Truthfully, this interview almost didn’t happen. Our conversation with Adam Biggs, bassist and now vocalist for progressive pummelers Rivers of Nihil, has been in the works for months. After bandmate and former player character Brody Uttley directed the frontman towards the Kill Screen arcade’s neon glow at the beginning of 2025, plans were made to link up at a U.K. stop during their European tour in March. Thanks to notoriously dodgy venue wi-fi, however, the only spot in the building that offered any kind of service ended up being—of all places—the mens’ room. Sparing our guest the indignity, our chat was put on pause until the group returned home. Scheduling conflicts continued to arise and with mere days left before heading out on a headliner across the U.S., the co-nerds finally caught up with Biggs—calling in from the back of a van parked in a shopping center parking lot. Thankfully, at least, the wi-fi was better.

It’s far from an uncommon experience shared in previous installments of this column, but Biggs is an incredibly busy guy. As the profile of the band grows following the release of their recent self-titled LP, balancing music with family life can make FromSoft look like Cookie Clicker. Despite this, gaming continues to be not just present, but a crucial part of the equation both creatively and emotionally. With his Nintendo Switch in hand, the long stretches of time traveling from stage to stage, city to city, country to country offers our subject the chance to turn off the outside world and tune into the expansive pixelated lands that have held fast to his imagination for years. His digital days are different, not over, and we appreciate him taking what little time he has to share his digitized perception.

Looking for a bit of extra DLC from this discussion? Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Decibel (dB250/August 2025) to learn what role storytelling plays in the bassist’s appreciation of modern day games.

What was your first gaming experience?
I’ve been playing video games technically since before I can remember because my older sister had an NES in the house. She got it I think before I was born or when I was a little baby. There was always a game of Super Mario going on in the house and it was something that I got immediately attracted to. It was a family thing—we would just pass the controller around and see how many goombas we could stomp out.

Was it a common family occurrence for you or was this just when you were really little kids and then she kind of grew out of it?
There were some times, but once we got into the Sega Genesis era, my parents definitely didn’t touch it. My sister would play some Sonic [the Hedgehog] now and again, but that was mostly my thing. Once we stepped into a second generation of video games, my parents just lost interest entirely. [Laughs] It was good times, hitting the video store, renting anything I could find on Genesis. That was a good number of years. But yeah, video games became exclusively my thing for the most part in the house around that time.

Was there a particular first title that was like, “This is my game”?
It’s hard to say because when I got a Genesis, I might have been 8 years old, 9 years old maybe. I was in on all the hype. I was like, “Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario but faster, blast processing? Let’s go!” A lot of that immediately didn’t appeal to my parents. They were like, “This hedgehog has way too much attitude. I’m way more comfortable with plumbers jumping on mushrooms and stuff.” [Laughs] Which, for some reason, it makes sense.

What have you been playing lately and what are the games that you typically prefer to play?
Lately lately, I have not been playing much at all because I reserve most of my gaming time for when we’re on tour. At home, I’m working, I’m with my kids, squeezing in practice time late at night after everybody goes to bed. There’s not much time for games going on until we get on the road and everything’s settled, and then I can veg out and play Switch for hours. On that last European run we did, I got really sick at one point which was horrible, but I was just in my bunk playing Switch constantly. I played through entire runs of a few games. I think I played Batman: Arkham City and Arkham Knight on the Switch. [Sarcastically] That Arkham Knight port is beautiful on the Switch. [Laughs] It’s maybe one of the worst running games I’ve ever played in my life, but it’s still fun somehow. I just like Batman a lot and I like that game.

And I played Final Fantasy VII start to finish in the bunk as well. It was good to revisit that. It’s always good to revisit games like that from my past. I first played it when I was in, like, 6th or 7th grade. It was an ongoing project for several years. And now, I’m like, What’s the gameplay function of this? and then just rip it apart and go real fast through it. The mystery of everything is a little shaved down, but it’s fun. It was definitely a lot of fun doing that.

