KILL SCREEN 053: John Darnielle of THE MOUNTAIN GOATS Launches Us Into 2025 With Forward Momentum

Photo by Lalitree Darnielle

It’s November 7, 2024 and Albert’s persistent co-nerds are sitting in a Zoom lobby, waiting for today’s player character to ready up. Truth be told, the atmosphere is remarkably glum. Though we’re excited to be chatting with a former colleague, 2024 has taken its toll on us. Just two days removed from both election day and a print day, the effects of politics, work and life can plainly be read on our faces as we pass the minutes talking about—what else?—games we’ve been playing. A notification pops up signaling that our guest has arrived, and what appears before us in a convenient digital box is New York Times bestselling author, one-time duet partner to Stephen Colbert, utterly hopeless Magic: The Gathering addict and The Mountain Goats main man John Darnielle. Wearing a Gamescience shirt (a company that makes dice), Decibel’s previous back page columnist clearly came ready to play. Before recording starts, our guy has to take a call. Waiting in anticipation, the co-nerds quietly mull over our prepared questions. When we hear Darneille say, “It’s a poster of Mercyful Fate when they were touring Italy in ’84,” before politely explaining he was about to do an interview and hanging up, our weathered faces gave way to much-needed smiles.

We’re going to level with you: This interview is absolutely more for us than it is for you. Getting the chance to sit down with the mind that brought us “No Children” to talk luxury cardboard may feel like a stretch for gaming’s most extremely extreme column. That said, neither Darnielle’s nerd credentials (seriously, a dice shirt?) nor his metal bonafides (how many times have you gone on network TV sporting an Inter Arma shirt and a “Don’t Break the Oath” tattoo?) are second to any that have appeared in our growing arcade. We’re obviously interested in hearing his take on all things gaming—and we very much did—but it’s his intelligent perspective, unflinching enthusiasm and radiating warmth that we really needed now more than ever. The following conversation with one of our favorite “Jesus dudes,” unsurprisingly, solidified his spot this holiday season as the surprise bookend to our calendar year. Pick up a copy of The Mountain Goats’ latest LP Jenny From Thebes, wake up early on Christmas to play your favorite game way too close to the screen and enjoy our present to ourselves.

What was your first gaming experience?
Pinball. I’m 57. When I started playing games, they were called pinball parlors. The only video game in there would have been one that I think was called Space Wars. It was a giant you-sit-in-it cabinet. That was in there, and they might have had the original Pong at that point. But for the most part, it was just pinball. Over time, the video games started coming in. My first gaming experience like that would have been in ’75, so I would have been 7 years old. Those places were magic. The reason people get so nostalgic is [because] you would go in there and it would just be the dinging, right? And then over time, the blooping. Before the blooping, it was literally just bells. You would just go in and be like you’re among the angels, “ding ding ding ding ding!,” and the sound of the reels and the mechanical sounds.

Those places were super magic, and they were places where teenagers were hanging out. So, if you were eight or nine years old, they’d pull up in their car, and they’d be playing Foghat or Head East or whatever. It was all rock ‘n’ roll dudes with feathery hair who were smoking, you know… Weed would not really probably go over today, but it’s like, that was the deal, right? If you ever watch The Bad News Bears and you see the scene where they meet up at the pinball park, that was it. They had air hockey, you would play air hockey. The air hockey was absolutely amazing in those days because like it got a lot of action, so the surface would be really good. So that would have been it.

One of the most vivid ones was I remember putting a quarter in a game called Fireball, and Fireball had a spinner at the center. It was red and had raised ridges, so when the ball hits it, it can fling it anywhere. One place it can fling it is directly between your flippers, right? I was so fucking pissed. I was like, This game is bullshit! They put this thing there that the whole thing is just to fuck you! And I was so mad. [Laughs] The whole thing is like, Well, no, it’s a chance element. Yes, it can do that, and also it can throw it up into a place that you might actually not be able to calculate the angle for yourself—but I was so pissed as a child. So that was it.

