KILL SCREEN 060 // Phase 1: Neill Jameson of KRIEG Loves His Secrets, Tells No Lies

Photo by Hillarie Jason

It’s good to know your neighbors. Sometimes you luck out and have a friendly smile willing to keep an eye out for your deliveries; other times you end up living next to a makeshift meth lab that considers a cough after 6 p.m. a noise violation. Either way, it’s helpful to understand with whom you happen to be sharing space.

In August of 2024, your overly eager co-nerds found the opportunity to do just that as fellow Decibel columnist Neill Jameson of USBM trailblazers Krieg was slated to perform the magazine’s 20th Anniversary Show. The faithful subscribers among you are aware that for over a year, Kill Screen’s print-exclusive excerpts are placed right next door to Jameson’s long-running Low Culture column. While the frontman’s monthly slot serves more as an airing of grievances regarding metal’s eternally frustrating community, it was a mention of the recent mini versions of the NES, SNES and Genesis in dB192/October 2020 that caught our attention. Some polite introductions and small talk lead to us shooting our shot. Our neighbor in print—much to our relief and surprise—replied with, “I was actually going to pitch you on that.”

Truthfully, this is not Jameson’s first time singing the chiptune praises. The December 2022 installment of his Noise Pollution feature for Invisible Oranges focuses exclusively on a number of game soundtracks from the late ’80s to mid-’90s. He not only remembers these OSTs fondly, but credits them as direct contributors to his musical sensibilities. Upon linking up with his fellow Decibel cogs over Zoom, the voice of one of the magazine’s most biting features can’t help but share a genuine love of the medium and an openness with his gaming history, both good and bad. Our conversation proved too long for a single post and too interesting to shrink, resulting in our second two-phase interview to date. We may not be able to get his mail for him, but as Jameson celebrates Krieg’s 30 years of tortured existence, Kill Screen is happy to pass him the controller for as long as he’d like.

What was your first gaming experience?
I grew up in the ’80s—I was born in the late ’70s—so I was around for the arcade boom. That was kind of when I was just starting to form memories. I remember going to restaurants with my parents and shit that would have the [Nintendo] PlayChoice-10 and all of that. I remember fucking around with, like, Super Mario Bros. and stuff like that, Atari games at friends’ houses. But it was never really anything that I thought I was going to bring home until my neighbor got the NES one year. I was over at his place, just watching him play constantly. I begged my parents and I was able to get an NES. I guess this is, like, ’87, ’88.

The first really impactful memories I have is kind of a cliché, but it’s Legend of Zelda and being able to explore that open world that they had and experiencing the music, which was far deeper than the beeps and boops and all that that you would hear in common arcade games and just being able to really immerse myself in that world. What I really, really remember is making it to Death Mountain the first time. This is after you get the Master Sword and you hadn’t gotten the Red Ring yet, but you’re basically at the end of the game. I just remember the music and the feeling of that. It was a Saturday morning, probably late fall. No one was awake in my house. I’d gotten up early so I could get a chance to play before my father came down and monopolized the TV. And I just remember the sense of, like, it felt huge. The world felt so immersive, which, when you look at it now, it’s kind of like listening to the Ramones now and wondering how people thought that that was the most revolutionary shit when it came out. But there’s still a part of me that when I hear that final level music, it takes me back to that and it gives me that kind of hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-arms feeling of just going into this enormous, immersive, dangerous world.

It sounds like that really stands out quite distinctly in your mind, yeah?
Well, I mean, pretty much everybody who either reads this magazine or listens to what y’all are doing or listens to any of the music I do or whatever, we’re all pretty socially maladjusted. And especially those of us that grew up around this time that were slightly isolated from any kind of urban environment. I lived outside of Pittsburgh, so I didn’t really have any kind of city culture. My family was a little bit on the poor side, so because of that, that divided me from a lot of my peers. And so what do the socially maladjusted latch onto? We latch onto fantasies, escapism. And so the fantasy world of Legend of Zelda or some of the games that came a little bit later, that was really important to me. That was a big building block of my imagination, between that and stuff like Dragonlance novels and Dungeons & Dragons and all that.

