 Over time, the worlds of music and video games have been getting ever closer. Not only will many games employ an orchestra to create a quality sound track, or licence various artist’s music to appear in a video game, but games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are being seen as a new way for the music industry to directly promote music.
For German Metal band Blind Guardian, just having your music in a game wasn’t enough. They’ll actually get to appear as themselves in a Diablo style role playing game called Sacred 2, released on PC and Xbox 360 later this year. It’s an exciting venture for these ‘Bards’ of fantasy metal, who have been an influential force in heavy metal for the last 20 years, famous for songs, lyrics and album covers inspired by fantasy works by J.R.R Tolkien, Stephen King and Michael Moorcock. While their earlier albums like ‘Battalions of Fear’ and ‘Follow the Blind’ were primarily Speed metal, the group’s style has developed over the years to embrace Power metal elements, with huge orchestral arrangements and choirs to create an epic sound. Their latest album, ‘A Twist in the Myth’ was released in 2006. It was this fantasy metal style that prompted game developer Ascaron, to invite the band to create a track for the game and become part of the game world.
UKMusic.com went to meet the band in Hungary, where they were filming the motion capture for their appearance in the game. We chatted with Blind Guardian lead vocalist, Hansi Kursch, and guitarists, André Olbrich and Marcus Siepen, about their music, role in Sacred 2 and their thoughts on music games like Guitar Hero.
UKMusic.com: For those who may not be familiar with Blind Guardian, can tell us a bit about the band?
Hansi Kursch: We’re a German metal band, some might call it progressive metal, some call it Fantasy metal, but if you get down to the bone its heavy metal. We’ve been around since the 80’s and have done about 8 studio albums so far. While we’re not totally unknown in the UK, our world tours have hit London, it isn’t our biggest market. We’re very successful across Europe and South East Asia, particularly Germany and Japan. We’re getting a good buzz in the US right now too. Fantasy plays a huge part in our inspiration, but it’s not just fantasy like Tolkien and Moorcock that we focus on, but also horror and more sci-fi related stuff. Stephen King for example, all his stuff just rocks and his Dark Tower books have played a big part in Blind Guardian’s music.
UKM: Blind Guardian is seen as having had a big influence on certain metal genres, particularly Speed Metal, but who do you feel influenced you as you developed?
HK: When we first started playing metal in the beginning, all we were doing was listening to was metal, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, that sort of thing. It was the best music in the world as far as we could imagine, so had a huge effect. But our background and growing up was in the 70’s, so that means our first and earliest influences were people like Deep Purple, Queen, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis- stuff like that. So later on – I don’t want to say when we became proper musicians, but we came closer – we tried to put these different ingredients into the metal! Queen, for example was one of those key influences and the most admirable band we can imagine. So we mixed in all those elements and it worked!
Nowadays as we develop even further, there’s even some funky stuff to be heard in the last album. We’ve done stuff that we’ve never done before and no other metal band that I can think of has done, we just try to explore music and create our unique style.
UKM: You’re known by your fans as ‘Bards’ why is that?
HK: That goes back to an album we did in the 90’s called, ‘Somewhere Far and Beyond’ with a definitive Blind Guardian song called ‘The Bard’s Song’, which is about the gathering of time travelling minstrels and partially took it’s inspiration from a computer game called ‘A Bard’s Tale. I’m not really a computer game’s player, that’s more Andre and Marcus, who came up with the concept. But I thought it would be a good basis for the album concept, even if it was just a loosely based on it.
UKM: How did Blind Guardian get involved with Sacred 2?
HK: That’s quite an interesting story. Having three very active fantasy
computer game nerds in the band, it’s easy to imagine the big impact Sacred 1 has had on us. Because of their passion for Blind Guardian, some of the people at Ascaron in charge of Sacred 2 saw it as an opportunity to have us in the game musically. Coincidence or predestination? We’ll never know. Fact is, when we were finally contacted by Ascaron asking if we were interested in doing a song for the game, we immediately agreed to do so. So far the whole thing
has been great fun for us. The reason for that is quite simple: Blind Guardian’s music and the world of Ancaria perfectly blend together. It’s certainly an unusual experience seeing yourself as 3D game character, almost looking better than the original! In the game the gamer will also have the chance to see us headlining our new song on Ancaria’s main stage somewhere far beyond reality. What a blast!
UKM: What exactly can we expect from Blind Guardian in Sacred 2?
HK: At first we were only asked to do a song which would be used in the game. Later on, the Ascaron guys came up with the splendid idea in having us as resident NPC characters in the world of Ancaria. We perform in the game as a kind of a prize after a quest which our characters are involved in. We’re here today to do motion capture for that performance, so it’s a big challenge and the first time we’ve ever done anything like this.
UKM: What can you tell us about the track you’re doing for Sacred 2?
HK: It’s called ‘Sacred’ – the easy stuff always works best! It’s about six minutes long and there are a lot of musical changes in there, but I’m sure the ‘hook-line’, which contains the word Sacred of course, will make it very easy for the listener to get into the track, even through it’s quite a complicated number.
