As much as we lovingly refer to ourselves as “Decibel’s nerdiest column,” the truth of the matter is that video games are as mainstream as it gets. There are varying degrees of enthusiasm that can color your opinion of the fanbase—just ask our editor-in-chief how it feels to be stuck in a room with us for any amount of time—but talking gaming in 2025 is as socially disqualifying as talking about the Super Bowl (go Birds). Hell, one can look at Elon Musk’s recent and incredibly stupid Path of Exile II controversy to recognize how far the medium has come. Video games are big business, and one that can feel increasingly overwhelming with each title added to our backlog. Just shy of 11 months ago, Imperial Triumphant frontman Zachary Ezrin tread under the neon lights of the Kill Screen arcade to sing (death growl?) the praises of From Software’s ARPG masterpieces. Now, drummer Kenny Grohowski stepping up to represent NYC’s avant garde masked men—and he finds himself in no rush.

The New-York-by-way-of-Miami percussionist has been handling arcade sticks for as long as he has drum sticks, but it’s his mastery of the latter which has earned him the recognition he enjoys today. With a resume like his (Imperial Triumphant is far from Grohowski’s only gig in town), it’s easy to understand why his screen time has been more limited over the years. His passion for the industry, however, has never dimmed. Though unable to keep up with the deluge of new releases, the drummer feels no FOMO. “I think most gamers who have any sort of sense of impulse control are from an era where you had to wait a while and you only had, like, five games,” he explains. “And you better love them because you’re only going to play those five games for a year or however long it was some decades ago. I’d like to think that most people have enough self-control.” Ahead of the trio lighting up the underground with their upcoming LP Goldstar and their appearance on the Decibel Magazine Tour 2025, the co-nerds couldn’t wait to catch up with Grohowski.

Do you wish this interview came with some DLC? Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Decibel (dB246/April 2025) to get an exclusive excerpt from this latest text adventure.

What was your first gaming experience?
It was when I was a really small kid. Between 3 and 5, my dad had [an Atari] 2600. He was a big arcade gamer in the ’70s and ’80s, he loved going to arcades. So when I was old enough, I would go to arcades with him. But the first system that I remember we had in the house was a 2600. Standard shit—Combat and Joust, shit like that—which I was terrible at because I was, like, four and he was great. He had Asteroids and Ms. Pac-Man. But we didn’t have anything like [former Atari game designer] Howard Scott Warshaw kind of stuff. I never got to experience those games on 2600, just standard Atari arcade crossover stuff. And then eventually we had an NES.

Was that a good bonding experience growing up?
Totally! Absolutely, yeah. Because not everything growing up was awesome, but those moments were really amazing. My dad, before he passed, we were very close. We never lost love or anything. I realized I just said something maybe sounded a little extreme—it’s just it was tough for my folks in the ’80s. It just was. But playing games, it was awesome. On NES, we’d play Contra together, so that was always really fun. He knew the code, but he always wanted to see, “Can we do this with just the three lives?” And he, against his better judgment, would let me take an extra life. It’s like, “I’m six. We’re on, like, level four. I’m going to fuck this up. Just keep going, because if you make it, then maybe we could join in.” Nope, he would let me take the life every time. So that was cool.

Did you play quite a few two-player games on the NES together then?
Yeah, a decent amount. But he also liked [The Legend of] Zelda and stuff like that. That was something where we would trade times when we would play. Especially when I was five, because of the way the school system worked, I still wasn’t actually in school yet, so I had a whole year before kindergarten to just play games while he was at work. It was not so bad. We had Super Mario Bros. 1 through 3, we had Double Dragon II: [The Revenge]. That was one that we played a lot two-player. The Turtles arcade version, the one that came after the the Ultra Games version, that super crazy side-scroller hard fucker. He could do the swimming level; he was fine with it. He was a very good gamer. Eventually our video game tastes kind of diverged. He was a mix between tactical shooters and anything Nintendo, and I kind of went Sega, PlayStation, more RPG-oriented, long-form RPG. He was like, “I like that you like those games. I don’t have the bandwidth for that.”

