KILL SCREEN 043: David Bruno of SUMMONING THE LICH Has the Power in His Hands

“Let’s crack a pack, shall we?” While the surgeon general has long warned the public about the dangers of smoking to your health, it’s still perfectly fine to open up a pack of trading cards in search of a different high (for now). But these aren’t just trading cards being opened on camera—this is an exclusive, hand-crafted bundle of custom Summoning the Lich trading cards shared by vocalist and world-building mastermind David Bruno. “I do a couple series per album release and it’ll be character cards,” he explains. “Each series are the same five cards, but I do one random holographic in every pack, so that way people who want to collect can get a few packs and try and get all the holos.” Each card boasts unique art and flavor text that depicts the lore of self-described “fantasy death metal” band, showing a meticulous attention to detail and genuine enthusiasm for both their influences as well as their end product. Though it’s been a decade since the death metal growler has played Magic: The Gathering (more on why later), the connections to the immensely popular card game can be seen in the layout, including a color-swapped alter of the back print and the vestigial “Deckmaster” text being replaced with something a bit more appropriate: “Deathmaster.”

Bruno, a lifelong gaming nerd—both tabletop and video—certainly puts the “create” in creative. Rather than retreading the same bloodied ground that death metal legends of years past have well explored, the lyricist instead crafted the world of Arrias for his titular Lich to occupy, using the band as an outlet to tell tale of this druid-turned-necromancer’s fall from power and malevolent return to the realm he once sought to protect. So expansive has the lore become that Bruno set out to write a book detailing his interpretation of the story so far. “I did two years worth of work building the story and now finally starting to commit to actually writing it, it’s just so intimidating. Like, Man, what did I get myself into?” he shares with a knowing laugh. In the mean time, the lyrics for group’s recently released sophomore LP Under the Reviled Throne, the second in an expected trilogy in this dark fantasy saga, will have to suffice. Despite fatherhood and band commitments having eaten up a significant portion of his free time, Bruno has found refuge in others’ worlds over the last few years thanks to his love of handheld consoles and the growing emulation scene. Rest doesn’t have to be a fairytale and the co-nerds of Kill Screen are happy to hear tale of Bruno’s legend.

What was your first gaming experience?
It would have been in an arcade for sure. That was my first big draw to gaming, playing in arcades, so it probably would have been Pac-Man or Galaga or something like that. Growing up, I didn’t really have tons of consoles. I did PC gaming and I did handhelds. The first handheld that I had was the Game Gear, so that was the first gaming system I owned. Sonic: [the Hedgehog] was the first game that I got really hooked on, so I have a special place in my heart for Sonic. That’s the first real property that I played.

That Sonic on Game Gear is great. Not full-speed blast processing, but it’s really fun.
Oh, it’s so good. And you had color in the day of the Game Boy. It was awesome. In some ways, It was ahead of its time. They definitely were forward thinking with the colored screen and the backlit screen and trying to focus on ergonomics with the horizontal handheld form factor, right? I mean, it was a gigantic brick, but it was our gigantic brick. [Laughs]

It also took, what, 6 AA batteries?
So many, and it burned through them! Then I got a Game Boy Color after that and I was like, Wow, this thing lives forever! It was such a different experience.

What have you been playing lately and what do you typically prefer to play?
Once the Lich started, at the time I was working a ton of hours, so I just kind of dove headfirst into the Lich and I was like, I’ll catch up on some games. I was gaming a lot at the time. It would have been, like, 2016, so I would have been playing Doom. I was playing through The Witcher 3 finally and a few other games, and then I basically fell off the face of the earth. My wife got pregnant, so we had a kid and the band got serious and then the pandemic happened and I got into some other hobbies. It was just hard to game with with a kid, especially [because] the kind of games I like to play tend to be a little more on the violent side. But recently I got back into handheld gaming via emulation and I got a Steam Deck, too. I’ve been basically going back through my catalog of games that I had in 2016 and trying to finish all those before I start jumping into too many new games.