What, if anything, have you been playing lately?
Dude, I haven’t touched anything. I have NES Classic and SNES Classic, both of the Genesis minis, and I have them all hacked and loaded up with tons of shit that either I loved when I was younger or that I never had the chance to play. I’ve been looking into getting a RetroPie so that I can emulate PS1 games somewhat successfully. I know N64 is an absolute bitch to emulate, but there’s still a few games that I really would like to jump in on there. I have this infinite list of games that I’d like to play, but between work and writing and a child that has an incredibly awful sleep schedule, it’s more “what games am I watching other people play on streams and YouTube?” or “what games would I like to be playing?”

I came so close to getting a PS5 around the holidays just so I could play the Silent Hill 2 remake, because the original is one of my absolute favorites from that time period. The last system that I owned was a [Xbox] 360 and it got stolen out of my house, so I haven’t played anything past the first year or so of 360. The last game that I played while it was modern was World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, which fucking sucked. That was a terrible expansion. And so I’ve got, what? That’s, like, 15 years worth of catching up on games, not to mention the fact that I have the entire library of my childhood that I was never able to grasp like that at my fingertips. There’s also this paralysis of, What do I play? I could sit and stare at the screen and be like, I want to try this. Oh! But I’ve got this, I’ve got that. I am paralyzed by choice.

You had mentioned watching some games being played on YouTube. Is there anything in particular you like to watch being played?
I don’t watch a lot of playthroughs. I’ll watch videos on games. SNES drunk is a channel that I really enjoy, reviews like that. One channel that I definitely wanted to bring up, because he’s actually the only guy that I’ll watch stream anything, is a channel called Big Ole Words. It’s a dude from Atlanta. He goes around and he’ll do video essays on obscure NES games, but then once a week he’ll stream. He’s very clever, and his use of sarcasm, this jovial sarcasm, is just fucking magnificent. So, I’ll watch a lot of that stuff, those kinds of creators, as much for the games as I do for their commentary on it. It’s like reading reviews or reading an essay or something like that. Listening to these people’s opinions on things that, if they’re clever, it’s just as good as listening to a podcast.

A lot of these questions revolve around your Noise Pollution piece for Invisible Oranges where you discussed some of the most influential game soundtracks of your upbringing. You named a lot of JRPGs from the ’80s and ’90s, like Phantasy Star II, Final Fantasy VI, Sword of Vermillion and Secret of Mana. What is it about this genre that connected with you so much?
I was always really big into reading and imaginative storytelling. Those games really made you use your mind a lot more. Growing up, I was a huge fan of the Mega Man series and Super Mario 3 and Ninja Gaiden and stuff like that. But what really stuck out to me that had these kinds of emotional markers were the JRPGs. All games, you’re playing a role, right? But these were games where you really could immerse yourself either as the main character—like in the first Dragon Warrior, for example—or that you’re immersing yourself in a story. Phantasy Star II especially, that’s one of the first experiences I had where the story is very detailed, very dark, and just takes you in all kinds of emotional directions. That was what I really enjoyed about JRPGs.

And it wasn’t even just the ones that I had mentioned for the soundtracks. The Super Nintendo library for JRPGs was fantastic. There were tons of games on there that I can look back on with a lot of really great nostalgic feeling: both of the Lufia & the Fortress of Doom games, Secret of Mana obviously. That seemed like it was the golden age. And then you hopped into the first few years of the PS1 and that took those games and really just upped it. I don’t know if it was because of my age when I was experiencing them, if that has a lot to do with it, but it was like being a part of the story. It was like when you would have your toys and you would make stories up for them and all that. It’s kind of like that, except you were seeing it play out in front of you.

On the role side, too, you could sink into what the character would think, you see them affected by a situation. In the case of Lufia, I [James] remember very specifically they have kids and then the plot continues. In comparison to when you play Mario 3, as great a game as Mario 3 is, I don’t think many people sit around and think, What would Mario be thinking when he kicks this shell? What’s the dramatic motivation for him stomping on this goomba?
Exactly. Final Fantasy VII gets a lot of credit for being the game that people will first think of when they think of a main character surprisingly getting killed. But Phantasy Star II, the character you start out with, Nei, she gets killed pretty early into the game. There’s these things that have emotional impact to them. It’s like when you’re reading a book and an important part happens, and you just sit and you hold the book and you’re not reading it, but you’ve put it down and you’re just thinking about that moment. And that was one of those moments in video games to me. I paused it and just sat there and was very reflective of it. It’s not that the characters necessarily felt alive, but it’s the fact that you could assign emotions to them and you could create backstories in your head to them. You could create what their motivations are, what they were thinking. It gave them more of a fleshed out kind of feeling to it.