Was there a specific reason that you hopped from Nintendo to Sony?
I guess it was really a lot of the games that I started playing over time; that fork I had mentioned with me and my dad, where he kind of just stuck with Nintendo until he passed. He always had Nintendo and he did have some PlayStation systems in his house. He had a PS2, he had a PS3, but those are the only Sony systems he had, where I actually went from 1 through this current gen and it’s just the standard one, not the pro because Sony was just getting greedy. [Laughs] That was really greedy.

When I was younger, too, I also still played games on PC as well. But then after a while, I transitioned from using PC to using Mac because I was starting to use more music software in the early 2000s into late-aught years, using things like Logic before they were bought out by Apple and then became part of the Apple App Store thing. But back when it was Logic and Reason, I was using these kind of softwares and programs and just getting into music notation because of work, so I was then using Apple systems. So at that point, I was really only playing Blizzard games, like Diablo II and Starcraft and Warcraft III. Those are the only games I had on the computer until I got World of Warcraft, which… we’ll just bypass that era of life, as I’m sure a lot of recovering WoW addicts could probably say.

What have you been playing lately? What are the kinds of games that you typically prefer to play?
These days, it’s usually some sort of RPG. I don’t really keep up with games like a lot of people. If I was to keep up with every game as it came out, it would be too intense, especially the way the ecosystem for, let’s say, ingesting games now works. I wouldn’t be able to keep up with what I’m doing to do that. So, I tend to get a game and I sit on it for years before I even play it, or I play it over the course of years. Right now, Cyberpunk 2077 is that game for me where I’m just playing it over the course of a couple of years now. I’ve gone through it a couple of times and tried different builds and different pathways, trying to get the different endings just to see how much shit they fucking put in that game. If you really are kind of an old-school tabletop type of RPGer where it’s like, “No, I’m not trying to 100 percent this fucking thing, I want to experience a narrative and see where my luck and chance takes me,” that game really allows you to do that in a very gentle kind of way, an easy kind of way.

If you’re not used to, say, something like—which I also have a copy of and still really haven’t played—Baldur’s Gate 3, just knowing what I know about the game without having really dived in, those choices are way more consequential than they are in Cyberpunk. But still, the narrative that you walk away [with], the story that you’re able to weave, taking a lot of liberties with the original Cyberpunk lore, they wove an incredible tale that’s really heartfelt. I enjoy that. It makes the experience a little bit more tactile for me at this point.

Did you pick it up at launch or did you do the smart thing?
Oh, no. That’s what I mean. Most of the games that I’ve been playing for the last decade or two, they’ve already been out for maybe a couple of years before I even picked them up. Or I’ll grab a copy and then I’ll just get to it eventually. I’ve had a copy of Bloodborne now for three years, four years. I still haven’t played it. I don’t know when I’ll get to that, but eventually I will. Once I finally get sick and tired of Cyberpunk, I’ll probably pick that up. There’s a lot of games to get caught up on.

It’s kind of nice having that patience and that you’re not getting that constant $60, $70 hit for the brand new thing.
Yeah. Again, that’s very much this expression of the modern ecosystem for ingesting games. There’s always this conflict that I’ll have with certain developers—especially if they’re smaller developers—where it’s like, I do want to support this company because in the myriad of what’s happening in sort of more macro, globalized economies, there’s a lot of these game studios or developers, these artists, these writers, these directors, where their work actually inspired me in a lot of ways, [even if] not necessarily directly musically.