You know, I say that and then I got [Halo:] the Master Chief Collection, so I’ve just been playing through Halo 3 again. I just got Sea of Stars. My buddy [drummer] Eric [W. Brown] from Nekrogoblikon did the music for it. So if you love the music from Sea of Stars, that’s his doing. It’s tight, very cool stuff. It’s a small world. I’m going on up to Chicago for 4th of July, so I’m gonna bring my Steam Deck with me and play it.

I went back and started playing Borderlands 2 again just because I love that game. It’s like I kind of live in the mid-2010s right now, just trying to finish up a few games. [Laughs] I’ll probably just skip to current games once I finish the games on my list, but it’s like, Man, I’ve been wanting to play this thing for almost 10 years, [laughs] I gotta play some of these games. Elden Ring’s definitely on my list, Baldur’s Gate 3 is obviously on my list.

I like strategy games. I haven’t played them in a while, but I cut my teeth on Warcraft III. There was an online tournament of Warcraft III that was literally just a community like, “We’re gonna battle the piss out of each other!,” and community-made brackets and stuff. I was playing for 18 hours straight and I had the Mountain Dew bottle filled with pee. [Laughs] I was going hard. That was probably middle school or something. Definitely that and Starcraft II, to a lesser extent, but Warcraft III, I love that game. I just bought Civilization VI, too, because there was a big Steam summer sale. A lot of the newer games, it’s like, Man, it’s $30, $35 and I still got all these other games on my list that are on sale for $2.99 right now.

That’s my [James] same opinion on Baldur’s Gate. I keep looking at it and it’s like, Ehh, I want it and it’s a little discounted, but I’ve got all these other games that were, like, $5 or I already have a stack of them I need to play.
Yeah, it’s hard when you have a stack of games to play and you’re not just waiting for the next game to come out, like I was when I was a kid. It’s like, Dude, I’ve got this whole library I gotta go through and I got all these old games that I’ve owned in the past that I have emulated now that I get to trudge back through. My wife and I are about to start a Phantasy Star Online campaign. We had that on GameCube and we had a flood back in 2015 or something. It was in an apartment complex, it was a sewer flood. It was shit water and just completely destroyed everything in our basement, including that game. It’s, like, $90. I was like, You know what? I paid for that game once, I’m gonna not feel bad emulating it. [Laughs] I think I still own the case, I rinsed that out. But the CD, it was in there for so long, it ruined it. I was like, There’s no way.

I [Michael] would be heartbroken.
It was thousands of dollars worth of stuff. The artist for Summoning the Lich [Austin Philipps], he was our roommate at the time. He lived in the basement, so he got the worst of it, man. He got tons of stuff destroyed. It was not too much as far as nostalgic stuff aside from our GameCube collection, and then I had a bunch of signed stuff from Impending Doom from their Serpent Servant album era that just got thrashed, like a signed poster and stuff. I was a little bummed about it just because that was the same thing, a nostalgic band. Growing up, I loved that band, especially that first album Nailed. Dead. Risen. I thought that was a really solid death metal/deathcore crossover, actually had some death metal chops to it. But that’s just life, right? And now I can emulate [games] on my Odin 2.

[For these older games], I’m [Michael] pro-pirate-everything at this point.
You already made your money on that game. And also, if you want to really make money, allow people to emulate these games, have a server where they can emulate them and just charge a monthly fee like you do with every other fucking thing in the world. You have these games [where] these developers spend thousands of hours of their life developing these games and then their online stores for these consoles—like 3DS, or I think it really started as far as the Nintendo side with the Wii—they just shut down and these games are vaporware unless you pirate them. And then they’re like, “Well, you shouldn’t pirate them.” It’s like, “So they should just not exist, you dick?” I don’t understand.

For some of these things that haven’t been re-released and you have no easy access—so, what? You’re expecting people to go buy this old hardware and then this old game from decades ago?
You’re still not making the money on that!

Right! It’s being sold by some person on eBay. I’m [James] a fan of old shit like that, I’ll enjoy doing that. But for somebody who’s 21 or 15, they’re not gonna do that.
No, and same thing goes for those of us that were dumb and didn’t save our collections. I don’t want to go and re-buy Final Fantasy VII again for some crazy marked-up price or whatever. Even for $5! Dude, I bought it already! I’ll buy the remaster. [Laughs] It’s hard for me once it’s an obsolete console.