UKM: What sort of things influenced the creation of the song?
HK: There was a combination of things, including seeing the Sacred 2 concept art and playing the previous game. I started the music prior to playing the game, so initially the music was inspired by regular video game music, or at least what I understood as computer game music. I started playing the game, to be honest it was the first game I’ve really played, I’m not really a computer games pundit! André and Marcus are the band’s gamers, but I did 4 or 5 levels to get an idea and then focused on the music. There was a certain amount of inspiration from Sacred 2 itself, as I asked the programmers and writers to give me an idea of where the game’s story was going, so we wove that into the song.
UKM: This isn’t your first video game related project, is it? Didn’t Uwe Boll’s recent video game movie, ‘In the name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale’, feature Blind Guardian music?
HK: It was slightly different with the Dungeon Siege movie – our record company came up with the idea because they’d been in contact with the German film company looking for bands like Blind Guardian to be involved in the movie. In the end it turned out they just needed some music for the credits. One of our songs they used was ‘Carry the Blessed Home’ based on Stephen King’s Dark Tower. We were willing to give them some of our stuff but didn’t have any creative input; it was music from our previous albums.
UKM: After these experiences would you be interested in doing more video game music?
HK: Yes, we’d like to. In the past we were always really looking to do things like movies and games, but as an independent band on a major label with EMI and Virgin, we never got the chance, they always gave anything like that to one of their major bands. But we terminated that contact in 2000 and luckily they let us go, which leaves us open to this kind of thing.
 UKM: Is it true that Blind Guardian could have been involved with the music in the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy?
HK: Yes, when the movies were announced there were pages on the web voting on who should do the soundtrack and a lot of people voted for Blind Guardian, saying our music would be the perfect soundtrack. We’ve worked on LOTR inspired orchestral stuff ever since the late 90’s, some of which is going to be released in 2010 – so we took the opportunity and got in touch with Peter Jackson’s production company. They had more or less made the decision about which music they would use, but would have been happy to listen to our stuff. But I was on tour at the time and we didn’t have the chance to get the vocals to them and skipped the idea.
UKM: As professional musicians, what do you think of music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band? Would you be happy to see Blind Guardian’s music in them?
HK: Sure, but to be honest I’d be more comfortable if we had the chance to create something particular for the game. I know that in most cases they use an existing song and put it in the game, but André does a lot of challenging stuff on guitar and it’d be important for us to make it interesting for the guys being ‘Guitar Heroes.’
André Olbrich: I think we would be a good fit in games like that. Those games are great, especially for kids, although just as many dads play too, I think it’s a great thing bringing music into the video game genre. There isn’t the same emphasis on music as entertainment this generation; it’s switched towards video games and movies. Music feels like it’s lagging behind sometimes, so I like that music, and rock music in particular, is coming through in this medium.
Marcus Siepen: I have Guitar Hero myself. I was kind of sceptical about it in the beginning, until my wife and I played Guitar Hero 2 at a friend’s place-and found it was actually a lot of fun. We went out the next day and bought Guitar Hero 3 and played through unlocking all the songs! As a party game Rock Band looks like fun; the only danger I can see with it is kids thinking “Ok, I’ll buy this game for my Playstation as a way to be a musician” – No you’re not!
I heard about a band that put videos on YouTube, their instruments were 2 iphones and a Nintendo DS! Sorry guys, those aren’t instruments and that isn’t making music. It might be a fun project and it might be entertaining to explore what you can get out of those things, but if you want to be in a band then grab a fucking instrument and learn how to play it!
UKM: Don’t you think that perhaps these kinds of games could help inspire passion for playing real music in people?
MS: That might be the case of course. If they grab Guitar Hero, play a little plastic guitar and love doing that, they might get attracted to it and say “I’d like to try the real thing” – which would be a good thing. As I said, the game is fun, it’s entertaining and that’s ok, it just shouldn’t be confused with being a musician.
UKM: Blind Guardian’s music is driven by your guitar work, but are you any good at playing Guitar Hero?
AO: No! I tried it once and couldn’t figure it out! It’s strange; I think I just need more time to get used to it.
MS: The funny thing is that if you’re actually able to play the guitar, the game’s more difficult, because what the game expects you to play is not what the real guitars are playing. As a real guitarist you tend to try to play what you hear – it gets complicated! We wouldn’t miss the chance of putting a song into something like Guitar Hero 4, it would be fun, but if I played our song in the game, I’d fail! I’d be trying to play the real song – either that or it would mess up our live performance on the next tour – I’d be screaming things like, “Where’s the green button!” Perhaps I should speak to Gibson about getting us guitars with buttons!
UKM: When can British fans and those who might want to hear Blind Guardian expect to see you in the UK next?
HK: We’ll be doing do the next 2 regular Blind Guardian albums back to back and intend to be done by the beginning of 2010. After that we’ll hit the road again and we’ll certainly hit London as part of the tour.
Interview By : Sam Bandah
To check out more on Blind Guardian visit: www.blind-guardian.com and for details on the forth-coming PC and Xbox 360 game Sacred 2 visit : www.sacred2.com
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