When I came up with games, it wasn’t cool. You’d have to defend yourself in some cases because people would just want to rag on you or beat on you just because it’s a thing they hate you on. People I work with, when they find out I play video games are like, “But how do you learn all this music and how do you play with all these different bands?” It’s like, “Because I can do both. It’s my hobby. My brain works still just because I play a video game.” But there’s a certain generation of people that really think anybody who plays a video game is a fucking moron. And it’s like, well, guess what—all the video game players from the ’80s now own every tech company that you fucking buy all their products from. People forget that fucking Steve Jobs worked as a developer at Atari. His start is in games. They rule the world now. And now it’s very cool to be a gamer. You can make a living being into video games. In a span of a couple of decades—30, 40 years—that became a thing.

“There’s a certain generation of people that really think anybody who plays a video game is a fucking moron. And it’s like, well, guess what—all the video game players from the ’80s now own every tech company that you fucking buy all their products from.”

You mentioned indie developers. Imperial Triumphant obviously has a very experimental streak to it. Are you more personally interested in the experimental titles or are you looking for a very refined AAA experience knowing that you’re only going to be playing one game for an extended amount of time?
Cyberpunk, that’s extreme what is going on there. You can see, this is my TV back here [looks back at TV]. It’s a much older TV, it doesn’t do 4K, it doesn’t do ray tracing or anything. I’ve had this TV a while. I’m going to run it into the ground. So there’s a lot of elements of games like Cyberpunk that I’m not even seeing while I’m playing. For me, it’s just about the experience and the escapism of it.

But it’s weird, because there’s that experience and I enjoy that. But then I do like a lot of smaller indie-er productions, and it’s been kind of nice seeing that there is this sort of bed that’s beginning to grow with all these different developers who are experimenting with the medium. The company that does the game Scorn [Ebb Software], now they seemingly have inspired a kind of subset of this exploratory kind of eldritch horror thing that I’m very fascinated by. [Necrophosis], they just demoed, like, a week or two ago. It’s all based off of [Zdzisław] Beksiński’s work, so it’s all landscape and everything and you have to solve this logic puzzle to figure out, “Where the fuck am I? Where am I going? What do I do?” I’m kind of fascinated by games that are exploring this more, especially now that gaming is not high strung for me anymore.

I know I play Cyberpunk still, but for me, it’s very relaxing, even on very hard. It’s not like playing a Soulslike where it’s like, I can’t get past the first fucking hallway in any of these goddamn games. I’m not good enough for this experience, but it’s amazing. Cyberpunk for me, I just roll with it. You’re going to be fine. Just get a couple of levels out, you’re going to be fine. There’s always a pathway forward. It’s pretty fun in that regard. But these other indie games, I think they’re taking more risks with narrative and presenting, “What is gameplay? What is a heads up display? What are controls? How do you feel about this character that has no personality whatsoever, other than your own paradigm that you’re superimposing on the experience?” Knowing how some of these developers will create a whole world that you’re never going to ever have access to unless you’re on a PC and you can actually go into the coding and noclip through things to see just how much shit is there, I’m fascinated by that kind of shit.

I guess maybe as a lay person who doesn’t understand anything about computers and creating games, but loving the medium, I’m always fascinated with how people who you wouldn’t readily think of as being creative in the tactile sense of a painter or an actor or musician—your standard institutionalized versions of creativity. This medium, it’s technological creativity. It’s a different iteration of where creativity exists now. When you break away from the AAA model, when you don’t have a series of investors or an investment firm that you have to give a fucking return on investment, what risk are you willing to take? What things are you willing to try? What kind of stories are you willing to weave? What kind of gameplay do you want people to walk away with? Do you want the player to walk away with crippling carpal tunnel because they can’t put the thing down? Or crippling carpal tunnel because the amount of moves you have to make per second to survive the mission?

