I really appreciate about retro games is the “filling in the blanks” of the imagination. I think the creative experience is more for the designers nowadays and less for the player. Then, there was more of a “you had to fill in on all these gaps yourself.” The artwork on those 2600 covers was really incredible. There’s a book of all those Atari covers, and they’re really awesome. Adventure was another early one, and when you go back and look at Adventure, in my mind, you’re a knight and you’ve got a sword and you’re trying to kill this dragon and you’re finding all these different gates and all these different parts of the castle. If you go play that game and you’re a fucking square—a literal square—that’s moving around a screen full of lines, that’s fucking it.

That’s most of the games back then. You were either a ball or a square or some kind of a line or something made out of balls and squares and lines, and you’re fucking shooting a ball at another ball and square and line, like Missile Command. It’s so abstract, they probably wouldn’t even register to a lot of people’s brains now as a missile silo with an interceptor missile coming out of it to shoot down a nuke. It’s just a pile of lines with a ball coming out of it to hit another ball. But in my mind, when I was a kid, that was incredible. What I saw was more like what was on the cover of the video game itself rather than what was on the screen. Actually, it’s really shocking now when I go back and play those games how impossibly rudimentary they are. The NES I think is the first system where a young person today would be able to understand that those are graphics, that it’s not just gibberish on the screen moving around.

Absolutely. We’re both also kids of the ’80s, but we also have a lot of really fond memories of the first PlayStation. It really is amazing looking back on some of these games where in the moment you’re just like, Holy shit, this is photorealistic. And then you look at PS1 games now and it’s like a bunch of cardboard tubes just bumping into each other.
I feel like more recent old systems look older than old systems. Really old systems are so abstract that they almost kind of just look like abstract art—they’re deliberate. But when I see PS1, 2, 3 games, they look old to me. The Atari and the Nintendo and the 16-bit cartridge era still holds current value to me. I think it does to people in general, based on the resurgence of 2D gaming and deliberately 8-bit, 16-bit-looking titles, how long the Switch has managed to dominate marketplace share, things like that. I don’t even see it as an earlier version of what we’re playing today. It’s like a fully different thing, that era of video games, whereas the PS1 to now is more of an evolution into what we have now. Early CGI looks like shit, but puppets from the ’80s don’t.

A lot of this interview is going to expand upon what you previously told [Australian website] Rawing in the Pit Media back in 2020. You shared that you didn’t play video games from the age of 17 until roughly 2015 at the time of that interview. What led you to step away and what brought you back?
I didn’t have a TV from, like, 2007 to 2015, so it was kind of more like I just got out of television-based everything overall. I don’t really know why, I just fell out of interest with it. Also maybe touring. It wasn’t as convenient if we’re in a vehicle and it doesn’t have a video game system. It’s like, are you going to bring the game with you? And then you’ve got, like, fucking 10 people and two controllers, and the Barcade thing hadn’t happened yet. I found a lot of other things that were taking up my time, taking up my interests, and it was like that for a lot of things for me—I lost touch with things that I had previously enjoyed once I started touring a lot and all this new other stuff was happening. All these things I did when I was a kid, like play basketball, ride bikes, play video games, do a lot of stuff in nature, I just stopped doing and it wasn’t intentional.

I think once I reached a certain point and started rediscovering that stuff little by little, I was like, Wait a minute—why did I ever stop playing video games? I was really into that. And then Barcades started happening. So it’s like, Oh shit, all these games that I loved when I was a kid, beg my mom for $5 worth of quarters when we went to Ocean City, suddenly these games again are in arcades everywhere and there’s alcohol, too? This is fucking awesome! And now I’ve got the money to be able to just play them and not have to worry that when these $5 of quarters run out, I gotta get out of here. A lot of things just happened at once, and it wasn’t just me rediscovering video games. It was more or less me rediscovering who I was and what I was into before everything really started for me career-wise. It’s about getting out of what I’m doing for work because I get so obsessed with it, so into it that I need things that keep me really present. I like to be really present, and video games, particularly the kind of video games I genuinely gravitate towards, you cannot not be present in them. You have to be, like, millisecond-to-millisecond available mentally to play them. I feel like that’s kind of like a recess for my brain, or otherwise I’m sitting around thinking about some song I’m working on, I’m thinking about some packaging or some other aspect of all this, and I can’t get away from it.