The video games grew over time because the next big one would have been Space Invaders. I was around for the Space Invaders invasion, which was a giant thing. People wrote comedy songs about them and stuff. There was a couple of daytime radio hosts who wrote a song called “Space Invaders.” So Space Invaders and Pac-Man were the big moments after that.

What is your gaming diet like these days?
I mainly just play Magic: [The Gathering] Arena now. I don’t have time to play video games. When people say that, it sounds like they’re saying that video games aren’t fun or important. It’s just that given my workload and given that I’m a father of two and given that the kids kind of own the house in a lot of ways—they are on their iPads a lot of the time playing Roblox and playing Minecraft and listening to whatever they’re listening to—I don’t want to further populate that environment with me on the TV. When I do, I like the virtual [console] that the Switch has. I recently got the original 8-bit Castlevania again. I hadn’t played that in a while. I will assail Ninja Gaiden III: [The Ancient Ship of Doom]. I will go to that un-finishable Ninja Gaiden game that I still haven’t finished. I do all the new [The Legend of] Zeldas as they come off the line and the new Mario Bros., generally speaking, if it’s a full platformer, the ones that usually come along with the new system. So, we did Breath of the Wild. That took a long time because I no longer do the thing where you sit down and do four to six hours playing a game. I just don’t have it.

I have too much other stuff to do, including Magic. I’m an addict. Once they got Arena for Mac… Before that, I had a dedicated IBM clone to play that on, but that shamed you enough. It’s like, you’re going over that computer for one purpose only, right? And so there’s a shame attached to that. Once you put it on your actual work machine, then you’re screwed. [Laughs]

The thing is I also get games on there, but I don’t ever finish them. What do I have there now? I have a game called Cycles. I have Fortnite on there that I got for my son to look at. That’s actually all I’ve ever bothered to get there. I tried The Last of Us that everybody was so excited about. Eh, I don’t know. I come from a generation of video games where fun was at the front, right? I need to be having a really good time. If it’s about the storytelling, [pans camera over to a full bookshelf] I have a lot of books and I absolutely guarantee you most of that storytelling is better. [Laughs] I got Ghost of Tsushima. Everybody said the storytelling was so amazing. Eh… People need an editor, man. These dialogue scenes, they go on forever. The action is good, the build is good. But if you don’t have an actual writer writing your dialogue—somebody who’s actually a writer of fiction—then the dialogue, it’s ponderous and over-explainy.

Again, I’m a books guy, so I don’t mean that as a criticism. The games are fun, but I don’t generally engage myself with the storytelling at the level that some other people seem to. So, I tend to go for stuff that’s more early platformer like Ninja Gaiden, like Castlevania. And earlier Zelda games, when they’re 8-bit, 16-bit.

You had told The Hard Times Podcast that you played video games a lot for your kids. You would be the one who had to get through the game for them. Had that experience of playing video games for somebody else kind of change your relationship or your interaction with the medium?
Well, for one thing, it makes you more aware when the child’s very young. Even Zelda—Ah, Zelda’s not violent. Yeah, it is, actually. [My youngest son] had a pretty low tolerance for violence when he was younger, and I was so aware. If he powers through this because he’s enjoying the game, you are desensitizing your son. Now, he’s gonna get desensitized anyway, so better if something like that is happening in the presence of his father. But these are these things that when you’re parent, you fret about loss of innocence. Well, innocence is a bullshit concept—it just means that they haven’t grown yet. But also, it’s a real concept. When we went to go see that Mary Poppins remake [Mary Poppins Returns] when he was, like, four or five, it had a scary part. He looked at me and I said, “Do you wanna go outside and wait this part through?” And he nodded his head. It was just a little, minor scary scene with a carriage going in the dark. I was like, That’s precious, that part of your life. Once you lose it, you’ll never have it back. And you shouldn’t be in a hurry.

I listen to goregrind. I’m not like Mr. Everything-should-be-innocent, but you should make your choices as to when you’re crossing those barriers, when you’re deciding you wanna engage something. And so with that, I used to get spooked, but it was specifically Zelda where you could feel him going, “I’m too engaged in this story to not push through feeling afraid.” That’s a useful stage in any storytelling, movie-watching environment, where it’s like, Now I can see why there’s violence here.