You’re talking about some different eras of games as well. Do you consciously make a choice to play some older stuff and some recent stuff to mix it up?
I’ve been playing games my whole life. I feel fortunate. I wasn’t born at the roots of gaming, but NES is a pretty good starting point I feel as far as the culture of gaming at large is concerned. I have that perspective of, This is the roots of really commercial home gaming. I’ve gone through every era and picked out my spots of what I find fun. I feel like as it happens with a lot of things when you start to get a little older, modern games have drifted from me a little bit. There have been a whole bunch of different eras and I really appreciate classic stuff from just about any era that you can describe. The PS1 era is great, things like Tomb Raider and Final Fantasy and a whole bunch of stuff from that era. That’s big stuff. A little bit later, we started getting into retro revival gaming. They started making new 8-bit games and new 16-bit games and that I thought was really fun when it stopped all being about how good everything looks. They made new Mega Man games. That really drew me back in for a while. When I talk about gaming as a modern thing, maybe with somebody a little younger, I hear them talking about Overwatch or Marvel Rivals, stuff like that, really intense online experience kind of games and I’m just like, “That’s not me.” [Laughs] I’m a single-player guy. It’s amazing to see how many different genres of gamer have developed over the years. Everybody played Super Mario and Tetris when I was a kid, and now if you’re a gamer, that can mean so many different things.

Beyond nostalgia, what is it about the PS1 era that you feel those games got right that modern gaming has kind of lost along the way?
I think Sony and those developers at the time were pushing hard to be like, “This has to be the future.” Bringing games into a 3D space is just a whole other rung of the ladder. I think it took a lot of courage and a lot of thought to make gaming work in that 3D space. It’s not just a cartridge and a little guy running across the screen anymore. There’s that push to make things more cinematic and more adult. It combines in this way that maybe on its face it’s clunky and awkward, but I think the games that do get it right, you can tell the developers were like, “What makes a game fun to play?” and they still preserve that kind of thing.

It’s kind of hard to point at examples in the PS1 era that you can completely wipe nostalgia from it and be like, “Yeah, this is a good game.” [Laughs] Even if you love Resident Evil, you play Resident Evil 1 and 2 and you’re going to be like, “I love this game! These controls are…” [Laughs] I love the atmosphere, I even love the story and everything, but the controls will slow you down. It’s that a lot of times. But you can see how by the end of the PS1 era, you’re playing something that’s super clunky like Resident Evil, but then you pick up Spyro the Dragon and that feels like it has the bones of really modern platforming, they figured it out. Being along for that experience was a really cool thing, I think.

I think that is kind of a luxury that everybody on this call has. We got to be there to see that transition, where a lot of younger people now have not only existed in a world that always had games, but always had these hyper-polished, super tight [experiences].
Literally anything is possible! Like a Grand Theft Auto V, you can literally travel through a whole state in a video game. That’s why I got so into Final Fantasy games when I was a kid—because I liked the explorative element. When I was younger and still on NES and Super Nintendo, I was obsessed with [The Legend of] Zelda because of the little discoverable elements. The unbridled joy of discovery is when they build that world in there. It used to be that there’s little breadcrumbs. You go from a Zelda thing and then you go to a Final Fantasy thing—it’s a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. And then all of a sudden you’re at Grand Theft Auto and all these open world games where the map is huge and it’s filled with cool stuff, hopefully.

Like Baldur’s Gate 3, a game where you’ll never have the same experience twice.
I heard that was really good, and I played the first two on PC when I was a kid. I didn’t have a lot of PC games, but Baldur’s Gate was one of them. That game back in the day blew my mind, just having to open this giant booklet full of CDs. If you go into a town, you have to put in this disc and stuff. I was terrible at it because I didn’t understand hardcore RPG mechanics, but it was a little too adult for me at the time. I’ve considered checking out Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s not on the Switch probably. [Laughs] I might treat myself to a Switch 2 when that comes out. Maybe they’ll port some of those more modern things over.

[At the time of this interview,] you’re gearing up to hit the road with Holy Fawn, Inter Arma, and Glacial Tomb. Do you often run into any gamers? We know of at least one nerd that you’re going to be sharing the road with.
Oh yeah. There’s definitely dudes out there with their Steam Decks ready to go. People are way more hardcore about their gaming on the road than me. [Vocalist] Sean Zatorsky from Dååth was on the last tour and he’s got all the gadgets. He had the Steam Deck, he had everything ready to go, ported onto any TV and he had all this stuff hacked. He’s like, “I can play any game in the world!” I’m like, “Dude, that’s awesome.” [Laughs] That’s a little hardcore for me. At the end of the day, I am still that NES kid. I like to plug in a game and then have it run. I am kind of a grumpy old man when it comes to, “I have to to download a patch?!” That doesn’t make sense in my head.

