Avenged Sevenfold: Tapping its partnership with gaming franchise 'Call of Duty,' Avenged Sevenfold is poised for big things with the old-school metal wallop of "Hail to the King"

Last October, metal five-piece Av­enged Sevenfold scored perhaps the biggest booking of any musical act outside of the Grammys.

It wasn't an awards show, it wasn't a festival date-it wasn't even a physical appearance. Instead, the band appeared in animated form during the end credits of Activision's "Call of Duty: Black Ops II," performing a custom-made song called "Carry On" and becoming part of videogame history in the process. In its first 15 days of release, "Black Ops II" became the fastest-selling game to pass the $1 billion mark and the largest entertainment launch in Hollywood history, exposing Avenged Sevenfold to millions of fans in the process. A YouTube clip of the band's cameo has racked up 6.2 million views. Not bad for a band that refuses to play the talk-show circuit.

"I don't want the fair-weather fans, the soccer moms who watch 'Jimmy Kimmel' to discover us that way," says Sevenfold lead singer Matt Sanders, who performs as M. Shadows. "I want the people who grew up listening to AC/DC and Slayer, and if we can figure out the right way to have those people see a snippet of what you'd see at a festival or a live show, we'll do it."

Though "Carry On" was physically released this year only as a Record Store Day exclusive-selling 3,000 copies, according to Warner Bros. Records marketing assistant Jamil Baldwin-it set a dramatic precedent for Hail to the King, the band's sixth album and most cinematic in scope to date. Opener "Shepherd of Fire" has a 70-second introduction filled with brooding brass, crunchy riffs and heart-racing drums so ripe for an action movie that "Call of Duty" publisher Treyarch immediately selected it to score a key scene in "Apocalypse," the fourth and final download pack for "Black Ops II." And in a serendipitous synchronizing of marketing rollouts, "Apocalypse" arrives the same day as "Hail to the King." That could give the album an extra exposure boost to help it beat the first-week sales of the band's last outing, "Nightmare," which entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 in August 2010 with 163,000 copies, Avenged Sevenfold's best sales week to date, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Other musicians have been a part of "Call of Duty"-Trent Reznor composed the theme music for "Black Ops II," and Eminem just debuted his first single in three years in the trailer for upcoming "threequel" "Ghosts." But few have had the in-game exposure, and real-life camaraderie with the publishers, as Avenged has. Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia first tapped the band in 2011 for a zombie-themed "Call of Duty" update dubbed "Call of the Dead"-the result of a frenzied search to find the right band that could create an original song in a rather tight three-month time frame.

"Up until that point, we had composed all our signature songs with our composer Kevin Sherwood, and it was very metal-influenced and built kind of a cult following," Lamia recalls. "We wanted to see what we could do with a band, and it didn't take long before there was an Avenged Sevenfold CD in here. I met with Matt, and it became clear that he was very ­serious about 'Call of Duty' and had a passion for the franchise and loved it and got what we were trying to make. It was one of those meetings where everything came together."

Not only did the initial meeting result in a brand-new Avenged Sevenfold track ("Not Ready to Die") to score the zombie slaughter-not to mention a later use of Nightmare for one of the game's expansion packs-a more personal relationship emerged. Today, Lamia and Shadows go to Laker games together, trade advice as new fathers and attend Major League Gaming tournaments. In June, Shadows attended his first MLG Spring Championship in Anaheim, Calif., as both a spectator and competitor, only to see his team's beaten-by-the-clock elimination voted one of the event's "Top Fails."

Shadows' passion for gaming extends to the road, too, as each concert has a custom-built room known as "Fort Knox" for him to play Xbox before shows. "Matt was telling me when he was recording Hail to the King he was playing the original 'Black Ops,'" Lamia says. "We're both marrying our passion to our work. He's marrying his passion with the music, and we get to work with this amazing, accomplished act and it's a real, genuine collaboration. The respect that comes with that and being able to work with those guys is pretty awesome."

The culture around first-person shooter games has been a part of every step of "Hail to the King"'s marketing rollout, beginning with a series of game-like scavenger hunts held in key venues around the world in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Helsinki, London, Stockholm and Berlin. Using the band's official Twitter account (@TheOfficialA7X; 926,000 followers), an augmented-reality app and media partners like Revolver magazine, Avenged Sevenfold dropped clues in real-world locations where fans could unlock the album's title, artwork and release date, and additional special prizes.

The Brazil version gave five fans a pair of tickets to Rock in Rio. The New York version led fans to a studio where the band was mixing the album, allowing a very devoted group to hear the new music months before anyone else. Additional contests gave fans tickets to a free show at Los Angeles' Palladium on Aug. 26, the eve of the album's release.