My [Michael] little thought on it is the simple act of being able to name your own characters makes you that much more invested in them. The fact that you can name the main character yourself, like a lot of kids did, it’s like, Oh, this is me and this is my friends. You immediately feel much more connected to how they are as characters. [In] Mario, you are controlling a character as opposed to imparting your personality onto the character that you’re playing.
Creating an avatar for yourself, basically. That’s not to downplay [Mario games] either. Sometimes you want something that you don’t have to assign a lot of thought to that you can just enjoy and experience. Whereas other times, you know, you’re craving something that really does take you for an adventure.

Absolutely. Even now, as I [Michael] get older, I’m much more interested in the 6- to 10-hour experience where somebody tells me a story instead of the 80-, 100-, 150-hour JRPG or Western ARPG or whatever, where I have to grind and experience every nook and cranny of whatever city to get the full experience out of it.
I don’t have the patience for that kind of thing. I look at a lot of modern games now and it’s like, I would really like to play that, but I know that I would lose interest, unless it’s something like the Resident Evil remakes for 2 and 3 or Silent Hill 2 or something like that. And I think the reason there is because I’m connected obviously to the games in the past, so I’m going to want to see what they’ve changed. But I don’t know if I could necessarily invest that kind of time into starting a new game. And it’s not just because I have a kid. It’s because as adults, we just have a finite amount of time to be able to do things and to be able to follow plenty of other interests. I think it’s great that JRPGs and just games in general have been able to expand enough that they could last that long. But it’s not a wise investment of my time.

[In Noise Pollution #28,] you said that gaming soundtracks “had a lot to do with building up how I view music, both as a listener and a creator.” What specific lessons can you point to that connect your appreciation of games, soundtracks and gaming sounds to the music that you make?
I have a very, very specific one. There is a part in Secret of Evermore. I’ve debated with myself for years what my favorite SNES game was. Chrono Trigger was definitely up there. I love Secret of Mana for great gameplay and then soundtrack and all that. But I continuously come back to Secret of Evermore as being my favorite experience. Why? For people that haven’t played it, you play as a boy and his dog that get lost in a fantasy world that has different eras in it. It’s the second era that you enter, Antiqua. It’s like a Roman town and there’s a marketplace. The game’s soundtrack doesn’t go constantly. There’s not always music, it kind of comes in and out. That was the first time I’d ever experienced that in the game, where music appears when it’s impactful instead of just being constant. But when you’re in this marketplace, there are samples of voices of people doing business. You can hear birds, especially if you go into certain areas where there’s a fountain and it gets quiet and all you hear are the birds and the fountain. You hear the clanging of money being exchanged. It really sounded 1) incredibly realistic, especially at the time, but 2) it was the, to me, incredible sound design because it caused me to experience that in such a visceral way.

And so when I started creating music, especially when I was doing the Imperial demos and I was doing a lot of samples on that, or the Krieg record, I was really trying to build that kind of atmosphere. I didn’t want to sound like a Roman fucking marketplace, but that had such an impact on me. I wanted my music to have those kinds of things going on in the back that fleshed it out and gave it this realism, that gave it this audio storytelling. It really sticks out to me. I can picture it right now.

Secret of Evermore is one of the last games I had a chance to play before my daughter was born, and I still had the exact same experience as the first few times I played it. Just the sound design in that game… And there’s other parts of that. There’s a part where you wash up on a shore and you hear the waves and seagulls and all that. There’s no music besides that. There’s this spatial emptiness to it where the ambient sound really brings you there. It’s an experience that pretty much all games have now, but at the time, you didn’t really get that. It was just such a formative experience.

The next time I could think of a game that had utilized silence and ambient soundscapes and ambient noise behind it would be the first Silent Hill. There’s not a lot of music in there, but there is a lot of noise. There’s a lot of things that don’t really aid the storytelling. I know that movies and all that, obviously sound design is super important there. But for whatever reason, these things in video games meant so much more to me. It helps you experience it differently because you’re playing through it, you’re part of the story. That made me really seek that kind of thing out in my own music.

