Photo by Gene Smirnov

As the technology that powers home console gaming has advanced at a staggering pace over the past 50 years, so, too, has its storytelling quality. That should come as no surprise to those of us who were sentient during some of electronic entertainment’s earliest days as we needed to refer to instruction manuals to learn about the dramatic motivations of our 16-pixel tall sprite that was determined to reach the right side of our television. More computing power meant more realistic graphics, immersive audio and environmental development that allowed the devoted player base to happily get lost in whatever world they enjoyed. You no longer just knew that the princess, the world or you yourself needed saving, but why. Decades of that why, now rendered in full HD and glorious surround sound, have helped influence generations of writers to follow, including the writers of HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us, which recently garnered a whopping 24 Emmy nominations.

Within the metal community is Outer Heaven vocalist, lyricist, cosmic horror fanatic and today’s player character Austin Haines. Speaking to us over Zoom while surrounded by Aliens and Predator merchandise from his enviable set-up located in—where else?—his basement, he graciously spent what little time he had available between work and his infant daughter to share just how ingrained gaming has been not only to himself, but the band’s existence. Even the name “Outer Heaven” is a reference to Metal Gear Solid, though the artistic connection to Hideo Kojima’s celebrated series has long evaporated in favor of more overtly gruesome tales. Haines is resolved to stay connected to the medium he’s so bonded with for his entire conscious existence in the face of mounting adult responsibilities and keeps himself as up-to-date with the industry’s offerings as time will allow. With new album Infinite Psychic Depths—a cosmic horror narrative crafted by Haines as a prequel to the already psychedelic apocalyptic story started with 2018’s Realms of Infinite Decay—due to be released this Friday, July 21 via Relapse Records, Kill Screen is keen to learn how deep this devotion goes.

What was your first video game experience?
There’s a few different eras I could say. My earliest memory of playing any video game was playing the original late-’80s GameBoy. I don’t think I even really knew what a video game was at that time. I was born in ’92, so that had been out for a few years by the time I was even playing it several years later. My dad showed up with a GameBoy. Donkey Kong Land, I think, might have been for it. That’s one that sticks with me. I have one specific memory of my grandma around the same time playing Tetris on the same GameBoy. She kept trying to take the GameBoy and play it when me and my brothers were also trying to play it at the same time. She thought it was so crazy because she had played Tetris in an arcade before that.

I’m the oldest of three boys, so I knew how to play and beat all the games and my brothers kind of sat by and learned from me. I remember a very specific memory: In Crash Bandicoot, you collect the little fruits, which are the Wumpa Fruits. We always used to just call them peaches. “Get the peaches! Jump and get the peaches!” We were young, you know? And then we opened the booklet that came with the game and it said “Wumpa Fruit.” We thought Wumpa was so funny and we were constantly just calling everything Wumpa or saying Wumpa all the time.

One Christmas, my brothers and I got a PlayStation 2 and that was the absolute pinnacle of, This is gonna propel you towards a lifetime of playing games. One of the big games we always played was Sly Cooper [and the Thievius Racoonus]. Great game. I have such fond memories of playing that with my brothers over the years, even as recently as a couple of years ago. I always go back and replay them from time to time. It just links me back to a time, like, way back when I was first playing games. That was always the best part of playing games; playing with your friends, playing with your brothers.

What have you been playing lately and what are typically the games that you prefer to play?
I have a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X that I jump back and forth between. The big one over the last few months was Hogwart’s Legacy. That one I sunk a lot of time into. In 2001, when the first Harry Potter movie came out, I was 9 years old. That was the coolest, sickest thing in the world. That stuck with me as I got older. I had played the older Harry Potter games on PlayStation 2. This was worlds above anything I had ever seen Harry Potter-related. That was really great and I probably put about 60 hours into that. I didn’t want to breeze through that one too fast, but I wanted to play Atomic Heart, which was a day one Game Pass release for the Xbox. That was maybe 20 hours. That was cool, more of a smaller open world. The combat, the characters and the design were really good in that. I beat that kind of quick. I have a semi-newborn daughter, so I play games around taking care of her and tending to her.