You mentioned, in conjunction with Cyberpunk 2077, the idea of the tabletop mentality as opposed to a video game RPG mentality. What are some of the standout RPGs to you? Why does that tabletop inspiration matter to you?
When we started moving into the rise of JRPGs being popular in the Western Hemisphere, and then afterwards into your heyday Bethesda, BioWare years, your [Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic] years, Mass Effect, that kind of era. I guess that would be right after Morrowind, so say going into Oblivion. Tabletop RPG kind of by its very nature requires you to commit to your fate. I’m gonna say it, I’m very guilty of it, too, especially if I’m trying to aim for a certain thing, but most people now are so used to [save scumming] when they play an RPG instead of just going beginning to end. And not necessarily to be in a survival mode, like in Fallout or something like that, or a hardcore mode in Diablo. Something where it’s like, “No, I’m not going to renege on any decision that I make. I’m going to commit.” Not go, “Ah, fuck, I meant to choose this option,” or, “I didn’t react fast enough.” None of that stuff. A really good RPG will make those choices where you just commit to that sort of linearity of experience, not in execution of the gameplay, but in what happens. Those games, they end up being more rewarding and they’re filled with all this detail so that every time you replay it, it is different.

At a certain point, it felt like a lot of times gaming—especially in this rise of the massive AAA, now we’re hitting hundreds of millions of dollars being earned in games—it sort of became this, “gotta 100 percent, gotta catch them all, gotta find every secret, find every little thing,” and the narrative starts to break down. The personal story that you’re weaving starts to break down. I know some folks, at least YouTubers I follow online, they’ll critique, say, Elder Scrolls, the Skyrim system where it’s like, “At a certain point, you could just select every skill and max everything out and you’re a god.” Yeah, you could choose that. You also don’t have to spend any of those points ever. Ever! You could go through as much of the game as you can, investing not a single skill point in anything, and you’re just a regular schmuck doing this shit. But the choice is yours! And with that experience, with the dialogue that you’re hearing or reading on screen, you also in your mind have to be filling in the gaps, having a rich lore to pull from to allow your creativity and imagination to create a story in your head along with the story you’re being presented. You’re going to have those four fucking things to choose from at this part of the game every time. So, what makes it different? You do. Your interpretation, your experience, the narrative you weave in your head like when you’re playing a tabletop game.

I think a lot of gamers at a certain point got so conditioned by how amazing games look and sound and feel and play that a lot of the narrative is on you to create in your mind. Your mind has to be engaged with your hand and your eyes, and they’ve gotten so used to, “Well, this is the story in this game. It’s kind of mediocre, it kind of sucks.” It’s like, well, do you know the lore of this world? Because there’s stuff that they’re hinting at that you’re probably missing. But if you’re not going to read every little fucking book that you find on the side of the road, or you’re not going to look at any sort of outside material, you’re going to miss a lot of what the game is hinting at and instead, it will just seem like a weak, open-ended story with no real weight to it.

Something like Cyberpunk did that well, but they’re not the only ones I think that do that well. Of the Witcher games, I played The Witcher 3 and like with any medium, they’re going to take liberties with the narrative, right? We see it in movies with comic books; it’s only fair that’s going to happen with books and video games. But it does seem like they tried to make a narrative that you could get lost in, and then later on go to the books or talk to people who’ve read the books and go, “Oh, that’s what this thing is referencing.” And when you go and play that again, it carries more weight. Something with Triss Merigold, the first time I played the game, it didn’t really dawn on me that she might actually be this other woman who’s infatuated with Geralt and has kind of been stalking him all this time, and she’s not actually this person and is kind of pretending to be her. It’s like, Well, I would have never known that the first time playing through the game, but reading up on some lore outside of the game? Wow, OK, cool! I think a good RPG does that.

You are in a fuckload of bands. You have done a lot of work.
A little bit.

Being such a prolific, talented musician and also being a lifelong gamer, has learning the drums at such a high level—with it being such a dexterous activity—changed your approach or appreciation of a dexterous activity like playing video games? Or, vice versa, do you think that playing video games at an early age and then going into drums, with it being so hand-to-eye coordination focused, had any effect on your appreciation of drums?
I think both those things are, in a lot of ways, kind of true. In my case, my dad was a drummer and he did it professionally for a number of years. But over time he kind of retired from music and just stayed working and in business. Essentially, he was in printing. Drums were always around. I always had this element in the house, but we always had video games in the house. And he and I both played sports. So I think it was a combination of those three things. There was a lot of hand/eye/body things happening. And I think, in some ways, it allows me to be able to actually watch really good gamers play and enjoy that. I was never much of a let’s play watcher necessarily. I did watch [the Angry Video Game Nerd] when it first started, but I didn’t watch actual great gamers necessarily on a live stream. I never really did that. But nowadays, I’ll see people who will demo things, and that shit I’ll watch.

