Published: October 13, 2009 03:52 pm      

Designer Tim Schafer's 'Brutal' dream come true

WASHINGTON (AP) — Heavy metal will never die, but if you're just downloading it from iTunes, you're missing an important element. Album art — metal's hallucinatory hellscapes, with their blood-red skies, lava-filled lakes and mountains of skulls — once defined the genre every bit as much as grinding guitars and wailing vocals.

Video-game designer Tim Schafer remembers. He grew up listening to bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Megadeth, "and I stared at the album art," he says. "If you were lucky you had a gatefold with an epic heavy metal landscape."

Those images were the inspiration for "Brutal Legend," the epic adventure being released by Electronic Arts this week. It tells the story of a rock 'n' roll roadie, Eddie Riggs, who's transported to an alternate dimension where humanity has been enslaved by demons — and only the power of rock can save them.

Jack Black, whose band Tenacious D paid tribute to metal even while lampooning it, seemed a natural choice to provide the voice of Eddie. "We heard he liked 'Psychonauts,'" Schafer says, referring to his previous game. "We set up a meeting, showed him some art, and he jumped right in."

"Brutal Legend" also features the voices of heavy metal legends like Ozzy Osbourne, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister and Judas Priest's Rob Halford. "It was a dream come true," says Schafer. "When I was a kid, my head would've melted if I knew that someday I was gonna have Ozzy explain what the runes on the 'Diary of a Madman' cover meant."