After I did Atomic Heart, it was [Star Wars] Jedi: Survivor. I breezed through that one. I did maybe 30-some hours on that. That was great. That is, in my opinion, one of the top-tier video game sequels probably of the last 10 years. The story and the combat were great in the first one. The one thing I always think about between games is, I spent the entire first game garnering these abilities and these weapons and all these upgrades. So, if I start off the next game, am I gonna start off with all of these abilities again? And in Jedi: Survivor, they actually did make sure that you kept every single ability that you had from the first game and they managed to even upgrade everything from there and give you new abilities. And then I played Amnesia: the Bunker. That was 4 hours long, I beat that in a day. That was a day one Game Pass release. And then right now—I only put a few hours into it so far—Diablo IV.

The name Outer Heaven is a reference to Metal Gear Solid. Who came up with the idea for the name and why did you decide to go with it?
Our guitar player Jon [Kunz] had a list of names that he always wanted to use for a band. The original lineup of Outer Heaven was more of the core group of gamers of all of us. We had all played the games. He brought up the name. Actually, in the beginning of the band, when he had brought up Outer Heaven as a possibility for the name, I was actually going to just make the band Metal Gear-themed. I had written a few songs worth of lyrics that were all Metal Gear themed. I had a “Psycho Mantis Blues” and stuff like that. As we were writing the songs, we were like, “This actually could be something that’s not a joke.” I decided to go more serious with it, but we kept the name just because we had gotten so used to it at that point.

Do you still have those lyrics around some place?
I don’t know if I still have them anywhere written down. If I really thought about it, I could probably remember them. You’re talking about 10 years ago, you know? I’d be hard-pressed to find them written down somewhere. As far as Metal Gear Solid goes, we’ve always been big fans, especially our guitar player. My personal favorite: MGS 3: Snake Eater. There’s a lot of great characters in MGS3. You have the Cobra Unit, you have The End and The Fear and The Fury and The Sorrow. One’s the sniper and one’s the weird cosmonaut with the flamethrower. The one guy’s really just the spirit of the Medium. More than the previous games before it, it felt a little more surreal, the story and the characters.

They’re actually remaking MGS3, but without Hideo Kojima. I don’t necessarily think that means it couldn’t turn out great. Hideo Kojima is a legend in gaming for a reason. His stories are so out-of-this-world. Even when you’re talking about Death Stranding, you couldn’t name me a game that had a more cerebral story in the last 10 years than that. Very odd and obscure and almost psychedelic in some aspects; that’s why I really enjoyed it. I have high hopes for it. The animations from the teaser, I thought they looked good. I think I’d be excited for it. I’m sure I’ll buy it and play it whenever it comes out.

Would you be open to a future of Metal Gear without Hideo Kojima?
[Sighs] I don’t see a new entry in the series happening without him. I think people might be kind of afraid to touch it, but it’s hard to say. I’m not a purist. If somebody’s got a good idea and they think it’s worth doing, I’d give it a shot. But, I mean, obviously at the heart and soul of the series is Hideo Kojima. If they were trying to take it in a different direction—not necessarily the gameplay, but the story—that would be alright. When they were starting to remake the Resident Evils, they were just remakes. They weren’t brand new stories or anything. People were like, “It’s such a classic game in horror. You can’t fuck with these games!” And that was completely wrong. The remakes are so good. It’s an elevation of the horror; that’s what I like about it.

I [Michael] whole-heartedly agree. If you go back to those original games, I can’t imagine somebody looking at that and being like, “No, this story is perfect. Nobody can do better than this.” I know that Kojima is this galaxy-brain writer, but I can’t imagine that there’s nobody out there who can’t have a new, interesting take on the series.
Sure. Give me a Metal Gear universe game from the writers of The Last of Us, or something like that. When you played The Last of Us 1, the story is so oppressive. At every fucking turn, you’re just like, Dude, what in the hell is going on here? Everything just goes bad, goes wrong. It’s depressing, but it feels good at parts, it feels horrible at parts. As far as story games go, that’s top tier, maybe of all time.