You mentioned Barcades. Were they something that helped you get excited about it because you were able to hop in and play for a bit without having a major commitment?
Yeah. And there’s this social aspect to it, too. When you’re a kid, you go over to your friend’s house or your friends come over to your house. And then with high-speed Internet, you can really just never hang out with your friends [in person] and you can just play games together with headsets. I really enjoy in-person time. I’m pretty internal when I’m not around people. I’m not a real huge talker on the phone or connecting with people, or sometimes it’s, like, three weeks to text someone back and then I text them as if it was five minutes later. But getting together with your friends and being able to be like, “Hey man, you want to go blast through a couple of NBA Jam games and try to do a Contra run-through real quick and have a couple of cocktails?” I don’t know, there’s something nice about it.

It’s got a stim aspect to it, too, for me. Like I said, the ADD thing is very real for me. It’s a part of my daily life, so anything I can do to immerse myself in an environment that has more stimulus in it. Those places tend to play like a lot of retro music, too. You’re listening to old Janet Jackson and you’re playing fucking Contra and you’re having some drinks with friends—it’s full immersion for me. Whereas when you’re home, there’s still this element of, If I wanted to, I could look at my phone right now, or, I could get up and try to open that Logic session back up and hammer away at this song. You’re not going to do that when you’re in an arcade. That’s one of the first things I do every day when we get to the city that we’re in, it’s how far away or if there is a Barcade nearby. [Jerry] Cantrell’s really into it, too. It’s always nice when I’m out with him because he’s always down.

So is the ideal scenario get into town, do a load in, do a sound check and then run over, play games for a little bit?
If we’re not going to stay long after. If we have time after we play, I’d rather go after. It just depends on when I need it mentally. Sometimes you just need to get the fuck out of there. I can’t sit around at the club all day. I’ve spent enough time in the last 24 years sitting at venues. So to me, anything I can do to feel like I’m still living life while I’m being carted around like a circus animal to get let out once a day to sing or scream at people for an hour is good. Anything I can do to protect my personal time or to have any kind of other experience. And then something else happens while you’re doing that: It’s an anchoring point, too, because they’re like, “This thing’s three blocks away. Let’s walk to this Barcade.” Then you walk to the Barcade and you pass some other place and you go into this vintage store and you eat a chicken skewer that you wouldn’t have eaten. It helps you to get out into the world, really more than anything for me.

What have you been playing lately?
I bring an Xbox Series S on tour and a Switch because the S is really convenient for hotels. It’s so small and it’s really fast to get up and running. You can just jack it into the HDMI port on the TV, hook up to the hotel internet and you’re good to go. This tour, I haven’t been playing as much. We have a PS5 in the rig and Cantrell and I have been playing a lot of sports games randomly. We’ve been playing a lot of the EA [Sports] stuff, like NHL 24 and MLB and whatever NBA game and the PGA game. We’ve been playing all those games because he’s super, super competitive and I’m super competitive, so we like to maybe get one or two of those going every night. The golf game takes a lot of fucking time. You get four people involved in that and then 18 holes takes, like, hours, so that’s becoming a little bit less favored. We’ve been really hammering this NHL game lately because it’s just so fast-paced.

I’m running through Hollow Knight again. I love Metroidvanias and I’m running through Hollow Knight again just hoping that Silksong, the sequel, comes out ever at some point. Every now and then I just Google the word just to see and I’m like, Cool, still no updates for the last four years. What else? I’m a Fortnite junkie, believe it or not. I fucking can’t get enough of it, it’s like crack to me. I played a lot of Call of Duty: Warzone over the pandemic, but I don’t really mess with it anymore. It’s just so involved. I really like things that just make me happy. I’d rather play Fortnite or Super Mario Wonder than a game where I’m realistically ripping someone into ground beef.