But I also don’t play shooters, is the thing. That actually is something that changed massively when I became a parent. I used to play the Rainbow Six games, and then I had a six-month old, four-month old in the house. A lot of downtime when you have a baby that young—just sleeping a lot. And so I fired up the video game. It just feels different blowing open people’s brains over and over when there’s this fragile form of life in the house and most of your daily work is about taking care of this young [child]. The fun had gone out of it. I recently got the Hitman anthology for PlayStation because I used to love Hitman. Now, the kids are older and all of that huge softness that you have when you’re a parent of a very young child has gone back into that area. But I did find it changed me some. I’m just less interested in that. It’s not that I think it’s gross or wrong or anything, but it doesn’t hold my interest as much. Some games are parts of your lives during a progression of your life. Hitman 2, for me, when it was just me and my wife and no kids and I was touring constantly and I didn’t have a console on the bus—there was no bus—I would come home, get into Hitman 2, strangle some motherfuckers, right? Although I’m not good at Hitman, getting through the mission without hurting anybody, that seems really appealing to me. And I do not have the time to actually do it, nor am I gonna use a walkthrough because, with all respect to your listeners who use them… come on. [Laughs]

You had said that Zelda seemed to have really hooked your kids. Was it any particular Zelda title?
Breath of the Wild. Tears of the Kingdom is the one we finally just finished a few months ago.

You mentioned also that you would play through new Marios. Was it anything in particular with Zelda or Mario that really dug its claws in?
It’s that they’re fun. We don’t really stop to think about the concept of fun. We just go, “Oh, this is fun.” But actually, fun is something that not all kids like the same way. And the reason I know this is because my older son, he likes to have fun. But the younger one, when something is fun, his face lights up. Since he was very small, it’s like, Fuck yeah, now we’re having fun. And fun is what it’s all about for him. It’s a value for him. And with more “mature” games, you have to learn how they’re fun. Mario and Zelda games are fun the second you start them. You start running around—well, we all love to run around from the second we can move our legs, right? You have to run around, hit some stuff and get some coins or some rupees out of them. It’s just fun.

And also, with the game design—I suspect this is true of all of the flagship platformers, whether it’s from Sony or Nintendo—those are the ones they pour their extra into. They spend the extra time sanding off the edges, and so they’re very immersive. The second you are in it, you can feel that it’s a big world. With Breath of the Wild, sailing through space on the parasail thing, you don’t have to be a day over two to look at that and not go, Whoa, I wish I could fly! Whereas I think other games don’t quite put you in it. They just go, “You can fly in this game.” And that’s cool, but in Zelda, you actually get the feeling what it would be like if you could do that.

I don’t know if you read comic books, but there was a comic book called What If? back in the day that would just pose, like, “What if the world had exploded?” or “What if Thanos had beaten so-so,” right? Zelda games are great—and so are Mario—at actually taking the question “what if?” very seriously, making sure that it’s actually given the space to feel real. Mario games are incredible like that because it’s a totally unrealistic world, and yet at the same time, you feel like, Well, if I was in this world, this is exactly how it would work. And that’s very immersive.

It is interesting to bring up Nintendo specifically for that idea of fun because so many of the games that [Nintendo lead game designer] Shigeru Miyamoto has made are based off of his childhood experiences.
He’s like [director Hayao] Miyazaki in this way, right? That he’s got a vision of childhood that he wants you as an adult to be experiencing that kind of pleasure because it’s missing from your adult life.

No two children, ] no two anybody are gonna experience fun the same way. And we have spoken to so many people that have such disparate tastes in terms of what is fun for them. Some people need that immediate hit of dopamine, “I want these games that are quick 5-minute rounds, just constant stimulation,” or “I need that 300-hour JRPG just grinding out my life.”
That’s one I feel like usually if you start playing it, you’re not gonna feel the fun right away. I was an Odin Sphere fan. You ever play Odin Sphere? You’re just doing the same thing over and over. [Laughs] But if you get committed to it, you’re like, I gotta get to the end of this one! And then you learn there’s, like, four different endings. That’s where I usually get off. I’m like, No no, I’m trying to tell the story and be done. I don’t care about the other endings.