I love horror games. If there’s a horror game to be played, I’ve played it. Still, I think one of the absolute greatest games was [2014’s] Alien: Isolation. That was a game that totally took me by surprise. I was used to never having any good Alien-related or Predator-related games, with a few exceptions.

This is another thing I really love about games: When you have a game that’s based off of a movie series or a T.V. series, it’s an ability to expand on the lore of a movie or a franchise you love, like with Alien: Isolation. The main character that you’re playing as is Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda Ripley. If you only ever saw the original Aliens film in theaters or you only ever saw the theatrical cut, you don’t even know that Ellen has a daughter. It was only in one of the extended versions—an early ’90s special edition—where she shows the picture of her daughter and it’s a picture of an old woman because she had been away and she had been in cryosleep. Then you find out via Alien: Isolation what her daughter had been doing. All of the events of Alien: Isolation are happening between Alien and Aliens. The ability of a game to expand on something that you really enjoy that isn’t even really game-related is just crazy. I love when that’s able to happen in that way.

Alien: Isolation just goes to prove that good writing is good writing. For so long, people kind of dismissed video games as just kid’s stuff. We’re seeing such an elevation of the medium that you get something like The Last of Us T.V. series that really [expands] the series itself.
It’s amazing that you can take a “child’s plaything” like a video game to some people and turn it into one of the most popular T.V. series of the year. You don’t have to know a single thing about the game to enjoy it. It does just go to show it does come down to writing. I think as I get older, that’s what I really enjoy more about games than even the gameplay itself. I sometimes get so immersed in the story that the gameplay is almost secondary and I’m just trying to get to that next point where the story is gonna progress. But there’s these million side quests to do. That was a big problem I was having when I was playing Jedi: Survivor: I was like, I want to keep going here, but there’s all these missions. I don’t want to skip all this stuff. I had seen and read about how the story—even pertaining to the side missions and stuff—was pretty good. I find myself sometimes almost getting anxiety and I get overwhelmed with some open world games sometimes because of that.

I [James] definitely hit that with Horizon: Forbidden West. I love the little towns and the side quests. But then I’d play that for 10 hours and I’d be like, There’s a main story I’m supposed to be doing. I have to go save the world!
Horizon is a perfect example of a game that becomes extremely overwhelming because there’s so much. In the first Horizon game, they were getting their footing. And then they took that and they expanded on it, like, a hundred fold for the second one. When you open up the map in Horizon 2, it’s just like, [pantomimes objective dots appearing on a map] all over the fucking screen. I’m like, OK, ahhh, I’m gonna go here, here, there’s this machine monster here, and then there’s this quest, there’s a million fetch quests. In the first Horizon, I had found all the pieces to get the special armor. The armor basically made you invincible. I felt really good that I had done that. I was like, I hope there’s something like that in the second game. As soon as I got 2 or 3 hours in, I was like, Man, this is too much for me almost.

That’s exactly why I can’t play Assassin’s Creed. I played one Assassin’s Creed game: Valhalla. There was a time I played for, like, 15 hours straight and I didn’t do one thing pertaining to the main story. I was just trying to get all these icons off the map. And then it even got to a point where I wasn’t even sure how to progress the main story. Eventually, I had to look it up. That’s another game that I sunk way too much time into. The payoff is not huge when you put in that much time into a game like that.

What’s the ideal game length for you? I feel like we’re hitting peak game hours for some of these open world games where the expectation is minimum 60 hours to finish the story and nothing else.
My ideal game would be a non-open world game. I certainly don’t hate [open world games], but every game is trying to outdo the last game with the biggest open world and the most stuff. If you want to play all of these AAA games, you have to have a lot of time on your hands. I played The Callisto Protocol. That was more of a linear game. You just go through, you kill stuff. It’s gory, it’s brutal, it looks good. There’s a variety of weapons and stuff like that, so it’s not super linear, but I didn’t have to constantly worry about backtracking across places I had already been and hitting, like, 75 locked doors. I do like linear games because a lot of games that I played growing up were more linear. Open world was not really a huge thing. [The Legend of Zelda:] Ocarina of Time was semi-open world-ish, in terms of traversing to different areas, but it wasn’t gigantic by any means.

