Trivium’s Matt Heafy Names His Favorite Video Games of All Time
This year at Gamescom 2022, Trivium’s Matt Heafy joined an all-star lineup to perform original music from Metal: Hellsinger. Before the show, we caught up with Heafy to talk about his Hellsinger track, "This Devastation," and the Trivium frontman’s favorite video games of all time.
“We were always a Nintendo family,” Heafy says of his upbringing. “Beat Mario 1 first… Mario 1, 2, 3… but Super Nintendo and N64 were my big eras. Super Mario World was huge, I loved Donkey Kong. I remember when Donkey Kong Country had the making-of VHS we taped it off TV and I’d watch it all the time, I was so into the making-of. Mario 64 is one of the greatest games of all time, Goldeneye is arguably one of the FPS’ of all time. I was the jerk who’d always pick Oddjob.”
Heafy then goes into Final Fantasy, Halo, DOOM, Mortal Kombat, and what he calls the greatest first-person shooter of all time — Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
Heafy actually just finished his first video game soundtrack for a title called Martial Arts Tycoon. “The soundtrack is 90 minutes of Brazilian music — pagode, samba, bossa nova. I wrote a song where I’m singing in Portuguese. I gave them one metal song… they said ‘no metal’… it sounds exactly like Sepultura and it’s freaking awesome. The rest is chill, lo-fi Brazilian music.”
As for Metal: Hellsinger, the games mixes DOOM-style action with a focus on rhythmic play ala Guitar Hero. “It’s something I never knew I wanted, but I needed it, to be able to shoot on-tempo with something.” Heafy says about the Metal: Hellsinger gameplay. “It was so inspirational that I actually hit them up and said, ‘I know the game is done, I know the soundtrack is done, but I wanna re-record the screaming because I can do them better now.’ They’re like, ‘No, they’re ready great.’ But I did it, sent it over in one take and they were like, ‘Okay, we’ll mix this in.’”
Watch Matt Heafy nerd out on video games with us in the video below. Metal: Hellsinger will be released on Sept. 15. To download the Metal: Hellsinger demo or pre-order the game, click here.