Do you have any games that you have lined up for this tour that you’re excited to dive into?
I was actually going over my library of games last night and didn’t really see a whole lot new to grasp onto. I’m going to have to figure that out. I might play some more Final Fantasy just to keep that train rolling. I haven’t played Final Fantasy VIII in a very, very long time, and I know that they had an updated version that they released. I might pick that up and play 75 percent of it and realize that the game’s not good like I do every time when I play that game. [Laughs]

Ooo, those are fighting words!
Yeah, well, come at me, because that game’s not that good. [Laughs]

As a real question though, is that a usual modus operandi before you go out on tour? You go through the library or you check recent releases and kind of queue up three, four, five games for a tour?
Sometimes I’ll get the itch and I’ll be like, I should look into what’s out there that I might be interested in catching up on. I’ll maybe queue some things up if I’m in the mood. It might not be three or four games, it might be just one. I remember a year or two ago when [The Legend of Zelda:] Tears of the Kingdom came out, I was like, Yeah, I guess I’ll do that. I’m sure that will occupy plenty of my gaming head space. And it did. [Laughs] I bought that before we went to Australia and it definitely helped me get through a couple of 14-hour flights and an all-day recovery session in a hotel room, so that was nice.

So, if there’s a big, high-attention title coming out, do you pick that up and say, This will be perfect for two weeks later when we’re on a plane?
I wish I kept up with stuff a little better. I just don’t have that much faith that newer games are going to always interest me. I am always on the lookout for re-releases of older games that I like. I’ve seen people just be like, “What’s with all these re-releases? It’s just companies taking advantage of people!” And it’s like, I’m people. [Laughs] I’ll re-buy the games I like over and over again just to play them in a new context. I’ve been dying for [SquareEnix] to put out a port of Dragon Quest VIII on Switch and I’ve played that game a ton of times on PS2 and Nintendo DS. I’m just like, Why can’t I play this on Switch? But new new games, I think there’s a couple things that I’m looking forward to. It’s rare that things grasp me, but I’ll always pay attention to a new [FromSoftware] title coming out or something like that.

“I’ve seen people just be like, ‘What’s with all these re-releases? It’s just companies taking advantage of people!’ And it’s like, I’m people. I’ll re-buy the games I like over and over again just to play them in a new context.”

Are you going to be picking up [Elden Ring:] Nightreign?
I doubt it. I didn’t play Elden Ring at all. I just never had time to sit down at a console reliably to play something that massive. I’ll get around to it eventually. I’ve seen a lot of people hating on it, but I think that Duskbloods game looks pretty interesting. Bloodborne is one of my all-time favorite games and that looks reminiscent. I’ll be playing that and trying to make tedious lore connections to every other FromSoft game just like anybody else I’m sure.

Going down the YouTube rabbit hole, seeing all the conspiracy theories.
See you soon, VaatiVidya. [Laughs]

[Rivers of Nihil guitarist] Brody [Uttley] had mentioned that there was a tour where all of you got addicted to Vampire Survivors. Have you since kicked the addiction?
Oh yeah, I can’t even look at the app anymore. There was just so much downtime on that particular tour. We’d be sitting in green rooms and everybody’s head is down looking at their phones. I’d just walk in the green room, I’d look at everybody and I’m like, “What’s up?” And everybody would just go, [looking down] “…Surviving.” [Laughs] And that became the thing: “Yo dude, you surviving?” And everybody would be like, “Yeah man, I’m surviving.” There was a lot of shame attached to it, it’s just sad. It was fun, but it got to a point where I’m just like, Why am I doing this? I don’t know. I won’t do it again, but yeah, it was an interesting time for this band. We’ve never been so united in any kind of video game thing before.

Don’t get me wrong, I [Michael] think it’s a brilliant game. But thankfully early on—I think I put maybe 8 hours or something into it—I was able to discern [that] this is literally a game about watching numbers go up. That’s all it is.
Yeah. Once you figure out your little pattern of the upgrades and the weapons and you can just game it so that you can just walk around in a screen full of enemies that just dies. It’s fun and sort of satisfying in that old-school Dynasty Warriors kind of way, on your phone where you’re just smacking down hordes of enemies but then after a while it did become mind numbing. I’m like, Maybe instead of playing this game I should do something better with my time.

You’ve recently taken over vocal duties for the band, you’re about to release a new album, you are a father of two and you’re a husband. You have a lot of shit going on in your life. Why is it important for you to keep video games as part of that life?
It is a thing that I’ve always had around. There have been times in my life where I’ve bordered on doing it too much and it’s distracting from more pressing matters. But I’ve realized that it sort of has become part of my process as a musician to a degree. I feel like I owe a lot of my musical skill to that chill vibe. I’m hanging out, I’ll play some games and then I get bored of that, [so] I pick up my bass and I practice some stuff. A lot of the artistic process happens in that state of playing—whatever you’re doing that’s enjoyable to you. To go back and forth between those two things, again, maybe I’ll hit a wall with the games and then I go over and practice and then maybe that’ll catch on for a long time, or maybe I’ll hit a wall and then I go back and I’ll play whatever I was playing there.