Speaking of Metroidvanias, for whatever fucking reason, I had never played Metroid Dread, so I’m running through that right now. This is a different genre: [The Legend of Zelda:] Breath of the Wild took so much out of me that I never played the second one [Tears of the Kingdom]. I’ve just started dabbling with that, trying to wrap my brain around the whole “connect things to other things” aspect of that second Switch Zelda game. It hasn’t really clicked with me yet. Same thing with Baldur’s Gate [3]. I downloaded that, hasn’t really fucking [clicked]. I try to keep, like, one or two of those games going at a time, and then mostly I’ll play games that are single-serving, like a sports game or Fortnite or something, and then I have a longer-form thing running in the background that every few days I’ll chip away at.

Those games seem a little bit different than the kind of games that you said keep your attention—they’re definitely a long burn.
I have to be in a really specific zone, like a long plane ride or something where you really have the time. It’s like a movie. Sometimes you want to watch a movie, but then you see that it’s 3 hours and 40 minutes long and you’re like, Ehhh, not today. I can’t have that one in me today. Give me one that’s under two. I kind of gravitate towards that. And because you get interrupted so much on tour, too. You can be like, “All right, man, hang on. Give me 10 minutes, I’m almost done,” whereas it can take you, like, an hour to even know what the fuck you’re supposed to do when you’re playing those longer games. So for those things, it’s like, OK, shit, I’ve got 17 hours to kill on the way to Australia. Let me see if I can’t put a dent in this Zelda game.

Another game: Mario Kart 8 I think is one of the best games ever made. I really put a lot of time into Mario Kart 8. Waiting on that new one, but I’m guessing it’s going to be the flagship title for the Switch 2, whenever the fuck that happens. It’s really showing its age now, man. It’s fine when you’re playing it handheld. The OLED screen is incredible looking. But when you put it on a TV, it’s really like, Eh, fuck. I wouldn’t even bother to play shit like Fortnite on that. You’re at such a disadvantage. It’s not even the same game.

No. The fact that they ported things like Mortal Kombat 1 and Overwatch and Dead by Daylight to Switch, I’m [Michael] glad that people who only have a Switch can play those games, but nobody’s actively happy about playing that on a Switch.
Absolutely not. The frame rate alone is brutal. I think the PS5 as a system is my favorite, but man, I really slept on… I had never had any Microsoft system ever. I only got the S because it was so portable and I was like, I need something to play on tour that can go into the TV easy. I’ve dropped that thing on asphalt—it just keeps working. It’s crazy. With no case, just bam, just right on the concrete. Get to the next hotel, plug it in, boots right up. I’m like, Damn, this thing fucking rips! There’s really no reason to get it if you’re at home, if you can get the series X. But if you travel, the S is a fucking freak.

Have you ever considered making the leap into PC?
Kevin [Antreassian], who played stage left guitar in Dillinger towards the end, is a buddy of mine and he’s a super PC gamer. He’s like, “Dude, you’ve gotta get a fucking PC laptop for tour. That’s going to change your life. You’re going to lose your fucking mind.” We’ll play Fortnite together. I’ll kill, like, 7 and he’ll kill 30, you know? And he’s like, “I got a mouse. I’m running 240 frames per second.” I’m like, “OK, you’re starting to convince me of this.” He’s like, “This is the final frontier for you, man, of you coming back to gaming. If you get the laptop, you’re going to be like, What have I been doing for the last five years?” So that’ll be the end of my life.

You can get something like a Steam Deck. It’s not the same as keyboard and mouse, but you can still get the full access to the Steam library.
That whole world is truly an unknown. Steam even is just an unknown. I know nothing, nothing about PC gaming, so that’s a big leap for me. It would probably blow my mind. You know, you’re probably right. It would probably change my whole fucking shit. Thanks for ruining everything in my life, ruining my relationship.“I did this Decibel interview, they really got me sold on this Steam Deck.” Next thing you know, I smell like fucking cheese puffs, I haven’t left in forever.