You’re a books guy, but something I [Michael] think [about] with video games is the movement, the actual experience. And I think that you did describe it very well where a lot of these video game writers, to convey an idea as clearly as possible to as wide of an audience, they have to be overly explain-y. They have to be that stereotypical, “I’m gonna exposition dump for the next 10 minutes and I’m gonna remind you of it every 30 minutes so you’re not losing the plot.”
I would disagree. They don’t have to do that.

They don’t! I [Michael] think that there are good examples where they don’t and it comes across very effectively.
Exactly. Did you ever play Baroque?

No.
Oh dude, Baroque is a really crazy game that I never finished. It was a puzzle game essentially, but the storytelling left enough out. Now obviously this is why you’ve never heard of Baroque, right? [Laughs] If you’re going for the biggest audience possible, then you have to over explain. I listen to heavy metal. I’m not going for the biggest audience possible. I want an audience that is into this. I don’t make heavy metal, but the music I make is like that also. I’m not trying to get everybody to like my stuff. I want the people who, when they hear it, are gonna go, “That’s my thing,” to be into it. Those are the people I’m speaking to. And with video games, I like the ones where somebody is going, “This story isn’t for everybody. It’s only for the people who are willing to sort of take that extra leap.” And Baroque was like this. It’s a very nutty game. But otherwise, that’s the thing. In Ghost of Tsushima, they have to over-explain the story because if one person misses it, he’s gonna go online and tell his friends, “The story was unclear.” Whereas if he says the story’s too long, half the video game players in the world would be like, “I got time.” [Laughs]

If you were to approach a video game, what would be the fat that would be trimmed first for you?
That’s a great question, but here’s the thing—my problem with a lot of storytelling games is I’ll read the dialogue screens, I’ll go, Well, you’re not good with dialogue. Whoever’s doing this, you’re not a writer. You have a story in your mind, but probably you were told “turn this story”—by somebody else—“into dialogue,” and dialogue’s not your thing. It’s like if you go to a playwright, the playwright knows how to make that work, but they also have visual needs. When you look at the credits to a big video game, there’s so many people. Well, the more people you have telling a story—we know this from playing Telephone, right?—the more muddy the story gets. One person is probably the best number of people to tell a story, which is why indie games are probably doing the best with this. It’s one person who goes, “Here’s my story and I’m telling [it].”

But you need good writers to tell good stories, or, in video games, you need to stop putting words to the forefront. We know from Ninja Gaiden, the dialogue screens are fine, but they’re not the story. The story is the movement of the character. You don’t have to know the names of the birds that attack you to know the story of the birds in Ninja Gaiden. If you haven’t played Ninja Gaiden III, the birds will kill you every fucking time. They’re the absolute worst. I’ll see them on motherfucking deathbed, these birds. But that’s the thing—to understand that if words aren’t your thing, to dial them back. If you’re advancing through dialogue and dialogue isn’t your thing, then your dialogue screen is just a drag. And I think it’s gotten much worse now that the dialogue is spoken out loud. When they had to do it in 8- and 16-bit, then they chose the words carefully. Even if the English was badly translated, it was “You have no chance to survive make your time,” right? You know what that means and I know what that means. “All your base are belong to us.”

Yeah. “Welcome to die!”
And you know what these things mean and they’re compact. Whereas in the days of long dialogue screens and big games and people wanting to hear from a review that this is a 400 hour game—they want to hear that, they want to hear that this is gonna be worth my $90 or whatever. But I think the best way to tell stories on a screen is with images and sound and movement, as you were saying, with the actual gameplay. And I think the needs of telling the story through traditional story means don’t generally have people who are good.

I mean, that even includes Zelda. The Zelda cut scenes, they’re better than most, but still you go, “Eh, come on.” The way that Zelda herself talks to the game, she needs a couple different looks but she’s always sad and desperate. And it’s like, no, she’s a person. People have different ways of talking. Even when they’re a threatened princess living in some other world, they need to not be quite so unidimensional. And that’s why Link is the best character in any given Zelda game—he doesn’t talk! He doesn’t say anything! Because he doesn’t have to, because his story is in the movement as in what he sees. So, this is for me, I think, one of the things because, like I say, I have books. Writers are really good at this. Video game people, I don’t think, have fully embraced their art form and said, “If I have a guy who’s great at dialogue, I’ll use dialogue. Otherwise, I’ll keep it to a minimum.” That’s my feeling.