When it comes to a point where you know you’re gonna have to be in the studio soon, every second I’m spending playing video games at that time, in the past I’ve guilted myself and been like, I should just be practicing. But now, I know I need this to decompress or else I’m gonna be bleeding a stone as far as the music stuff goes. It’s helped me to kind of regulate that attention span thing and chill out, basically.

Would you then say that indirectly gaming becomes part of that creative process if only for the fact that it gives you that outlet to come back to playing a song with fresh ears?
Yeah. The bigger the music thing gets, the more pressure gets added to it and the more fun gets subtracted. I feel like interspersing playing a game and then practicing, it takes a little of that pressure off and it takes me back to the basics of, I’m here, I’m playing, I’m having fun. That’s when you get the best artistic output. There is something to be said about really putting a lot of pressure on yourself and squeezing it out, which will happen also. But in the casual times leading up, I find it more important not to just stress myself out for days at a time.

In the process of making a record, I’ve found that I usually will hardcore dive into a game. Sometimes it’s either a really long one or a really difficult game. I think when we were making Where Owls Know My Name, in the weeks leading up to studio time I was playing Zelda II: [The Adventure of Link] a lot, an incredibly difficult game. But practicing Owl songs and then playing Zelda II—I beat Zelda II with a little help from some save states—now I kind of assign that album with that game a little bit. I feel like there’s always been that going on.

Do you have a game assigned to [Rivers of Nihil]?
It was a little different because we recorded this album over several different sessions and it took a really long time, so I played a lot of different stuff. Strangely enough, I guess I played Final Fantasy II during that time, which is everybody’s least favorite Final Fantasy game but the pixel remasters had just come out on the Switch. I was like, You know what? I’m going to give this an honest shot. And I kind of liked it. I liked that game more than I thought I would—more than I remembered from when I was younger and played it on the PS1 Final Fantasy Origins collection. I know I’ve mentioned Final Fantasy a lot on this, but it is kind of a big series in my personal canon. I played that and Final Fantasy V from the pixel remaster, so the self-titled [album] I think has that behind it a little bit.

When you’re playing these games, even though that’s the downtime from practicing or writing or working on a record, do you ever find yourself in the middle of an encounter or something, you press the pause button and be like, This is exactly what I needed for that song, kind of a subconscious thing? Or are these two entirely different halves of the brain, so to speak?
It’s not even just about a game, but it is a good space [where] I can just kind of clear my mind while I’m playing a game. I’ll be singing the songs in my head all the time. Even now, they’re constantly playing over and over in my head. I feel like the amount of familiarity with a piece of music, the better you’re going to be able to perform it or write it. So yeah, I’ll have those a ha! moments if I’m playing and I’m just thinking about a song. Maybe I’ll imagine something new or that thing that I needed to do comes up in my head. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I’m just like, Yep, I’m going through this whole dungeon now with just a completely blank mind, not thinking about music at all, and sometimes that’s what’s needed.

Rivers’ music showcases a number of influences beyond what people would consider traditional metal. Brody had mentioned that the PS1 era was particularly important to him in terms of musical development. Are there any composers or soundtracks that you feel are musically important to you or has gaming always just been more about the down time?
I’m probably not going to break the mold with anybody too obscure, but Nobuo Uematsu is a huge deal to me. The Final Fantasy VII soundtrack was a big musical moment for me as a kid. I don’t remember a soundtrack to anything. Maybe a couple movies—like, the Batman theme was a thing that stuck in my head and the Jurassic Park theme from movies when I was a kid. But Final Fantasy VII was the first video game outside of Mario and Zelda where I’m like, This is a whole sweeping epic, where motifs are returned to and reimagined and characters are being built with this music. It’s the greatest concept album ever, just the way that the music tells the story of the game better than even a lot of the dialogue does most of the time. That definitely [was] a huge inspiration on what I appreciate in music. I like that to things like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, where it’s these really robust musical experiences with this sprawling world to explore.

I heard it said somewhere: It’s not that I like knights and zombies and fighting monsters all that much—I mean, I do like that stuff—but I just like games with more. There’s more to it: you have this whole world to explore, there’s a million different things going on, there’s a story, there’s all this epic stuff. I’ve always thought about that with music, too. Progressive music just seemed like music with more, and metal music together and all of that. That bigger, robust experience from games, that I think helped inform what we do musically at the end of the day, too.