Or professional gaming, like any of these speed runners and the wild shit that people have been doing lately with Super Mario World and GoldenEye and shit. I’m always amazed at how, if you do this, you’re going to save these microseconds, but then they’re doing these crazy button configurations with perfect timing and perfect aim. I’m always very impressed by that. Yeah, you’re not “doing it” in real life, but for somebody who’s been playing games for 30-something years, I can’t do any of this shit. I’m still, after all this time, a very average gamer, [laughs] a filthy casual. Just having that kind of dexterity in your fingers definitely helps with how I play drums. I use a lot of different techniques, it’s not just one thing. Being able to do different things with different fingers at any given moment, whether it’s a keyboard and mouse or a controller, it actually does help.

You have a wide range of styles in which you play. Have video game OSTs or anything from the video game world ever impacted your approach to music, appreciation of music in any capacity or has it always just been a casual thing for you?
Oh, no, there’s definitely composers, eras, music that sinks into my head. It lives with me. It’s stuff that I actually enjoy listening to. The late ’80s, early ’90s Konami era and Capcom games, like all the Mega Mans, the Contras. Hudson Soft also had a lot of really great music that was really appropriate for whatever the game was, even if it was their weirder [games], like Milon’s Secret Castle. The music is quirky, but it works.

Also, I do like a lot of the Oblivion and Skyrim soundtracks, that composer [Jeremy Soule]. Actually, my wife has both those OSTs on her phone and Apple iPad so she can listen to them when she works. She’s not a gamer whatsoever. She’s old-school, like Nintendo, Super Mario, you know, that kind of stuff, that’s what she played. But we don’t play games together or anything like that. They’re too confusing for her now, that ship has sailed. But she does love those soundtracks. A lot of the Bioware soundtracks I’ve always really enjoyed, Dragon Age: Origins specifically. The Mass Effect series, I like that soundtrack a lot. I mean, it’s some recurring themes throughout.

I don’t know if it’s stuff that necessarily finds its way into music that I write per se, but I think the approach that a lot of those early composers used, how they had to translate what they were writing and then putting it into a MIDI format in which you can then put it into a cartridge so that it could exist in a game or on a disc, a lot of that stuff affected how I started working on music for a lot of my adult life. Right now, we’re sort of living in an era where a lot of musicians who are writing for bands or writing for artists—not just metal, but outside of metal in general—that sort of modus operandi became kind of important for how people compose music now. Most people compose music in a DAW, they’re working in MIDI. They’re able to then generate charts or tablature that they can then send out to other musicians with demos. A lot of music is written this way now and that was sort of something that you only really saw in the gaming world for a while. It’s kind of fascinating how that tech, once it became more [accessible], we’re in an age now where people that are writing hit songs got their start in things like GarageBand or Ableton or Reaper. They downloaded a free software. There’s people that are learning how to write music, write scores because they’re using MuseScore 3. It’s open source software specifically for writing music. There’s people now who are going to be learning to write music, to compose music in this traditional sense with open source software. They’re not sitting there with a piece of paper. This is the era we’re in now. We’re in this 21st [century] digital age, this internet age, and we’ve slid right into the AI age, right? These things are now part of the process.