There’s so much out there nowadays. I keep a list on my phone of games that are either coming or that came out that I didn’t get to yet because I don’t want to forget anything. If there’s a big AAA game coming out that might be, like, 30 hours or whatever, I’m gonna play it. I’ve been sticking to a lot of shorter games only because I get to play basically in two-hour increments after my daughter goes to bed or on the weekend if my wife’s home and she lets me play. It’s been something that’s been so ingrained in what I do for my whole entire life that I can never just put it down.

Horror games have some of the best opportunities for great writing. Do you explore the indie horror scene much at all?
If there’s a game that I’m seeing a lot of buzz for and it’s only on PC, I own a PC that’s got specs that can basically play anything. I keep it for that reason. Derrick [Vella, guitarist] from Tomb Mold, he was playing with us for a bit. He’s very into PC gaming. At the end of the year, he makes a post of all the best games he played for the whole year. Some of them are very horror-esque. I ended up playing one or two of them that I enjoyed. If I hear about a game that people say is horror and it’s good, I don’t care what it’s on; I’m gonna play it. I own basically everything that exists: PlayStation 5, Series X, Switch, PC. I’ve just accumulated that stuff for this reason. I don’t want to miss out on any games that will inevitably come out on one of the consoles. If there’s something that I hear about—and I try to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on—I will most certainly make it a point to try and play it.

For a period of time when we were working on our new album, I was like, “I would really love to see if I could get somebody to make an 8-bit game using the art from the album.” I have a good premise for an 8-bit side-scroller game that would use the creatures off the album art. But the amount of time it takes even for somebody to make a decently polished 8-bit game is way crazier than I thought. I did talk to some people and they were like, “Yeah, it would probably take me about this long,” and I was like, “Holy hell. That is way, way longer than I had anticipated.” That was something I really wished we could have done. Maybe on the next one.

Speaking of the new album, 2018’s Realms of Eternal Decay and the upcoming Infinite Psychic Depths both have unique and very in-depth fantastical cosmic horror narratives. Do you ever draw any inspiration from any gaming franchise when you’re coming up with lyrics?
As we were writing for this album, I was playing through for the very first time the Dead Space trilogy on Game Pass, which obviously is right up my alley in terms of content. I felt like that had a good influence on what was going on with the new record. There’s actually a quote on the insert of the new album that is from Dead Space. Well, I heard it for the first time in Dead Space 1, but supposedly it’s from Hamlet and I had absolutely no idea. I was like, Man, that is a sick quote. Just by happenstance, it really embodied a lot of the main aspects of what was on the new album and even on the Realms album. I was like, I’d really like to include that somewhere in the record, I think it speaks a lot to what’s going on here. “Liquefied Mind,” I came up with that while I was playing Dead Space. I had seen a guy floating in a tube and his brain was kind of popping out.  I saw the brain and I saw the floating and I was like, “Yeah, that’s a [rhythmically] Liquefied, liquid mind, liquefied mind, oh, that’s cool.” I made it fit into the story that I had created for the album.

There’s actually a quote on the insert of the new album that is from Dead Space. Well, I heard it for the first time in Dead Space 1, but supposedly it’s from Hamlet and I had absolutely no idea. I was like, Man, that is a sick quote.

I’m a big fan of the narrative album. We like to create stories and that’s the Realms and Infinite Psychic Depths albums. They have the stories go like this [laces fingers together]. Even down to the music, it overlaps. In the last track of the new album, the song ends and it’s a false ending where it goes to silence. And then it’s 20 seconds of silence and then it starts to pick up again and it sounds like something’s playing backwards. It’s actually the first 30 seconds of the first song off of Realms playing in reverse. And then there’s a heartbeat playing in the background over it. That heartbeat is actually a sample I had recorded of my wife’s stomach—of our daughter’s heartbeat—while my wife was pregnant. I used that on the record. The end of the last track on Infinite Psychic Depths and the first track on Realms are kind of like a spark-of-life theme.