Obviously Yuzu got themselves in trouble by emulating Switch, and that kind of sent a shockwave through the emulation community right now as far as litigiousness. If you’re an emulation company that is then making money with a Patreon, but based in America where they actually have their best chance at some legal footing, they’re playing with fire. But it also sucks because part of the problem is [that] we buy these games on Switch and then they suck. The games are awesome, but you can’t play them because the game doesn’t run right. Pokémon Violet and Scarlet were broken—they’re still broken. Some of these games are running at, like, 18 FPS. I could buy it, I own it, and then emulate it on a handheld that can run it in docked mode with a 1080p screen running 60 frames per second. Why would I choose your terribly unergonomic, seven-year-old hardware that was three and a half years old when you released it and it was already a middle-tier chip when you dropped it? No, thank you.

They just underpowered the hardware, which is the Nintendo way. But for how long they wanted to keep that as their console, they undershot it—they’re doing a disservice to the amazing games that they put out. That’s why Nintendo can be so litigious—because they release fun games, right? Fun games, family games, they’re not necessarily the deepest or whatever, but I can pick up a Nintendo game and just have fun with it like every time. I mean, not every time—there’s some really bad stinkers out there. But more times than not based on any other console or whatever, if I’m picking up a Nintendo game that’s a flagship property, I’m probably gonna enjoy it.

You’ve mentioned that you’ve gotten back into games through handheld emulation. Why specifically handheld? Is it the nostalgia factor of what you had as a kid, or is there something about the experience of a handheld console that you prefer?
It’s multifaceted. Part of it is that my son’s five, so he’s super interested in everything I’m doing now. If I’m playing a game—Doom is a great example—I’m just absolutely destroying demons and stuff and blood and guts everywhere, I don’t necessarily want him to see that at five. If I have it on the 65-inch [T.V.], it’s hard to hide. But if I have it on my Steam Deck, I can just do the thing where I’m just kind of, [pantomimes holding a Steam Deck and keeping it out of reach] “You can’t look at what I’m looking at buddy!” and just chase away from him with my hands. So, that’s part of it.

A big part of it is the nostalgia. I love handhelds. I got into it with the Game Boy-style emulators. Also, all last year I was reselling the little Miyoo Mini Pluses. That was a part of how I made my money and was able to tour and do the band thing. I was getting a really good deal on them at the time, so I was importing them, loading custom firmware onto them and then just reselling them for about four times what I was importing them for. It was pretty good. I wasn’t jacking them way up, that was just where the market was.

It was a combination all three things got me into the scene of emulation handhelds. And then like any other hobby I get into, I start collecting things, so now I just have a whole bunch of little different handhelds for different purposes. I was selling them, so when you get 10 of them, it’s easy to just be like, I’ll keep this one for “testing.” [Laughs] The Steam Deck, obviously I got that for myself just because I wanted to play PC. I still have my PC, I got into mini PCs.

Part of it is that I’m touring, because I’m on the road. It’s hard to start a game, hard to bust out a laptop—a lot easier to bust out a handheld. We have a screen in our van, so I have a mini PC that I have ready to hook up. We didn’t get it hooked up on the last tour just because it was very last minute. But I think mini PCs are a lot of fun. I have a couple that are Ryzen, 8 core, 16 threads and they got the 6600 Graphics cards in them. It’s pretty small, and emulation-wise you can play up to, like, PS3, you can do a lot of Xbox, Xbox 360. PC-wise, with the integrated GPUs on these new Ryzen chips, I was playing BioShock Infinite on medium settings at 1440p, locked at 60 [frames per second]—for something that I can just toss in a bag. That’s kind of where I’m at. Portability at this point is my biggest thing. I have my PC that I’m on right now up in my office, but I have so little time now. Where I have time to actually have fun and play some games, usually I want to be on the move or I want to be downstairs, I want to be in bed. Handhelds have been instrumental in allowing me to really get back into gaming and not just wish that I was playing games. [Laughs]