This may be a little bit more of a stretch, but Rivers’ lyrics take on much more of a philosophical, metaphysical approach—not your standard gory death metal subject matter. You’re bringing up a lot of these very sprawling narratives, like Final Fantasy, like Zelda. Do you think any of that fantastical element from video gaming has factored into that lyrical content or is that just coincidence?
Absolutely. Our first four records were this whole interconnected story. There’s the four seasons element to it, but I’ve always kind of treated that whole story as its own world.Especially early on, the first couple records are really this imagined world. I would kind of build this world in my head that things were happening in, and then I would try to write about it in a musical way. I was like a bard or something from the olden days, writing about the events of this fictional world or trying to record the events of it in an artistic way. Visiting a world of your own creation or of somebody else’s creation, like you do in a video game or a movie or whatever, that definitely had a big impact on how I came up with a lot of these themes. Later on it gets a little more personal, a little more adult, and I think that’s come with age. My world is less video games, it’s less fantasy and it’s more adult reality stuff. But it still has the child’s heart beating in there.

So even if it’s not like, “This album is directly the story of Final Fantasy IV,” but more that these worlds kind of helped inform your way in which you then went to build and create a world that your music exists in.
Right. It’s my own imagined thing and then I can write about it in this context that isn’t the same thing. But it is sort of imagining that scene, the imagery of this fantastical world that now lives in my head. It’s inspired by all of these other big fantastical worlds from these games.

In the press release, Brody discusses the closing track of the album, which is also self-titled. He says, “The name ‘Rivers of Nihil’ implies this dark nihilistic hopeless thing. But lyrically the song is actually about letting time slip by you and not giving into the darkness.” It might be proximity bias, but all of us have far less time and are far more stressed out than we’ve ever been. What is the game that you would recommend to our readership as a game to let that time slip by and decompress?
Hmm. [Pauses] It’s tough because there’s so many options, but I think one of the most complete gaming experiences you can have now are the two newer Zelda games [Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom]. I think there’s just so much. They’re modern, but they’re not overly modern. There’s a story, but it’s not beating you over the head with it. You have that big world to explore and you’ll have that joy of discovery in those kinds of games. I find myself recommending those to people a lot because living in that world, just jumping in, running around that giant Hyrule map, it’s very soothing. Getting up in the sky, climbing this mountain and the changing scenery, for some reason I find that just very, very satisfying.

Let’s say somebody showed up and they said, “I’m an agent who represents video games—all of them. We would love you to maybe not necessarily score, but at least inform a soundtrack to a new video game. It could be any franchise you want.” Is there anything that right away you’d be like, “Man, I’d love to do a Final Fantasy or a Zelda”?
I would find doing Final Fantasy mega intimidating because I know that I’ve judged everybody who’s worked on that franchise who isn’t Nobuo Uematsu very hard. [Laughs]

Yeah, agree.
I think the guy who’s doing the Final Fantasy VII Remake stuff, though [Masashi Hamauzu]—hats off. That shit’s incredible. It was my Spotify number one thing for, like, two years, just that soundtrack. But if I had to pick any… [Pauses] Hmm. I would have to pick something that needs better music, and all I’m thinking of is games with good music. Mega Man? Great music. Zelda series? Great music. Even the newer newer Zelda games, their approach to their music is is really awe inspiring. I don’t know. Man. I’m thinking of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and it’s the use of music in those games. It’s not the music itself that I think is so good, but it’s when it comes in and when it’s not there is so cool. Thinking of the newer Doom series, the music is so so fucking good in those. What to improve upon? I wonder.

What if you could pick a genre that you would be interested in working on? What style of game would you think is most fun to score?
Probably something open world, you know? Some kind of explorative type of thing. If I had say in the music, it would have to be something that has a lot of different colors to it, a lot of different moods going on because that’s kind of how I like to operate. Any good RPG soundtrack is going to do something like that—it’s going to take you through all the different emotions, but it’s going to bring you back to the roots of what it is you’re doing. That’s a really hard question, but a very cool one. I don’t know. There’s so many good games with music that I really admire. Far be it for me to say that I would do a better job at any of them.

Rivers of Nihil is out now via Metal Blade Records and can be purchased here.
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The post KILL SCREEN 065: For Adam Biggs of RIVERS OF NIHIL, the Fantasy is Anything But Final appeared first on Decibel Magazine.