The other way it impacted me was [that] video game soundtracks are fucking fantastic—some of them. Going back to the Phantasy Star II, that opening song, the tones to it and all that. Secret of Mana, greatest soundtrack ever for a video game. There’s stuff on there that makes me tear up. This is electronic music. Once I started hearing stuff like Mortis or these interludes in metal songs—black metal songs in particular—it caused me to jump out into the ambient and what we call dungeon synth stuff now. That’s completely because of my love of video game music. That’s become such an important part of my music listening. Especially in a lot of my earlier releases, I did a lot of synth songs. Fifty percent of that was based on Cold Meat Industry’s projects, the other fifty percent of that is based on the influence that I’d take from video game soundtracks at the time.

I don’t believe that every single video game soundtrack needs to be released on vinyl. I say that, and then there’s some that haven’t been released on vinyl that I would fucking love, like the Sword of Vermillion soundtrack. That’s such a fucking dark soundtrack. And a lot of the sounds, especially the bell sounds to it, it’s that ’80s church bell that Danzig used in Black Aria and Archgoat used in their first album and all that. My love of that bell comes from hearing it in Sword of Vermillion or Phantasy Star III. These side sounds that you hear in black metal that I love and that I’ve tried to put into my own music, the roots of my love for that comes out of video games. It’s not coming from metal. There wasn’t a lot in the ’80s that would utilize that kind of stuff. I didn’t listen to Bathory until the ’90s. That or Venom or anything like that, I wasn’t familiar with it. A lot of the shit that was on mainstream radio, you never heard, like, a gloomy synth piece on a fucking Mötley Crüe song, you know? My appreciation of that kind of music, which grew into appreciation of classical and even jazz, all stems from the video games that had the biggest imprint on me when I was younger, that’s definitely helped develop my taste and then carried on fucking 40 years later.

Does it seem like a weird choice to have video game OSTs on vinyl for you, just because it is such a digital format?
Yeah, it does. I say that and last year, my biggest hunt was the Secret of Mana soundtrack. You can’t find that on vinyl. Discogs has it blocked because it’s apparently, I guess, a Nazi release or something, or a bootleg. Those are Discogs’ two favorite things. But there’s a guy that did a recreation of the soundtrack and then it was released on vinyl. The recreation is spot fucking on because he used the same sound fonts. I had to own that because when Square was really making their big push in the ’90s, they did CD soundtracks for Secret of Mana, they did it for Secret of Evermore and they did it for Final Fantasy III/Final Fantasy VI.

I [James] had that Final Fantasy VI one.
I had to sell it a few years ago when I was really, really broke. Those three, as soon as I was able to manage it, I put those all on my want list on Discogs and they never pop up. I was conflicted because—I know this is very out of character for me to shit on something—but I would shit on the idea of soundtracks for video games because I’m like, “This is just a fucking waste of plastic, it’s a waste of resources.” And here I am, my number one thing that I was really looking for was a soundtrack to a video game. And then I got the Phantasy Star II soundtrack. I will eventually get III and IV. Maybe not I because the soundtrack, it was cool, but I don’t see myself listening to it.

I started to view it less as this vinyl version of a fucking Funko Pop and more like archiving electronic music, much in the way that you would listen to Laurie Spiegel or Wendy Carlos, something like that. It’s still music, so it deserves to be on vinyl if it’s done well. I have no right to be shitting on any video game soundtrack, outside of the fact that I may think that it’s a little frivolous and whatnot, because it is music. Vinyl is how music can be released, regardless of it being digital or not. That doesn’t make a big difference to me, but I’m also not an audiophile. I prefer vinyl because I’m almost 50 and my eyesight sucks, so it’s nice to be able to see what I’m fucking listening to. And I enjoy the experience of it.

We are seeing a lot more soundtracks that are being released on vinyl thanks to people like Mondo. I [Michael] have Castlevania, I think Castlevania III and Silent Hill 1 on vinyl because of them. Are you happy that these soundtracks are finally becoming a little bit more widely available or do you kind of still look at it as that vinyl Funko Pop?
It’s a commodity like anything else, so it’s what you get out of it that’s really important because we’re being sold everything at all times. I mean, I’m constantly selling myself. It’s Bandcamp Friday—what did I do? Posted up all the shit that I was trying to sell. We live in late-stage capitalism, so enjoy what you can, enjoy what you want to. I still think that the majority of Funko Pops are gonna end up floating in the fucking ocean long after we’re dead as a society, but it’s not my money that I’m spending on the fucking thing. What someone wants to do with their time and their money, as long as they’re not fucking a kid or an animal, who cares?