It sounds like you’re able to get some time in on the road. You said last tour it didn’t quite work out, but is that usually a regular part of tours for you?
Yeah. We do a lot of drives and I co-pilot a lot. Touring is just driving, right? You’re talking 4- to 6-hour drives on the norm, longer stretches will be, like, 9 to 15 hours. Usually not above 9 or 10 if you don’t have an off-day, obviously, because it’s impossible. We’ve had to do an 11-hour drive and play a show the next day. We get off the stage, pack up our merch and stuff at the end of the night and leave the venue at 1 a.m., and then we have to be at the next venue at, like, 1 p.m. Sometimes it’s really crazy and you’re in the van a lot, so being able to pull out a handheld and just sit there in game helps keep sanity. [Laughs] I think since I’ve gotten into the handhelds, I’ve been a little bit less on edge. It’s exhausting work, so when I start to feel myself kind of slipping, I can just be like, OK, take myself out of this world for a little bit, disconnect, play some games.

And that’s the whole thing with this band, too, and the whole fantasy death metal angle. There are plenty of bands that have really eloquent lyrics about all the problems that we have around us, plenty of bands that do the horror aspect of death metal lyrics and stuff. For me, I just wanted to write stuff where you can escape into a fantasy world and it’s death metal and it’s brutal and it’s magical and fun. But the main goal is just an escape.

In your Digital Tour Bus episode, you showed a Switch, but you also mentioned that you had a PS2. Why the PS2? What are the PS2 games that you’re playing on tour?
It’s actually not in there anymore because it’s replaced with the mini PC, so we’re just gonna emulate the games that we had, mainly because it’s gotten drinks spilled on it and stuff and we’re like, “We’re gonna kill this PS2.” [Laughs] The mini PC is a little easier to tuck somewhere because it’s just smaller.

But we love PS2. The games that I have on there, God of War, God of War 2, Kingdom Hearts, Burnout, Burnout Revenge and then a couple different weird racing games. Our drummer [T.J. Chilton] is probably into racing games more than any person I know that doesn’t just commit to having a racing sim. He’s one step away from just building it. The first DiRT Rally, he just loves the game. But he has a couple weird racing games, like ATV [Offroad Fury], that are actually really fun. We had those on the road. I’ll definitely be playing some TimeSplitters, TimeSplitters 2. I love that game.

The other reason we had the PS2 is because it’s a DVD player, so we’d use it for that. But now I have a little Blu-ray/DVD combo USB that I’m plugging into [the mini PC]. So, yeah, we’re retiring that setup from touring.

Have you gotten to bond with any other bands over gaming at all?
We bonded with a few bands. Undeath, we’ve talked to them a lot about gaming. [Vocalist] Kev Muller from Alluvial is a big gamer. He saw me, I was sitting at the merch table playing on my Miyoo Mini. He was like, “Dude—is that a Miyoo Mini Plus? Let me look at it! Dude, this thing’s so sick!” We were just sitting there and talking about it. He was like, “I got a Steam Deck. Have you checked one out?” And I was like, “I’ve been wanting to but no one I know has one.” That was actually the first time I was able to hold a Steam Deck in my hand. I was kind of skeptical on it, especially the OG one. I have battery anxiety pretty bad. I’m definitely the guy that sits there and just looks at it too much. And then they came out with the OLED, and that was what got me. But when I held it, though, I was like, Oh man. I wouldn’t say I have large hands. If 1 is the smallest and 10 is the biggest, I have, like, 6.5 size hands, right? But they’re big enough that they do cramp on some smaller handhelds. Man, when I felt that Steam Deck, I was like, It was made for me. That sold me on it.

Also, the dudes from First Fragment, all of them are gamers. They’re all about our age and they play similar games. They’re the loveliest boys. I love the First Fragment dudes. I love their music. I actually have Gloire éternelle, their wall flag hanging up right above my head so that I can look up at it, especially when I’m sitting here and trying to write music and stuff. I look up because they inspire me because it’s just so crazy and whimsical. It’s just everything I want from a crazy, wild techdeath jazz classical fusion band. [Laughs] But they’re also all huge gamers. [Guitarist] Phil Tougas, man, that dude had incredible knowledge of games that when we started talking about games, he was naming games I’d never heard of. He’s like, “Dude, you gotta check this out.” And I’m trying to write everything down fast enough in my phone because he’s just layering through these awesome-sounding games from the generations that I’m really most interested in, which is gen five, gen six, gen seven consoles. I love a lot of those games. Some of my best gaming conversations have been with other band members, I guess is what it boils down to. We’re everywhere. [Laughs] We infiltrated the death metal community.