You’re going to be touring with Full of Hell very soon. You should absolutely talk to [vocalist] Dylan [Walker].
Yeah, we’re buds. I don’t know him super well, but obviously we’re mutual admirers and when I looked up this feature, I saw he was one of the most recent people. It’s cool to know that there’s going to be another gamer on the tour, because none of the Better Lovers guys are, really. I just got them into the Barcades on the first tour we had done. They had never even really gone, and now they’re pretty hip to it. [Guitarist] Jordan [Buckley] has a PS5 now, I think, and he’s getting back in. I don’t know what it is. And all of them played when they were kids. I’ll say to them, “Hey man, didn’t you play games when you were kids?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” I’ll go, “Why did you stop?” “I don’t know.” I’m like, “Now’s the time.” This is probably—not even probably—this is the fucking heyday for video games, no question.

Some of the best music I’ve heard in recent years, some of the most incredible scores I’ve heard were video game scores. The 8-bit, 16-bit era, fucking particularly, that really had a huge melodic impact on me for sure, no question. But some of these newer scores are just unbelievable—really, truly next level stuff going on.

What are some of the soundtracks that have really caught your attention lately?
When I was replaying Hollow Knight, I was just like, Damn, this soundtrack’s really good. I really like the soundtrack to this game Celeste. That was pretty startling to me. Or even sound design. Do you remember that game Inside? That was phenomenal sound design in that game.

Would you say that your interest in electronic music was at all influenced by video game soundtracks?
One thousand percent. Directly—not even an extension of it. For sure! And I think that that whole synthwave thing is obviously a complete extension of kids that grew up in that era of video gaming and ambient music. Some of the first ambient music I ever heard was Super Nintendo. Some of the stuff on Super Castlevania IV, some of the stuff in Super Metroid was probably my first exposure to ambient music. And then even just four-on-the-floor house or techno-type stuff, the first time I would have heard anything that sounded remotely like that would have been a Nintendo game.

Have you listened to the soundtrack for the game Scorn done by Lustmord?
No. I would love to hear that, I did not know that was a thing. There’s so many games that it’s overwhelming to know what to get started on. So many giant series that I’ve never played. I’ve never played Far Cry. I’ve never played Fallout. I’ve never played Bloodborne. I know that’s going to sound nuts. Because I look at it, I’m like, This is going to take 70 hours to complete, and then there’s six of them, or something like that. Jumping in late, I missed a lot of systems. I really didn’t sink my teeth back in until PlayStation 4. I get home from tour and I boot up the PS5 store and I’m just like, Oh, fuck. I just went through those Spider-Man games. I could not believe that I waited that long to play them. They were fucking amazing! Those fucking PlayStation Spider-Man games are unreal. Or these new Jedi games? Jedi: Fallen Order? Those are so fucking good, but they take time.

Like you said, there’s so many games that have amazing soundtracks that I haven’t heard. There’s games that I haven’t played. And it’s like, I’m running out of time on the earth. That’s the only thing about being a kid into video games—you have all this time. You can play, like, nine hours straight of a game and then you still don’t really have a lot to do. Now it’s like, Fuck, man. If I take a day out of my life and do nothing but play video games, the next day I got a bunch of shit I got to do that I didn’t do yesterday. It’s the perils of of adulthood.

I don’t know if you’re a night owl or not, but I’ll play until the sun is back up. And then I’m like, Oh Christ, man, I just fucked up my entire week! Now I’m going to sleep until 4 p.m., my whole schedule is going to be jacked for days. You haven’t pissed in hours, you haven’t had a drop of water, your eyes are bleeding, you can’t think. [Laughs] You’re like, Oh shit, man! The fucking sun is up, you hear a bird. Oh, fuck!