Magic: The Gathering, the ultimate excuse for us to get to talk to you. How have your games been lately?
Oh, my games are always terrible because I won’t play the meta. I will play, somebody will beat me with something I hate, then I will build a deck specifically to frustrate that deck. I’ll never see that guy again—I’m playing with strangers online—but somebody else is playing his deck, so I’ll get to him eventually. Right now in Duskmourne: [House of Horror], which is the set that’s on right now, it’s really good. It’s a horror set. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but it punches all my buttons.

There’s a good mill deck that you can build around this crab, and I love crabs. Crabs are always big defense, no offense. I love alternate win conditions. I love to mill somebody, they hate it. Although the thing is, I was singing a different song when Ruin Crab was in Standard because Ruin Crab was just too much mill. People could absolutely mill you on turn five with Ruin Crab, but it was very frustrating. [Laughs] There’s a new crab [Scrabbling Skullcrab] that every time an enchantment enters or you unlock a room, the opponent mills two cards. I’ve been doing that with Mirrorhall Mimic, so cloning it into having a bunch of those guys. You can only play it in Standard because in Historic—you can tell this is like what I play the most of, right?—people run a card called Gaea’s Blessing. If it enters the graveyard, then you shuffle your graveyard in your library. So then if you’re doing that, you have to have run Leyline of the Void. But Leyline of the Void, that’s double black. You can do that—it’s easier to fix mana in Arena than it really is with paper—but I don’t like having to fix my mana. I don’t wanna be sitting there looking at cards waiting for a treasure token or something. But I’m enjoying milling people. That’s what I’m doing. [Laughs]

Something I [Michael] found interesting is that you like tax decks.
Oh yeah, tax decks are great. There’s a guy, Eetai Ben-sasson, who was a champion at one point, who played a tax deck, and he’s the guy who very patiently listened to a million of my questions when I was just learning to play Magic. He’d say, “You wanna make something unique, and Magic is not about making things unique. It’s about how understanding how the cards talk to one another.” But he also respected that. He said, “This is one of the great things about the game. You can play it any way you like, and you can be into it for any number of reasons.” And that really is one of the most amazing things about Magic. Do you like the art of the cards? Do you like that you’re playing with somebody? Do you like being aggressive? Do you like stopping other people from playing? There’s a million ways to do it. But when I saw his tax deck, I just love [that] tax decks shut down big creatures, big, expensive spells that you wanna cast to annihilate everybody. Well, now, if I can make it cost 12 mana, you have less of a chance of casting it. I like that. I like Smothering Tithe. I like that you to have to tap your lands before your turn starts. [Laughs]

Nobody’s gonna understand what the fuck we’re talking about. Do you ever see yourself going full blown stax?
What do you mean by stax?

Stax is a deck archetype where it’s all those tax cards, but it gets its name from Smokestack. It’s all Smokestack, Winter Orb, Static Orb, like, hard lockdown.
I don’t know this card, but I can totally see that because I have played red/green land destruction a lot. God, people hate land destruction.

Oh, it’s the worst! I’ve [James] got a mono-black land destruction deck that people just hate.
There’s nothing more satisfying than when you take a person’s last land. [Laughs] The thing is, if I can reduce my casting cost on a Stone Rain deck, I can do it on turn four. Now you don’t have anything. [Laughs] And it’s really so horrible. It’s really great. But I did that in Waking the Trolls, this saga that gets me a bunch of lands and you none. So, if you do Waking the Trolls and land destruction, you can wind up with a bunch of big trolls with trample and they have no lands.