I think three of the Inferi dudes play Magic: The Gathering, like, aggressively. [Guitarist] Malcolm [Pugh] does Warhammer 40,000 stuff. I was talking to him. He was like, “Yeah, dude. Just sold this army that I made—spent 3,200 hours on it.” Like, painting them. Maybe it’s 2,000, but it was something where I was just like, Holy shit. I’d put $100 right now that it was at least 2,000 plus hours painting these things. And he’s writing all this crazy music, running his band, helping run Artisan Era, co-owning it with [ex-Inferi guitarist] Mike [Low]. I’m just like, “Dude, how do you sleep?”

We played with Inferi with Nekrogoblikon here in St. Louis, which is actually how we wound up going on tour with them. We did a week with Nekrogoblikon around Gathering of the Juggalos. The band that was supposed to do it dropped that morning and then they saw us live because the Inferi boys who we’re friends with were like, “Hey, you gotta make sure you check out Summoning the Lich open because they’re sick.” And then they literally came outside and they were like, “Hey, we just had a band drop and we’re supposed to announce tomorrow. Do you guys want to get in on it?” That never happens. It was like crazy, movie-level stuff. But at that show, Malcolm was standing outside and we’re just chatting he’s like, “Oh, wait, hold on. This dude’s coming for me.” This dude’s just running across the street with this bag. I’m like, “What does he have? What’s in that bag?” He gets closer and I’m like, “…is that fucking figurines?!” [Laughs] He made a figurine deal in St. Louis with this dude. He’s inspecting them, like, “Oh, these are high quality!” [Laughs] I’m loving it, dude. He was talking about [how] it was 3D printed versus hand-carved, and they just start going down this conversation. I’m sitting there just going, Wow, this is cool! [Laughs] I’m not alone! Everyone’s a nerd!

It’s safe to assume that tabletop gaming is important to the core identity of the band, what with a d20 being your band’s sigil. Do you get to indulge in tabletop gaming all that much these days?
No, not as much as I would like. I love tabletop gaming, also Magic: The Gathering. That was kind of my intro. When I was younger, I always wanted to play [Dungeons & Dragons], but I never had the friends that were into [it]. My friends that were nerdy were into stuff like Warcraft III, so that was what we did. But I was always hearing about D&D in the early days of the Internet, just reading different campaign summaries and all that kind of stuff. So when I got old enough to finally just do it with my friends, we started just doing kind of looser campaigns. I’ve done some one shots and stuff. For me, it was always just the lore and the creatures that came out of that universe were so cool that I dove into just learning about those outside of even being able to play tabletop necessarily.

Magic: The Gathering I played up through 2013—I played modern. And then my deck box got stolen and I didn’t feel like spending another thousands of dollars to get all new decks. [Laughs] I think it was, like, four decks in the deck box and then my sideboards. It was a bummer. I’m still sad about it. I think the only deck from that era that I have left—aside from all the loose cards from all the pack pulls—I have a white weenie deck. [Laughs] It was a spite deck specifically built for one of my friends just to thrash his deck. It’s virtually useless to play unless I’m playing against a very specific type of vampire deck. At least half the decks were just spite decks because most of what I played was with my friends. I did some tournament play and stuff, but I was never good enough to really cut my teeth. Some people, Magic: The Gathering is all they do, which, hey—respect. I get that, 100 percent. I just don’t have the time.

If somebody is reading this and they are a fan of tabletop games, what is either a campaign setting—like in D&D—or a different tabletop universe—Call of Cthulhu , Deadlands or something else—that you would recommend to somebody?
Call of Cthulhu is fun and they have one shots that are designed really well for a night, a solid six-to-eigh-hour session. I think it’s fun because it’s not going to be your typical setting for Dungeons & Dragons or any sort of D&D-esque campaign that’s not going for something more futuristic. As far as ones that I’ve played, I was like, Wow, I could see a lot of my friends playing this. The gameplay style was really intuitive, so that would be one to jump into if you haven’t done tabletop gaming.

