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.