Or you could be a real monster and do black/white and have Leyline of the Void and then Fall of the Thran.
That’s terrible. But the thing is, what I dislike is when it’s too much meta. Like, when the Dimir rogues were everywhere, it’s like, well, that’s a mill deck and I like milling, but not when it’s so turbo and obvious. You’re never gonna cast a card that I go, “Oh my God, what did you just do?” I’m a Johnny on that model. I like a cool trick, I like it better when I didn’t see it coming. That’s why I hate life gain decks so much. The life gain are, like, the absolute vanilla. And that’s why right now in Historic, I tend to play Quakebringer. I run four Quakebringers, and there’s a black “no life gaining” card, but Quakebringer is great because you can keep bringing them right back out.

You play on Arena, but you don’t play on Magic Online. Is there any particular reason for that?
Magic Online is for IBMs, right? I don’t think they have it on Mac. I did buy an IBM clone to play Arena on before they had it on Mac, but then they ported Arena to the Epic Games launcher, and that was the end of that for me. [Laughs]

So all we gotta do is get you a gaming PC and then life is over. [Laughs]
The thing is, with respect to my Arena brethren, but I suspect that the people on MTGO would own me all day. Like, Metaling Mage [former Magic: The Gathering pro Chris Pikula] plays on there. MTGO, I feel like, is guys who are very serious about winning.

I [Michael] just picked up MTGO. I’m not great at Magic, but I just wanted to play commander. I was sick of playing Brawl.
Oh yeah, you can’t do Commander on Arena.

And that was the big thing. I think Arena is the better client. It’s just much smoother and playing MTGO just feels like playing Microsoft Excel.
[Laughs] That’s enough to keep me away from it.

Yeah. But at the very least, I still get to play Commander. And I’ve asked you online before if you play and you said that you weren’t super into [Commander] because you didn’t want that big social experience, but I feel like it’s kind of the perfect breeding ground for the most creativity.
When I’ve played it with people I already know, it’s cool. I played it with [Magic: The Gathering content creator] Shivam Bhatt out in the Bay Area. That was amazing. But yeah, I had a tweet that had a lot of success back in the day where I said, “No, I’m not playing with you online. Video games are meant to be played by yourself with a screen in the dark at 1 in the morning.” [Laughs] That’s sort of my vibe. I don’t take my games online. I’m not playing against other people. For me, video gaming, to some extent, is me and a machine. It’s alone time in that sense. But if I had more time to play paper Magic, I’m sure I’d be getting into Commander.

That’s interesting to think that for you, video games have to be this solo experience when so much of the industry has been pushing more towards a social experience, even for single-player games. Is that upsetting for you?
I don’t get upset about it, but I have no interest in it. The only reason I put my games online at all is because that’s how you buy the games now. Otherwise, that’s not what I’m there for. There’s a line in Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection”: “I got all the friends that I [want].” I’m not looking to make new friends. That’s not what it’s about for me. I would rather be wrestling with the machine. Or, it’s with myself. When you’re playing against a machine, you’re playing yourself, right?

It’s so much more dopamine-related when it’s against other people. That’s why they like it—because you’re going to play more when you do that. You get a chat screen going? Oh my God. Do I want to hear what anybody has to say when I’m playing video games with them? No, not unless it’s my friend already. If I’m playing with my friend Joel, then we’ll run riffs, it’ll be fun. But other than that—this goes all the way back to Duke Nukem—that’s just not an environment in which I have any interest at all. To me, it’s very uncreative. It’s fun in a pretty dull and two-dimensional sense of fun for me. I can see having a good time with it, but it’s not of interest to me. For me, video game time is time with me and some environment, because it’s like reading books in a sense. Even though I said that books do it better, I’m engaging the art itself. I’m not looking to do that with the addition of some additional competitive social environment.

I’ve played some games with friends on Arena, but with Arena, you have to be in this other window and it doesn’t really work as well. You wish you were playing paper. But I’m not presenting my philosophy of how this should be. This is just me. I’m a pretty solitary person. I don’t really hang much at all. People generally think I’m exaggerating when I say that and then they’ll be around me for a few months and go, “Oh yeah, no, John doesn’t hang.” [Laughs] I talk so much, people assume that I want to hang and talk, but most of the time I’m fairly solitary. In that way, the online environment, it’s been kind of great for me. I am chatty, but also I retain my space because I burn up my energy when I hang. I burn it, right? And then I don’t have it to do writing stuff, which is what my main thing is mainly about.

