HOW SLAYER ALMOST ENDED UP NOT BEING IN GUITAR HERO: METALLICA

When the track list for the upcoming Guitar Hero: Metallica video game was announced a week or two back, we were flooded with e-mails asking us to post about it. But why should we? The tracklist is solid – certainly way better than I thought it would be, in terms of not making you play too much from the band’s wasted years – but there wasn’t much actual news to the announcement.

ANYWAY, there will be, of course, a bunch of non-Metallica songs included in the game (which were allegedly selected by the members of Metallica themselves), including Slayer’s “War Ensemble.” As it turns out, though, Slayer almost ended up not being in the game at all – and not because of their ongoing rivalry with the Metallicats. Lead GH: Metallica designer Alan Flores explained to MTV:

We’ve had Slayer in [a “Guitar Hero” game] before. But now, you can sing their lyrics. It’s a totally different ball of wax. We had the song “Angel of Death” cleared. Anybody that knows Slayer knows that that song is not about, “Hey, it’s good to go out there and do these terrible things.” They did a song about a really bad guy and it’s obvious that they didn’t put any commentary into the song, but some people interpreted it the incorrect way.

And that controversy probably blew over 10, 15 years ago, right? Everybody knows that, but it’s going to show up in a video game and some parents might see it. We couldn’t get that song cleared, and we had to take it off. Which personally killed me because Slayer was my absolute favorite band when I was in high school. And Lars was like, “We have to get Slayer, we have to get Slayer, we have to get Slayer.”

Then we got “War Ensemble” cleared, but it’s after we’ve gone down the line and got all our songs done. Lars really wanted it in the game. I really wanted it in the game. But I didn’t want to be the guy who broke the bad news to everybody and says to the people on the team, “Hey, you know what? You all need to stay late and do extra work because Lars wants a song in the game.” But he was really adamant that it needed to be in the game.

So we sucked it up, we did the extra amount of effort to put the song into the game at the last minute. But it’s Slayer. It just makes the game so much better. That song puts the high-end difficulty in there; it’s harder than anything else in the game, and it’s even hard on bass. And you can imagine what it’s like on drums with double bass pedals. It’s insane. It took a lot of extra work on our part. In the end, I’m glad we did it, and I appreciate everybody that had to pull together to try and get it done.

While I understand the concern of having kids sing lyrics about Auschwitz, you have to see the humor in having kids sing the lyrics to “War Ensemble” instead. In case you’ve forgotten said lyrics, here’s a sample:

Propaganda death ensemble
Burial to be
Corpses rotting through the night
In blood laced misery
Scorched earth the policy
The reason for the seige
The pendulum exchange the blade
for strafing air blood raid

So, there you have it. The parents of America can rest easy knowing their kids will now be playing a more wholesome, less controversial Slayer song.

-AR