That’s always when it hits me [James], when I hear something from outside the window. I’m like, Oh shit, are those birds? Fuck, I did it again!
Dude, yeah, that is a horrible sound, the sound of the birds. But you still want to keep going, too. You’re like, Ah, man. Shit! I was just about to get this thing. Do I just make it until I get the thing? Because then I’m at a good place. And then it’s 8 in the morning. Do I just loop this day? Is this one of those days where I try to stay up all day? And then you’re in real hell, you know? It’s nice to hear other people with these problems.

Most of my [Michael] gaming is done at night because I’m working until late on Decibel stuff, and then I’ll just hop on Discord. I’ll hang out with my friends and it’s like, Oh fuck, it’s almost 3 a.m.
Yeah, man. But the thing about catching up with your friends, it really saved me during COVID. I’m sure it did with a lot of people. Just being able to have a space to be like every night, I’m going to boot this thing up. These guys, we’re all going to probably be on. We’re going to say, “Hey, what’s going on?” We’re making food, we’re talking about this, talking about that. A lot of those Fortnite-y, Call of Duty games or sports games become just this background activity to feeling like you’re hanging out with your buddy. That’s a totally different experience.

I feel like those are where the games split to me. There’s the gaming experience where it’s sort of just an activity. I don’t care about getting any better at NHL 24. I’m not going to sit around learning all these weird stick moves and shit like that to try to become a master. But it’s something where I know that I haven’t talked to this dude in a while—I can go online, we’ll get on, we’ll chat, play a few meaningless games of Fortnite or some sporting game and that’s it. It’s just a different thing. But sitting down and really playing a game that is your solitary experience with it, those are completely different things for me.

Do you still keep up with these friends? Or have you kind of fallen off either because of work or life or whatever?
It depends. I’m on tour all the time it seems. And honestly, Jerry is one of the main people that I play games with—he’s super gamer, like, fucking super. So most of the time I’m playing a game online, it’s with him and we’re together right now, so we just go in the back lounge and play the fucking games together in person or we’ll go to a Barcade or something. Honestly, there’s only a handful of other people that I was playing a lot online with, and most of those people, I’m just not on the same schedule as anymore. It’ll be like, “Hey man, if you’re around and you want to rock some games…” I’m like, “Oh fuck, man, I’m in the middle of driving from Atlanta, but I don’t have the internet right now and I’m not going to get to the hotel until 4 in the morning, and then you’re going to be asleep.” It becomes a lot more difficult. Or they’re touring, too, and then it’s even more insane. It’s like, “I’m in Europe and you’re in Idaho.” It’s hard. Then it becomes more like I’m going to get more into the solitary gaming type of stuff and bounce back and forth, try to chip away at one of these longer games again.

This is a deep, deep cut, and is legitimately something that’s been on my [Michael] mind for almost 20 years. You did an AMA style interview in 2005 for Lambgoat and a person with the screen name “ryu_vs_ken” asked you a question, which you instead focused on their name about how you were a Ryu main for a decade until you switched to Ken and you found him better. Are you still keeping me up with the Street Fighter series?
I love Street Fighter. The longer I’m gone, I just keep going back to II. I think it’s a perfect game. I think the engine is perfect, the music is perfect, the controls are perfect. I got into Third Strike pretty heavily for a while, and then I’ve tried to get into V and 6. They’re cool, they’re great, I like 6. But there’s really nothing like being at the Street Fighter II: Hyper machine in an arcade and putting two quarters on the thing, not knowing who the fuck this dude is you’re about to play and getting your ass handed to you by someone, or having a really good game with someone that you can tell has just shredded, like, seven people in a row before you, you got to him and you somehow eek it out over him. It’s the coolest. You’re instant buds, like, “Fuck yeah, man.” There’s a certain thing about it. I used to own a machine. I didn’t have a TV and I had a Street Fighter machine in my living room, and I was obsessed with it. Now, I don’t play as much. But if there is a Street Fighter game in an arcade, I will sink time into it and I’ll get really pissed off if the controller is a little fucked up or the buttons are gummy. Also, Ms. Pac-Man—massive Ms. Pac-Man fan. I really, really will sit there for an hour playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Are those the two that you bee-line to, then?
For sure. And NBA Jam. If I’ve got someone with me, NBA Jam is a fav. I’ll never play against my friends, only on the same team. But NBA Jam, Ms. Pac-Man, Street Fighter, and I was never a pinball guy, but Cantrell’s super pinball guy and he kind of got me more into pinball. Now, I’ve kind of been equally into both. The pinball thing is cool because there’s so many variables involved and the competition aspect is a little heavier. There’s something more tangible. Obviously, there’s a fucking ball and flippers and such, you don’t know how they have the tilt control set. Some machines you can just beat the shit out of and get a lot of play out of them and other ones, if you bump them at all, your turn’s over. So, I feel like there’s a lot more variable in those kind of games.