As far as games go, I feel like I unconsciously kind of draw in a lot of influence from a lot of different games and movies and T.V. I think of something and it seems like, I just randomly came up with this idea. But unconsciously, I think it was just kind of working its way through my brain from all of the stuff I consume on a regular basis.

Recently, there have been a number of attempts at cosmic horror in video games. Have you come across any titles that you feel properly represent the genre?
As far as cosmic horror goes—more Alien style, like Callisto Protocol or Returnal—they’re doing a good job. They have a good sense of dread in them that I really like. I like not feeling safe at any point in the game. Even with Alien: Isolation, for example: There’s a moment where you feel safe after you’ve escaped. The red dot is flashing on your device, you’re running, you’re trying to hide and you feel safe for, like, three seconds. You walk out of the room and boom, Xenomorph, right in your face. I like that sense of dread and fear. I feel like a lot of the really good horror games I played on console, too, were more of the low-key stuff. Outlast, Amnesia; those are some fucking scary games. They don’t have to do a lot to be scary. They can just hit those perfect notes.

That’s kind of the pitfall of a lot of AAA horror. AAA is really good at action, but they’re not really good at subtlety. You have to rely on people like the Amnesia developers to come up with the thing that’s the simple mechanic that really tickles the back of your neck with that sense of dread. It’s super dated and kind of a joke now, but when Slender came out, that shit was terrifying to people.
It was because you hadn’t really experienced something like it. You want something new and fresh and scary. It is a task to come up with something that feels like it hasn’t been done. Scary is scary. Movies are different. In a movie, you’re just following along someone else’s story. In a video game, you’re part of what’s going on and they have to use that to their advantage to make it more scary to you. I think that’s a little more difficult than other formats of artistry.

It reminds me of those Dark Pictures Anthology games. I actually enjoyed those games and I played them up to the most recent one. They’re fun because they are kind of story-focused and narrative-focused, but you ultimately make the turning point decisions in the game. You can kind of sit back, make decisions and enjoy it like a movie without having to be a major part of what’s going on. It feels like the middle ground between a movie and a game, with a lot of replayability because there’s so many different options. I always do horribly in those games where all my people die at the end. [Laughs]

You’re creating an experience, and that’s why I say it’s different from a movie. A movie is an experience but it requires nothing from you. A game asks you to do a lot and it has to be enjoyable. That’s the main goal of it, I think, for most developers: For you to want to play the game. Even if it’s scary, you’re still having a good time doing it. It’s a hard task. Maybe that’s why you could say that a lot of video game developers are underappreciated for what they do. They create an experience that’s unlike most other art forms.

Kojima’s a rockstar now, hanging out with his movie star buddies.
You see a lot of celebrities vying to get involved in games, which is interesting. For example, Cyberpunk [2077]. They created an entire mythology and marketing campaign with Keanu Reeves as the center of it. They were able to use his likeness and everything else and make it a crucial part of the game. It’s almost like a movie. You see a Keanu Reeves movie because you like Keanu Reeves; you buy a Keanu Reeves game because you like Keanu Reeves. It’s very weird. Back in the day, you didn’t buy a game because it had a celebrity voice actor in it. The voice actors in games were not unknown, but more low-key. Nowadays, they can literally take an actor’s entire likeness and turn them into a video game main character.

Look at something like Twitch. If you had pitched the idea of Twitch to somebody when we were younger and said, “It’s like a T.V. show and you watch other people play video games.” I imagine even trying to tell my mom about this now, she’d be like, “This is a thing?”
100 percent. I’d love to be into streaming and stuff, but I do not have the time or the patience or the skill. Nobody wants to watch me play a game. I sit in a corner just keep walking back through the same room over and over again. [Laughs]

I [James] was watching Ben [Hutcherson, guitarist] from Khemmis play Elden Ring [recently]. He’s running through, dodging stuff and fighting monsters. I’m like, I couldn’t do that because it would just be me dying over and over again and nobody wants to watch that.
Khemmis got the opportunity that I wish to high heavens we could have, which is to have your song in a video game. They have the theme for the Dark Pictures games. Even Tomb Mold did a song that plays on the metal station of Cyberpunk. That is my dream, to have one of our songs in a game. There can’t possibly be anything harder than getting your music into a video game or a movie. The selection is so thin already. A movie that has a soundtrack with 12 songs on it [and] out of every song in the world, they landed on those 12 songs. That would be absolutely insane, to have your music immortalized in a game somehow. Every time I play one of those Dark Pictures games, it does the intro prologue with the narrator and then it cuts to the credits where the Khemmis song booms in. Man. It’s the sickest shit ever. I can’t even imagine it.

