Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX

Loud and proud

Playstation 2000 Z-axis

While the vast majority of my writing is published in i’ve been known to contribute to other magazines around these parts, from the likes of (RIP) and

(RIP) to (RIP) – and as i write this, i’ve recently submitted my first piece for

My dad raised me on Motörhead and I’ve been reading the magazine for over a decade, so it’s quite exciting. And like so many things in my life, gaming helped develop my love of heavy music.

Back when I was a young teenager, I didn’t really have many ways to discover music. What little money I got for working was spent on games and cards, and we didn’t have a PC so I couldn’t get in on the nascent MP3 revolution. We didn’t have cable TV either, so I couldn’t watch music channels. Thankfully, I grew up in an era of licensed soundtracks, and they helped to expand my tastes when I had few other options – and one of the games that really stood out to me on that front was

As a game, was fine. It’s pretty easy to see that publisher Acclaim’s entire design process was to get Z-axis, give them a copy of

and say, “Something like this, please.” Despite being fairly derivative, the ragdoll crash animations were pretty funny and it was a competent game that was easy to have fun with, so I put more time into it than I care to think about. But the biggest reason I stuck with it for so long was for its soundtrack, which features an assortment of artists that Darran would describe as “too loud” – Rancid, Dropkick Murphys and Deftones among them. For me, the best track of the lot is one of Social Distortion’s heaviest songs and one whose anti-racist message hasn’t aged a bit. I haven’t played the game in a long time, but I do think fondly of it whenever I hear that song.