Even the starter campaigns I think are pretty solid. I haven’t played the newer starter campaign for D&D, but I did play Mines of Phandelver and that one was actually a lot of fun. And it’s easy to run if you’re a new DM. If you have a group where you just don’t have a DM and you gotta draw straws and try and figure out how to DM, that was one of the first ones I ever DMed. Super loose campaign, not doing the mechanics necessarily properly, but still had a lot of fun with it. It was easy enough to get into, it’s not very long and that one is kind of quintessential D&D. I think your first encounter is goblins. That’s great.

With Summoning the Lich, there’s a whole world, a whole story associated with the band. The first three albums are meant to be a trilogy. [In an prior interview,] you told Maddie, aka Beaver Mosh, that you’re working on a book to detail all of the intricacies of the story of Summoning the Lich. Have you ever thought of gamifying the Summoning the Lich story in some kind of way?
Yes, absolutely. It’s something that I would love to do. I’m trying to write the book so that I can have a really solid base lore to go on. But what I would really love to do is work with people who are better at making something like a D&D campaign—especially with the mechanics of it and all that kind of stuff—but also have the story for them and then allow them to do their take on it while building the campaign with me. I’m of the opinion that some of the fun of fantasy and properties is all of the different takes. When you look at Batman—Batman is always Batman. But how many different times have we seen Batman’s story come out? If you go into anime, you have Ghost in the Shell. We’ve seen, like, three or four different iterations of the Ghost in the Shell universe that are all non-connected, but they’re telling stories within similar takes on the universe. I think that a lot of authors and people who create stories, you fall in love with your take of the story, and that doesn’t necessarily work well in other mediums outside of the medium that you create it in.

I would be 100 percent down to do any sort of gamifying, any sort of other take on stories. Somebody else could write a fan fiction, they could write their own novel and it’d be different. From my perspective, that’s something that I both embrace and am excited for. Anybody who’s ever interested, if you want to write a D&D campaign and you can show me that you’re the real deal, don’t be afraid to ask for the intellectual materials and any guidance because that’s kind of my thing. I like this universe that I’ve created. I want people to enjoy it and I want people to have their own takes on it.

So if we do a campaign, it’ll probably be slightly different because I think some parts of the story aren’t gonna work right. I might want to do something that’s with similar characters, but they’re doing a part of the story that I didn’t even tell. There are so many different ways that we could go about that to expand on it. But the short answer is I’m absolutely down for and looking forward to trying to create some sort of gamified version of the universe.

Have any fans ever approached you saying that they’ve attempted to make their own homebrew campaigns based on Summoning the Lich lyrics?
I’ve had a couple people approach me with the desire to do it. Maybe not like, “I’m doing it right now,” but, “Hey, I think it would be fun to do this. Would that be something you’d be down to do?” And my answer is always yes. Whether or not people are actually going to follow through with that remains to be seen. Once I finish the book, I have a couple friends who really game a lot and I’ll probably work with them to try and craft a one-shot within the universe just to start with, just because I think it would be fun and not too terribly time-intensive for anyone to do and see how it does. One shots are the easiest to get into, and throwing out a whole campaign out there for a lot of people, you’re committing to some time with your group to run it. That’ll probably be the first thing that I work on once I actually finish this book, which is just a bear. Also, shout out to Maddie/Beaver Mosh. That was a fun interview.

The breakout hit from last year was Baldur’s Gate 3, which really brought D&D to a community that was familiar with it and it made tabletop gaming much more appealing. Are you excited about the possibility of combining the worlds of tabletop and video games or do you prefer to have them as two flavors that you enjoy separately?
I’m all for it. I think it will probably dilute the interests of some of the bigger players who are creating some of these games. I think that’s the big fear, that it will hurt tabletop gaming because video gaming is significantly a bigger market. But in my opinion, that would only be the sense if the the tabletop community didn’t grow from it, and I think what games like Baldur’s Gate are obviously doing is piquing people’s interest in playing these tabletop games. I think the fact that we have so many options now with different Pathfinder games and all these different one shots and Call of Cthulhu, there’s so many different flavors now of tabletop gaming that you can do and that are easier to jump into and less commitment. Some campaigns, you’re talking about playing for a year or two with your friends to see it through, consistently putting in time. Which is awesome. Our artist does a bi-weekly campaign. I would love to do that, especially once my kid’s in school. He starts kindergarten in the fall, so it’s like the world’s gonna kind of open back up for me a little bit, as far as the time that I have.