And video game soundtracks being widely available, it’s fucking fine, you know? It’s music that people enjoy. We’ve spent this amount of time just talking about our visceral reactions to it, much in the same way that I’m sure the three of us could talk about our favorite metal albums. We get those very similar reactions. So if I were to sit and be like, “Well, I don’t think that this should be put out on vinyl,” that’s basically the same kind of bullshit gatekeeping that caused Discogs to become a haven for fucking flippers. And now people can’t get the records they want because some asshole’s hitting F5 constantly, resetting their screen. It really just boils down to: Consume the art and product that you enjoy in your life and do not give a fuck what somebody else thinks about it.

After years of reading your Low Culture column, self-deprecating humor is not uncommon for you. You do, however, express uncertainty in how to approach writing about game soundtracks, refer to yourself as “unfuckable” and promise that the following installment will be about black metal. As games have become mainstream, do you still feel any kind of discomfort or hesitation talking about games or has it become a little bit easier to discuss?
I mean, I still feel unfuckable, but I’m pretty sure that would be regardless of what I’m talking about. We all know that there’s comments on the internet. I know that a good percentage of my Facebook “friends” or people that follow me, follow me only because they’re waiting for me to slip up. They’re waiting for that accidental racial slur, they’re waiting for that accidental dick pic or something like that. And so part of me framing that article like that, it’s not going to stop people from being like, “this fucking nerd,” tearing me apart for that. But it does kind of take the wind out of their sails because it shows them I really don’t give a fuck what you think about me as far as what I’m writing about. And that goes for any topic that I’m covering, any band that I’m covering it, book, any movement or anything like that. That is just my way of telling my critics to fuck off in a subtle way.

When I talk about hesitation about writing about video game music, it’s because it’s kind of foreign territory to me. I feel the same way about writing about a lot of genres that I may not necessarily be as well versed in. Video game soundtracks and music, for example, I’ve just told you all these things that were majorly impactful to me growing up, these monumental moments in my life. I can’t tell you a fucking thing about any of the composers, when it was created, where it was created, that sort of thing. Whereas black metal, I can speak about who the engineer was or I can speak about techniques, any of the things that go into it. If I were to write about classical music or hip-hop or jazz, I can tell you how the music makes me feel, but I can’t tell you anything about the culture around it or the creation of. So that’s where my discomfort is.

As far as any kind of discomfort writing about “nerd culture,” I don’t give a fuck about that. We just talked about Transformers for, like, five minutes in depth [more on that in phase 2]. When I was younger, I think I kind of shied away from that because I thought that it might take away some of the gravitas to whatever I was doing. I just shied away from humor in a lot of interviews and stuff like that. It’s gonna sound like a fucking “live, laugh, love” poster, [but] I would rather express my authentic self in all of my interactions regarding my music or my writing because at the end of the day, I have to be the one that’s satisfied with this. I have to be able to look back on it and realize that I wasn’t putting on a facade. Let’s say I dropped dead from forgetting to take my cholesterol medicine and my daughter’s young, so she doesn’t get a chance to know me. I didn’t get that much of a chance to really know my father; he died when I was 15. These kinds of things, especially now, these are ways that my kid can look back and this is how she would get to know who I am because I’m trying to be as honest in every expression that I possibly have.

To put it mildly, you’re not a fan of talking to random strangers about black metal after being marked in the wild. Do you feel similarly about video games? Have you even had the opportunity to discuss video games with strangers or are we your first?
This is my first interview about it. Actually, I did talk to Bardo Methodology a little bit about the influence of video games kind of driving me into what would eventually be darker music and black metal. But in the wild? Without giving away where I work, I work in a nonprofit industry that does some reselling. Some of the people that work for me are into retro gaming, but they’re all in their 20s and 30s. I don’t talk about my music or anything like that, but I have utilized gaming as a way to relate to them and help with team building and that sort of thing. But then again, there’s that age difference where they’re attached emotionally to things that I’m not, like Pokémon. It’s very similar to somebody whose formative music was Slipknot and nü metal. By the time that shit came out, I was already doing what I’m doing now. The generation gap can kind of cause some difficulty with communication, but it’s also been a really good way to bond with people.