Would you ever consider lending your talents to video game composing?
Absolutely. It would be fun. And I know Imperial desperately wants to. [Bassist] Steve [Blanco], who doesn’t even really play games, he’s just fascinated by the process of doing something like that. And actually, it would be kind of interesting having a guy like that involved because he’s a very macro kind of thinker. You can see it in a lot of the videos he makes for all the music video stuff. The ones that he’s sort of directing or conceptualizing, he has this very big, directorial, macro sense of how a thing should be and figures out the details. But then you have guys like me and [guitarist/vocalist] Zach [Ezrin]. He’s a little bit younger than me, but also been playing games for most of his life. And when you’re composing for a game, you do have to keep in mind, like, What kind of game is it? What kind of action is it going to be? When they’re playing this game, how long are they going to be in an area? How much time should there be between the music cues between a change in the action or direction of the story, making these themes seamless with cut scenes? Anything like that. It’s such a different way of conceptualizing music that you wouldn’t necessarily think of for a film score where you are setting it to scene, but the scene is not going to change every time you play.

There’s a sort of innocuousness with, say, the Skyrim soundtrack, too, where you could pause, you could just stop playing the game and let it sit there—which we’ve done in the house. Before we downloaded the soundtrack, we just let the game run and I’d go do other stuff. There’s this beauty to it that’s also very haunting that I personally enjoyed, but it stimulates you without getting in the way. It helps tell the narrative that the visuals have to kind of invoke in the viewer more so than, say, something for a film where it has to be that thing for that moment at that time and it’s never going to change. And neither is the film. The action on the screen can change at any time. Does the music still suit it or does it adapt? It’s so many more variables to consider. The guy who did the early Silent Hill games [Akira Yamaoka], those early soundtracks, man, they gave you the perfect sense of what that game needed without being overbearing.

Zach has mentioned to us that the only thing that he ever likes to play anymore is FromSoft games.
Oh, that’s all he fucking plays.

You’ve already hinted at the fact that you are possibly not the biggest fan, but you have Bloodborne in the pipeline to play after Cyberpunk 2077.
It has stiff competition with Baldur’s Gate 3 though, because I really do want to get into it. What’s been holding me back is I need to do it with a keyboard and a mouse. I tried with the controller and I couldn’t think. It’s very weird. Those kinds of CRPGs, this [positions hands like he would on a keyboard] feels more natural.

I’ve [James] heard the interface on Baldur’s Gate on a controller is perhaps not exactly the most optimal. The keyboard is better.
Larian deserves a lot of praise. There was an intuition there and it makes sense, but you need to play this on a keyboard and mouse. You really should not be playing this on a PS5 controller like I tried to do. It just feels too sluggish. It’s just so much easier to memorize a macro than a weird, OK, I gotta half click this thing and then it’s like… No. I just want to pay attention to what’s happening. I’m not like a master CRPG gamer. I play things on normal to easy. Even hard for me on a lot of those games, like Divinity: Original Sin 2, I was like, Oh, well, you know, I could try this on the harder difficulty… No. No. Nooo. I put that fucker right back on easy. I know my place. I just want to enjoy the story.

There’s so many games out there and not nearly enough time in life to be banging your head against the wall, trying to get past the same boss for years when you could bump that difficulty down. You prove nothing to no one. Spending 500 hours on something that you could get through in 20? Who did I prove anything to other than wasting a ton of my time?
Totally. I do applaud people when they go full hardcore. I have friends that, some of them don’t play anymore, but they were the kind of people that would play something like a From Software game and just plow through it. There’s a community of drummers that I know in NYC who are doing all the From Software games, but crushing them. Like, legit crushing them. Guys like Ari Hoenig, [former Imperial Triumphant/Pyrrhon drummer] Alex Cohen was playing through all these games, I think one of the Dark Souls games, they were all playing. But I was like, “No, guys.” I have a hard copy of Demon’s Souls and I have a digital copy of Dark Souls that’s sitting in a drive. I like a challenge, but my life is challenging enough. Being in metal bands is challenging enough. There’s a lot of things I still gotta learn how to do as a metal drummer that it’s like, I gotta work. When I’m playing games, I actually have a practice pad here. I have other shit that I do while I’m playing the game. If there’s a point where I could pause, I’ll actually work on things. I don’t always listen to the game music. I’ll listen to music I’m learning and working on. So, I can’t also just be getting my ass handed for me for the few hours I have to play this game. I already yell enough when I play easy games, [laughs] I don’t need that extra aggravation. But I do want to try Armored Core VI: [Fires of Rubicon] as well. I do want to try that because Zach was playing it on a Steam Deck and it looked fun. From Software games, I gotta brace myself for that shit, man.