The only problem with these Barcades is that a lot of the games are either not well kept—which sucks—or there are a lot of retro games… The only games I really like are high score-based games. I don’t really care about like playing Altered Beast—even though I think it’s cool—or shit like that. Sometimes I’ll do a run-through of a Golden Axe or something, but there’s not any variable in those games. It’s more just a nostalgia thing. You’re like, I’m going to play this game I haven’t played since [whenever], like Dragon’s Lair or something. But the pinball game, there’s always a fucking variable. You don’t know what the fuck’s going to happen when that thing comes out, you know?

I feel like they’re getting more popular, too. On tour, the bar/arcade pinball thing, they’re starting to skew more heavily towards pinball, too. That’s probably sheerly just a profit decision. Maybe they make more money off of them or more people play them. Who knows? But yeah, I definitely didn’t like those at all when I was a kid. I didn’t have any interest in pinball whatsoever. I only wanted to play arcade games and now it’s 50/50.

You also mentioned in that Lambgoat interview somebody named “Biggie” on the West Coast and called them out. Did that face off ever happen?
Oh yeah, he’s my buddy. I talked to him yesterday. That’s funny that you bring him up. He was Every Time I Die’s manager. At that point, he was Every Time I Die’s merch person. But he was super into Street Fighter II and he had a machine. He was always talking shit, like “Whenever we get to play, I’m going to beat your ass.” He was a Ken guy. We’re pretty even. We’ve played a bunch and it’s pretty 50/50, who’s going to win.

That’s so funny, I know exactly the interview you’re talking about. It’s so funny what you can remember. I don’t know if I would ever do that now, an interview that I’ll just answer anything.

AMA is basically just Twitter at this point.
Yeah, for sure, which I’ve never done. But I’m not that interesting, either. I don’t have a lot to say about much.

Hey man, you’ve got plenty to say about video games and we’re having a great time.
I mean, if you were born at a certain time, too—I feel like anybody is always like this—you get old enough and you’re like, “Oh, you weren’t around for the 16-bit wars,” that kind of shit. But like, fuck, man, we really are blessed to have grown up during the genesis of video games. And it’s never going to happen again. You can say that about the Internet or smartphones and shit, too. But the video game thing, if you try to explain to someone now that video games used to not exist in our lifetime. In our lifetime, they were Atari 2600-looking and we’ve seen them go to where they are now, it’s just fucking incredible. Absolutely incredible.

For some people, even who have a lot of enthusiasm on video games that are used to newer games, sometimes it’s hard for them to go back to older-style games. I feel like if you grew up with them, for a lot of people, there’s a sort of switch that flips in your brain and you’re just ready to go. You remember what it was like to play those old NES games for the first time, the first time you played Mario 3 and thought those graphics were just amazing, whereas now, shit looks more advanced on a cell phone.
Or when you would even see them! This game that you’ve been fantasizing about, you’ve seen pictures of it in Nintendo Power, fucking GamePro or something, and then your friend takes it out of his backpack, he’s holding it and you’re like, Holy shit! It’s like you just pulled out the fucking Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant or something, like, “I can’t believe you have that fucking game!” Or even tricks and codes and shit—not everyone knew those things. You couldn’t just get online and learn them all. Someone would be like, “Yo, you know if you go to this thing and jump on it and kneel for two seconds, a thing pops up in this other room…” And you’re like, “Wait a second, really?” And then you fucking try it and it’s like, Holy shit, that’s cool as fuck! How many of those things are there? And you had no way of knowing.