It’s a more universal experience than music because music is so fragmented—everybody has specific things that they’re into. Whereas gaming, it’s more of a universal language, even if you’re not into the same genre of games. You could talk to somebody who’s into Madden or FIFA or something like that even if you don’t give a shit about sports games. You can talk about the graphics, sound, music, all that kind of shit. Those are slightly easier conversations than somebody coming up and asking me would I like to listen to their demo. I would much rather a homebrew come up and be like, “Would you like to try my game?” There’s still the same chance that it’s gonna suck as much as somebody’s fucking demo that they just gave me. But that’s still a much cooler experience, I believe, than being hit [with] a fucking demo or getting somebody sending you a message in your inbox that you never reply to, but every year when their fucking band has a new fucking demo on it. And I’m saying this because there’s somebody that’s like, “Hey Neill, I want you to listen to this!” when I’ve very obviously been like, “I go out and I find my shit or I have people recommend it to me.” I don’t wanna be bothered by somebody trying to sell themselves to me.

I don’t have that attitude about video games at all. I’m totally open to somebody who just wants to come up and bullshit with me about that. It’s kind of weird, right? It’s not like my personality is different. I’m a pretty introverted person, I’m very socially awkward, I don’t really drink anymore. At the Decibel [20th Anniversary Show], it was the first time where I’ve seen a lot of people where I’m not hammered, so I don’t have that kind of shield, the liquid courage or whatnot. And yet oddly enough, our conversation about doing this column, that was one of the highlights of the show for me. I am way more comfortable talking about this than I would be talking about music to a stranger, which is weird because music, that’s my “profession,” kind of—that and writing.

You mentioned you wanted to play the Silent Hill 2 remake, that the last modern game that you played was Cataclysm and it’s less what have you been playing and more what you want to play. Have there been many modern games that you’re interested in checking out, or is it mostly just the stuff that you want to go back and delve into from an adult perspective?
Every single Dragon Quest game after the one that was on the PS2 [Dragon Quest VIII]. That game, that’s another one where I have just tremendous amounts of memories attached to it. And also the sound design, especially the towns at night when there’s not a lot of music and all that. That and Fable are the two from that era that really stick with me as far as sound design and experience and all that. I would love to be able to catch up on all the Dragon Quest games I haven’t played. I would love to be able to play Fable 2 and 3. I’m hearing rumblings of the new Fable game that they’re working on now that’s supposed to be kind of a return to the series glory. I would love to play that.

I don’t know if I necessarily want to play any of the Silent Hills after [Silent Hill 4:] The Room. The Room was the last Silent Hill game that I played, and it was also the last game that I can remember—and it’s an embarrassing memory, because I was in my mid-20s when it came out—but I broke a fucking controller on it because there’s ghosts that you had to stick the fucking pins into or whatever. There was one that would catch you on a stairwell—I think it was the third or the fourth one—that I just could not get, and it just frustrated the shit out of me, so I broke a controller. At that point I was like, Fuck it, I’m not gonna follow through on that. And I’m well aware that the Silent Hill games after that have varying degrees of positive attention to them; I’d still like to kind of check it out. Any of the later Zelda games, like the two on the Switch [The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom], but I don’t give a shit about anything on the Wii. Any of that motion control stuff, it’s not appealing to me.

The more recent Warcraft expansions I think would be kind of cool to play, but I cannot… So, one of the main reasons why I got out of playing Warcraft was it became incredibly unhealthy for me. I’m about to really bring this into fun territory: so, I tried to kill myself in 2007, and it was with an intentional Xanax overdose. And you know what I was doing when I overdosed? Fucking raiding! I was spending so much time on it. That was during Burning Crusade, so I still hung around for two more expansions after that, Wrath of the Lich King being just incredible, another incredible sound design. But that was causing me to really just detach from reality, which I know that that’s a very similar experience to a lot of people. So, I don’t know if I could necessarily get myself back into something that’s that all-consuming. But the idea of going back into single-player games that have these incredible narratives but are over within 20 or 30 hours, it’s very inviting to me.