“I played video games in a drunken haze/I was 17 years young/Hurt my knuckles punching the machines/Taste of scotch rich on my tongue.” What is the cabinet that you punched?
So, this is funny because I actually used to occasionally change that line live to name one of the machines at the Mud Hole, which is the place at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont. This is the place I was at. They had a place, it’s underneath… I forget the name of the building. It’s called the Mud Hole, and they had pinball machines and video games in the ’80s. I would go there and there was a stairwell where I would sit and drink booze when I was 16 or 17 or get stoned and then go into the place and play mainly pinball. But video games back then, they had Crystal Castles, which would have been one of them, Zaxxon, and I don’t think I had gotten into Aero Fighters. Masterpiece game. Zaxxon was incredible. Oh! And Xevious. Xevious probably would have been the big one. These are scrolling flying games where you bomb things.

[Laughs] This is an interesting point about video games I hadn’t thought of before. Obviously to this day, getting stoned and playing video games is something people do. But when you were getting stoned and playing video games that didn’t involve dialogue that were these scrolling worlds that had to convey their whole thing through the visuals and sound, that was, like, the best use of your stoned time, right? Because you would just be in this, you’re already floating in space and now you’re in this spacey place in which language doesn’t really enter into it. You’re just understanding things through spatial relations and stuff, and Xevious was a big one. It would for certain have either been Crystal Castles, Xevious or Gorgar, the pinball machine, which is mentioned I think in [2014 novel] Wolf in White Van.

During your February 25th, 2009 performance at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco, right before you closed with “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” you said, “We should all rest. Rest, it’s so important. I spent most of my 20s thinking it wasn’t, but I was wrong about rest. I gave rest a bad rap. I canceled many people against resting and I’d like to say that I’m sorry.” One of the greatest lessons that the two of us have learned from working on this column is the importance of that notion of rest, and after the year that the two of us—and honestly, everybody else—has had, we very much need some. What is the game that you would like to recommend for our much needed conclusion to 2024?
Oh, wow. I mean, it would have to be something old. I’m trying to think. The problem is that video games are mainly aggravating, right? Like, a restful game, it’s not… [Laughs] They do exist. [Pauses] Oh, you know, maybe actually F-Zero X. You know F-Zero X? It’s a racing game.

Yeah, yeah, just curious on why, because I [James] remember F-Zero sometimes can be pretty high octane.
It is, but this is the thing—driving games are great. You might even go back to an old game like Spy Hunter or something like that, or Night Driver, these old games. When you’ve had a bad year or a bad month or a bad whatever, you wanna feel like you’re moving forward, right? And that’s why we’re all so bummed right now. We don’t wanna do again a thing that sucked. And it looks like we’re gonna be there, stuck in this loop of endlessly being mad at some guy we can’t do anything about and just frustrated with the same awfulness. But a driving game, you’re always going. You know what it would be? Rainbow Road from Mario Kart 64. The Rainbow Road is joy. The Rainbow Road is just pleasure and joy with the soundtrack. You’re moving forward, you can do that one jump off to the left right off the beginning of the finish line where you sail through space, and if you land it, then you’re uncatchable. That’s a genuinely relaxing experience. Whereas F-Zero X, it’s too high-octane. So is Extreme-G, another Nintendo 64 driving game.

I [James] love Extreme-G! Those first two games are fantastic! Underrated gem.
The 64 was an absolutely fantastic console. Just really good. Although if you bought it when it was new—which I did—then you had to wait literally, like, nine months for Nintendo to come out with more than four titles. And of those four, one of them was GoldenEye—I was not interested in GoldenEye—and one of them was golf, and I didn’t want golf, either. So you just played Mario 64. People were buying a build to attach to their 64 to play Japanese imports with, because there were a bunch of games in Japan, but you couldn’t play them on the American machines. But yeah, Extreme-G, especially if you can do it in a solo mode and just be moving. But I think those are good games to sort of transition into the next year on.

Jenny From Thebes is available now via Merge Records and can be purchased here.
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