Avenged Sevenfold tries its hand at games development

US rock band Avenged Sevenfold has been working on its first ever video game – a mobile RPG entitled Hail to the King: Deathbat.

The game was developed for iOS and Android by Subsistence Studios and is set in a world is inspired by the group’s discography. it features music by the band and is due for release tomorrow.

Speaking to Polygon, the band’s frontman M. Shadows said the title is designed to serve a similar function to a music video.

"for us a video game really is the next music video," he said. "It’s not going to make us popular on the streets, it’s not going to this or that. But our generation grew up on games, and people have short attention spans.

"This is a chance for us to tell our story – the game is the story of our Deathbat, and there’s visuals and artwork and there’s music that we put in the game. So this is another creative outlet for us, instead of making shitty music videos on a 40k budget and throwing them on YouTube and hoping that someone goes and finds it."

Avenged Sevenfold first discussed the possibility of making a game during a break in their touring schedule, originally hoping to make a triple-A console game. Shadows even read up on how to prepare a game design document and began writing one in the hopes of getting a publishing deal.

However, he was pointed towards mobile by some familiar games industry faces.

"I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of friends such as Mark Lamia at Treyarch and the guys at Activision," he said. "So basically I wrote this thing over a whole summer and it was forty, forty-five pages… It was probably 18/th of the game written out.

"I took it to Mark and he said, man, this game is going to cost you literally 200-500 million to do it. Unless you want to quit Avenged Sevenfold and be the lead on this thing, seriously, it will ruin your life."

Image: Clay Patrick McBride