In addition to video games, you’re a Magic: The Gathering fan and even named all the songs from 2015’s Diabolus Vobiscum after different Magic cards. What’s the story behind that?
When I was younger, my brothers and I were very, very into Magic: The Gathering, around the time when Mirrodin was coming out. My brothers and I went to the card shop and played there all the time. The shop used to have this thing where they had this overnight party where you could go there even if you were a kid and you could stay there overnight. They had a huge projector and you would play Smash Bros. They would do drafts and all kinds of shit. And then as I got older and my brother went off and I went off, we stopped playing as much.

Around the Diabolus EP, me and my brother and our bass player at the time [Phil Jaquez] and some other friends, we all were trying to get back into playing. I was now an adult with all this money, so I was just getting whatever card I wanted. I actually went back and I was making all these decks from back then. I was like, I forgot how insane this game was. We were just really vibing on M:tG at the time. I was coming up with song titles and I was like, It would be awesome to name the tracks after different cards from the game. They already came up with all the really cool names and stuff. I can just go through and pick the cool ones. Some of the cards have a description on the bottom. If it had a description, I would read it and I would use that as a basis for the song.

That was the first time that I kind of branched out into being a little more obscure about the topics. On our demo, I was writing more personal stuff, which I never did since then. Looking back on it, it kind of makes me feel weird that I wrote personal stuff. I had written a song on our demo about my dad passing at the time. I was like, Man I really don’t like to listen to this or read the lyrics or do anything with this. I kind of detached myself from it. I kind of got more comfortable in writing about more sci-fi and cosmic stuff. I kind of found my niche in that. I started creating a story on the Realms album that I continued into the new album. I’ll continue it into the third album as best I can. I always had a proclivity towards the sci-fi and fantasy stuff like that, which is how that kind of played out.

Are there any games that are coming up that you’re looking forward to?
Let me check my list here. I’ve got Dredge. That’s been out for a while on Switch. I haven’t played it yet. I was actually gonna put the Switch in our bedroom and just play it at night right before I go to bed for an hour or two. I know it’s not long, I just haven’t gotten around to it. The Greyhill Incident. Have you heard of that?

Don’t play it.
It’s not good?

It’s terrible.
Alright, scratch it off the list then. It was coming out for console this week and I was like, Eh, maybe I’ll try it. I’d love to see a game that touches on those topics, but it’s gotta be well done.

Alien: Dark Descent. It’s an RTS Alien game. RTS games can kind of go either way. It looks kind of cool, maybe I’ll play it. It’s coming out for Switch. I like to play those kinds of games on my Switch because that’s the type of game that I play on the go. I don’t sit down at home with the strategy games a lot. I play them in the car or on the way to a show. This has been out for a long while, but I had never played it, but the remaster of Alan Wake. They announced the second one and I was like, Alright, I better go back and do the first one. Those are the ones that I’m kind of focused on at the moment. Those would be what I play next either on my Switch or whenever I finish Diablo. I know in the fall there’s supposed to be some bigger titles. I try not to put anything on my list that’s more than a or two month away because I’m just gonna get overloaded with stuff.

Game Pass keeps a good back stock of games, a nice catalog and a lot of nice day one releases. I’m only paying $15 a month for Game Pass, but I’m getting a $40 to $60 game, and I’m getting one basically every month. That is at least somewhat worthwhile. I’m glad I have all the consoles. Not everybody is that fortunate, but it’s nice to have them just to have the variety and options in playing everything.

Infinite Psychic Depths is available July 21 via Relapse Records and can be pre-ordered here.
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