But in my opinion, it’s only going to help the tabletop scene grow and it’s only going to help the video game scene have a whole new medium that’s being focused on. I think Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of those shifts in the paradigm everybody’s looking at. People are still talking about Baldur’s Gate 3 heavy. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring are still easily 30 to 40 percent of the gameplay posts that I see from friends and stuff online, or shared, or even pushed algorithmically. They’re still very relevant games, even though they’ve been out for a long time. I think Elden Ring coming first helped because it helped people get into the super heavy, grind-y fantasy games, and I feel like it got more people more ready and primed for the fantasy setting that is Baldur’s Gate 3. So when that game came out, people were just ready for that transition.

And Fallout, too, honestly. People going back and playing Fallout: New Vegas because of the Fallout series coming out on [Amazon] Prime. I think the fact that people are going back and playing New Vegas, it’s such a heavy RPG. Obsidian did great with that game. I think it got people used to sitting there and having to make your decisions. It’s not turn-based, but it’s almost turn-based in the way that the dialogue works within that game and how impactful it was. So when Baldur’s Gate came out, it was the perfect time for it, too. People were ready.

But I think that’s gonna start this whole new wave of video games that’s gonna be more leaning towards tabletop gaming. What I would really like is a solidly built tabletop client to come out. One that has absolutely everything you need there just to tabletop game, even to the extent of being able to play with random people and set up random campaigns. I think that would be a fun aspect, especially with the way that stuff works now. You could set up a webcam and have it just VR you into a little metaverse. I think something like that could be fun and a good way to blend the two mediums, where you can play these preset campaigns and have a digital table. You make your decisions and then it zooms in and your characters advance. I think that would be an interesting take. There are ways that they can still be combined that would be fun and unique and won’t just be soul-sucking for both. And then there are going to be the ones where they’re just like, “We’re going to cash in on Baldur’s Gate, baby!,” and they’re going to release some of the worst games ever designed.

Understanding that you are stretched between family life, work life, band life and life life, are there any games coming up that you’re excited for or are you just going to be plugging through that backlog?
Mostly plugging through the backlog. I can’t wait to play Sea of Stars. That’s one that I’ve been wanting to play for a long time. Finally, I’m gonna have the chance to soon. And then Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I still need to play that, been wanting to play that for quite a while. It looks like a lot of fun and something that’s gonna be right up my alley, but I haven’t even booted it yet. I think that’s about it as far as what I have. Oh! Civ VI. I just got Civ VI from the Steam summer sale because the last one I played is Civilization V. That’ll be fun. They don’t release games all that often, but I love the Civilization games. I just don’t have a ton of new games in my library. I did get Hogwarts Legacy when it was on sale recently. I’ve heard that’s good. I enjoy the Harry Potter universe, so I figure I’ll at least like it.

Oh, you know what? I do need to get Final Fantasy VII [Remake]. I haven’t gotten that yet. I have no idea if it’s good. I’ll be going in blind. Final Fantasy VII was one of the first RPGs that I really played a bunch as a kid. I probably played through two or three times. Like I said, I didn’t have consoles, really. I think the first home console that I bought for myself was the [Xbox] 360. Everything else was just handhelds. But I did have a PS1 when the PS2 was out because my friends just gave me their old PS1 and a bunch of games, and then I bought a few more games. That was when I finally played through Final Fantasy VII—then again and again and again, so I have to at least try it. I don’t know if it’s good or not. Everyone could be telling me it’s trash and I’m still going to go and revisit it because it that particular one was huge for me.

Under the Reviled Throne is out now via Prosthetic Records and can be ordered here.
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