You also shared a touching memory about playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and you called it the best moment of your life prior to the birth of your daughter. The two of us can easily point to a bunch of memories with similar feelings. For a medium that is commonly equated with isolation and stunted maturity, and you just telling us of a very traumatic memory that’s associated with a very particular game, what is it about games that keeps a favorable impression in your memory rather than a negative one?
Because so many of them just outweigh the negative that I just described, and I can’t even attach the negativity to that game. It was just what was happening at the time. That was what I was immersing myself in. It was a period of extreme mental illness, so I probably would have made that attempt if I was watching a movie or if I was listening to music or whatever. I’m not gonna sit and blame the game for it, but I have so many positive memories like the one that I described with Symphony of the Night. I remember coming home that night from hanging out with my friends. I stopped at Wawa. They’d just started their cappuccino machines, so I had a large cappuccino, and I just sat down. It was a few weeks after Christmas. My mother had gotten me Symphony of the Night and Tomb Raider II. I spent that night playing Symphony of the Night. Tomb Raider II, I never got really far in. But what really, really obsessed me was the tutorial where you would just run around Lara’s house and her butler would be there, and she would just talk, so I would just go and I would fuck around with that for an hour.

It’s a memory that I look back on now where it’s one of those last moments of innocence before things really started to become complicated and go south. I have way too many of those kinds of memories that happened then, and then after. I’ve got memories of Dragon Quest VIII that I just talked about. I’d gone to Tennessee to do live vocals for Loss on a show. That was the same weekend that Halo II was having the midnight release. We did the Loss show, the next morning had breakfast—this was when I was living in Jersey—drove from Nashville to New Jersey so that I could make the Halo II launch.

Hell yeah. [Laughs] That’s dedication.

There’s that memory. Or the memory of the Burning Crusade midnight launch and yelling out my car window at the players that weren’t Horde. These memories that all add up, that really just showed me that gaming was, at least at the time, such an important part of my life, my experience, and helped shape, obviously, a lot of my aesthetic taste, a lot of my musical choices. In a way, gaming could be partially responsible for me being here right now, which would mean that would be responsible for my entering music, which would be responsible for me meeting my girlfriend, thus responsible for me having a child. You can kind of pull all these threads from that.

That’s why gaming has such a positive connotation to me. It’s because these memories, these experiences are very similar to the first time that I heard Ulver’s Bergtatt. It was in the fall/early winter in ’95. I remember being in my room; it was nighttime, it was fucking cold. And the feeling I got from there, that’s very similar memories to music or to books that I’ve read or films that I’ve seen to the games that I’ve played and the experiences I’ve gotten from them. Yeah, there’s been negatives—but that’s everything in life. And to suppress that, to just push that down, that’s the kind of shit that causes you just to drop fucking dead. I don’t necessarily celebrate the negatives in my life, but I have to consider them when I think of everything in the big picture because these are all building blocks of who I am.

To anyone reading this who may be exclusively connected with metal but willing to give game soundtracks a shot, what OST would you recommend as an introduction?
Secret of Mana.

That was quick. [Laughs] No hesitation.
Occasionally I’ll hide in my office at work. One of the things that I’ve really gotten into is ASMR. And I’m not just talking about, like, girls talking very quietly so that you can fucking crank your hog and be done with it. But there’s a channel called Calmed by Nature that does this jazz shit. And then there are all these ASMR channels on YouTube that have static images with occasional movement. But Calmed by Nature, what this creator does is they’ll have, like, a coffee shop room, but then you can look out the window and you can see people walking by or cars driving by or something like that, which goes back into video games, my interest in visual storytelling. And so I listen to that a lot, or I will throw on the Secret of Mana OST. I hide in my office at work and do that, especially days where either I’m stressed or I’m just like, Fuck it, I don’t feel like dealing with people. So that would definitely be the first one that I would toss at somebody. Final Fantasy VI would be another one because that is so varied. That’s an electronic classical record. Faxanadu, that would be another one. I really enjoy that. That’s probably my favorite NES game. And then, just for shits and giggles, probably Mega Man 2. That’s a great, great fucking soundtrack.

Ruiner is out now via Profound Lore Records and can be purchased here.
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