A proud brother of the PC Master Race, deadmau5, is no stranger to video gaming. When he’s not producing new and exciting music on his Twitch stream in the Creative category, he can be seen racking up goals in Rocket League, slaying mobs in Diablo III, or punching trees in Minecraft on his monstrous gaming PC. You can also learn to build your own with this how to guide from TheGreatSetup.com. In fact, many of you will recall that his name came about when he found a dead mouse inside his computer and was aptly named that “dead mouse guy” by friends.
“Music is 80 percent fun and 20 percent work. Video games for me is all fun.”
Joel recently spoke to Rolling Stone US after a Black Ops 3 stream event (video below) in New York City about his background with video games, among other brief topics.
“I’m a video game enthusiast. I love video games! They were a huge part of my upbringing in their early form when I was all about Dig Dug and River Raid. As they evolved, so did my music-making, and we just kind of grew up together like cool friends. It’s something I do still to this day. When I’m working on something and need to take a little break, I’ll go down and play some video games. It’s just a good time-sink to take your mind off shit” Joel said.
Unsurprisingly, deadmau5 has drawn quite a bit of inspiration for his unique sound from his history with playing video games, with 8bit influences making appearances in his music every now and then.
“The first video games that I ever played didn’t even have soundtracks. It was just a bunch of blips and bloops, and then as the technology evolved we started hearing soundtracks to early NES titles and Super Nintendo titles. I was actually really taken by the – if you will – soundtrack for Castlevania and Super Castlevania for Super Nintendo. That was like, “Holy shit! These are cool songs!” Now you can just take professional-level recordings as is – sometimes better – and just throw them in games.
So I was like, “Wow! This totally caught up.” And it runs parallel to me. I love making music, and some of mine lends itself to video-game-soundtrack-type stuff. We’ve been back and forth, of course, in and out of each other’s industries, kind of playing off each other. We’re just cool buddies, me and video games. Back in the day we even did a thing for DJ Hero where we went in a mo-cap studio and recorded me “DJ’ing” or whatever.”
When asked about whether or not he has any intentions of quitting touring and just living out the rest of his days producing and gaming, deadmau5 had this to say:
“No, no. Never. No. Because I owe it to my fans to tour. If I wanted to just cash out and do my own thing and go ride ATVs for the rest of my life, then I’d just cash the fuck out and stop spending money in the music and show up to festivals with a couple of USB sticks, stick ’em in the player and just make money like a fucking madman. I’d be Calvin fuckin’ Harris. But that’s not what I want to do. I like the challenges that touring provides: all the logistics involved, all the technology and constantly keeping in the front of production that looks great.
There were only so many moments in music history where precedents had been set, like Daft Punk in their pyramid and then me with my LED mouse head at Coachella in the cube. I can count that on one hand, how many times those things have happened, across the fucking span of music. That’s my goal: to be the guy who unveils that crazy fucking thing that people saw and then tour it a little while so we can share it with everyone else.
If you want to retire because you’re sick of fucking playing a CD, do it! Fuck, we won’t miss you. Yeah, that was rough for you. Anyways, I have the “me” thing going on, so I’ll just be over there.”
You can read the rest of Rolling Stone’s interview with Joel via the link below.