Man, once you beat Elden Ring, then you’re an official metal drummer.
[Laughs] I think I’m going to be a non-metal drummer now for a long time. I mean, maybe. Let me not say that because it does also does look fun. The Elden Ring world looks more my kind of speed, in a way.

A while ago, there was a photo posted to the internet of Zach in his full stage gear playing Mario Kart: Double Dash!! at the Rickshaw in Vancouver. We asked Zach who won. He said not him. We asked Manuel [Gagneux] from Zeal & Ardor who won and he said it was his drummer. Do you remember this game? What is your memory of this game?
I want to say that the Mario Kart bouts began shortly after dinner, so that was during doors. Throughout the entire show, that was going on. Zach definitely didn’t win. He kind of took over for somebody and with the mask, you see like this [curls fingers into small circles in front of eyes] and he hasn’t played that game in a lot of years, so he’s trying to find his way on the buttons. But, you know, considering that he’s in his full regalia and he has a guitar strapped to him, he did alright. But it was very funny. Zach is a sucker for photo opportunities like that. He loves kitschy photos. For him, it’s almost like a kind of weird, obtuse pop art kind of thing.

But for sure, the whole evening, we were all taking rounds with the sound engineer and Manuel. Everyone was going around. I even got a couple of rounds in, which was fun. Some of those older controllers, they feel so much nicer to hold. The PS5 controller, it’s huge, it’s clunky, it’s not very ergonomic. The shoulder button thing is so not intuitive to how a hand is shaped. It’s amazing no one’s figured this out yet. Nintendo has a nunchuck and it works fine. I mean, even the VR controller makes more sense, but that’s just a personal gripe. Holding those controllers again, it was that weird nostalgia surge.

Ezrin playing Mario Kart: Double Dash!! backstage at the Rickshaw, September 26, 2002.

So who is the top Mario Kart player in the band? Are you looking forward to a rematch on the Decibel Tour?
I mean… it’s probably not Steve. [Laughs]

[Laughs] Let’s get the easy one out of the way first.
Yeah, I don’t know. The fucked up thing is that [Zach] thinks that I am and he doesn’t understand I’m not. For me, it’s escapism, it’s entertainment, it’s inspiration. It’s how I relax when I can. But that doesn’t mean I’m that good at it. I’m good at certain games. Maybe I might have more experience playing Mario Kart than he does just from being older and growing up with that system. When that game was new and playing it with my dad, who was a super Nintendo head and also he and I both like racing games. Super Mario Kart, F-Zero, when Wipeout came out, when Destruction Derby came out, when the Turismo series started, we played those games, so I maybe have an edge on him in that. But I think Zach really likes more your action-adventure kind of RPG. The dude likes a motherfucker with armor and a fucking greatsword. Zach crushes those games. When he was doing Elden Ring, he’s good. Is he, like, top 100 in fucking the country? Probably not. But he’s good. He plays through those games, he gets all the fucking shit, he finds all the things. For his brain, the way it works, those games are perfect for him. And for me, I’d rather sit in the van and meditate than be dealing with that. [Laughs]

The last run I did on Cyberpunk, I did a really fucked up build and it wasn’t smart. God damn what’s-his-face [Adam Smasher] was way more of a pain in the ass than it should have been. That was as close to From Software as I want to get, like, Wow, it took me, like, 10 tries to kill this guy. I can’t do more than that or I’m just shutting the game off forever. But yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s a tie for Mario Kart. I think it would be a fair time.

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