And now everybody has YouTube.
Yeah. And I’m not pooh-poohing the fact that you can find it. I would never go backwards in time to a less-technological era. It’s obviously beneficial that we can find out anything at any time. But there was something real magical about the mystique that surrounded “how to do a fatality,” or some game that was hard to find. It took me forever to find a copy of Strider on Genesis, and I remember finding it in a Montgomery Wards or something. I was like, “Mom, I have to! Please! I need Strider!” She just doesn’t understand. “Every time we go to Toys ‘R’ Us, this is the game that I’m looking for and they never have it!”

Or even that! You’re in the fucking Toys “R” Us and they’ve got the rows of tickets—that was such a cool thing. You beeline to the video game section, they’ve got all the fucking covers with tickets under them, and then you take it to this weird bulletproof hut that’s in the front of the Toys “R” Us, [laughs] some fucking guy lives in the room with all the games. In your mind, you’re like, If I could get in that room, if I could just have access to all those games… Now, you can just get every Nintendo game ever made on an emulator for free. It’s just absolutely nuts, man. But it’s been a really cool thing to be alive in the time of. I think if people aren’t playing games, they’re missing it.

I [James] remember being a kid and calling up different stores on the other side of town. When you’re a little kid on the other side of town, 20, 30 minutes away might as well be another continent, you know? And you can convince your mom to take you over there to buy that game and you’re just so excited. You’re sat there in the front seat of the car, nearly shaking because you’re so excited to go get that new Mega Man game or something.
100 percent. Dude, I have specific games that are tied to certain birthdays or certain times . I couldn’t wait to get Mega Man 2 on my ninth birthday or something like that. I remember getting the NES, and the first game that I had with it besides that Duck Hunt/Mario game was Metroid. It’s stained to that part of my life. So many memories of being that age have to do with specific games—Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, Contra, Castlevania. You can remember whole years of your life that revolved around a certain game coming out or a system coming out or your friend group, you’re all staying over at someone’s house, primarily because they have this game that you guys all can’t wait to play that they got. You’re like, We’re going to stay at Steve’s house, we’re going to order pizzas, his parents are going to let us stay up until, like, midnight, we’re going to watch the new Nightmare on Elm Street, we’re going to play Super Mario World, he’s got the Super Nintendo—it’s going to be fucking sick. That was such a cool time to have.

Are there any games coming out that you’re looking forward to?
Besides Silksong, which we’ve acknowledged is never happening? [Laughs] That’s the big one. That’s really it. That’s the one that I’m really eyeing.

I didn’t finish [Jedi: Survivor] and I would really like to. Another game that I’m trying to get more into, the Baldur’s Gate thing. I really want to because everyone that gets it is like, “Dude, the game is amazing.” And I have it, I just haven’t been able to sink the time into it that I feel like it’s going to require for it to hook me. Right now, I’ve got too many open. I can’t start any new ones. The second Zelda is unfinished, Metroid Dread is unfinished, the Baldur’s thing is unfinished, the Jedi thing is unfinished. There’s four… Fuck, Spider-Man 2, I didn’t finish either. That’s just hanging around. I gotta wrap all these things up or else I just feel like I wasted 20 hours into something that I didn’t finish. That sucks.

Highly Irresponsible is out October 25 via SharpTone Records and can be pre-ordered here.
Tickets to see Better Lovers on tour with Full of Hell, Gouge Away, Spy and Cloakroom are available here.
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