KILL SCREEN 049: Tyler Affinito of EARTHBURNER on …

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Photo by Corey Soria • Edited by Stephanie Cabral

Across extreme music and video games, no two words command such an immediate reaction or inherent respect like “old school.” After witnessing light-speed progress in the blink of an eye, large swaths of the video game community are increasingly interested in older approaches, whether they be sprite-based 2D gameplay, PS1-era low poly models or a return to seemingly abandoned series. Metal, with over half a century of history claimed under its well-worn bullet belt, similarly has come full-circle on its own identity. Earthburner, conceived more than two decades ago by death metal O.G. and Broken Hope guitarist Jeremy Wagner, seeks to honor the pioneers of grindcore with their long, long awaited debut album Permanent Dawn, out this Friday on M-Theory Audio. In paying tribute to the classics, however, Wagner filled out Earthburner’s ranks with younger talent via Broken Hope/The Atlas Moth drummer Mike Miczek, Sanguisugabogg vocalist Devin Swank and Gloryhole Guillotine bassist—as well as today’s player character—Tyler Affinito.

Thanks to his access to games at a young age and the eventual musical influence of Wagner—his stepfather and now bandmate—Affinito now wears his love of the old school on his sleeve. Quite literally, in fact, as during our interview he proudly shares his Iron Maiden Eddie tattoo. His interests, however, aren’t stuck in a Portlandia time bubble and he understands first-hand the difficulties facing a younger audience looking to get into retro gaming. While discussing the technological headache he and a friend faced while playing Resident Evil: Outbreak, one of the PlayStation 2’s few attempts at online gaming with no official servers remaining, Affinito laments, “You can get all of that up and running and then you can go play with your friend and you can die immediately. Everything you just worked for, you can sit there and go, I don’t want to fucking do this anymore. Even a re-release of these things… that is extremely beneficial.” Where others have taken a far less generous position, Affinito expresses hope for the gaming industry’s return to the well and understands an important lesson: The kids are the future. Ahead of Earthburner’s appearance at Metal & Beer Fest: Denver 2024, the slaves to the Kill Screen are happy to catch up with Affinito to talk all things past, present and future in the world of digital escapism. We’re always up for learning something new.

What was your first gaming experience?
I had to have been, like, four years old. My dad had a thing where he would just buy whatever new gaming console there was and whatever game that he saw. I wasn’t looking one day and I popped in Resident Evil 2 on the PlayStation. [Laughs] I don’t know how I got there being four, but somehow I worked my way up to the first Licker encounter and died immediately. From then on until about maybe 12, 13, I just didn’t touch horror games. I was so fucking afraid of them to the point where I had bought [The Elder Scrolls IV:] Oblivion when it first came out because I really liked Morrowind, and [in] the first cave, there’s a zombie in it. And I remembered in 2006 getting really nervous and scared because there was a zombie in it. Since then, I’ve conquered that fear. I’ve gone on and played every single Resident Evil game, even emulating some of the harder to find and really not as good ones.

That was really the first gaming experience I remember. I used to watch my dad play Grand Theft Auto all the time. I played through all of Super Mario 64 on the N64. I also remember the first week that the original Xbox and Halo: Combat Evolved came out. My cousin lived down the street from me and he got it, like, almost immediately for some reason, and we co-op’ed through all of Combat Evolved. Essentially, I mainly just play horror games and FPSs and RPGs because of all these really early experiences, but I tend to play almost whatever I can get my hands on. Those are just my, I guess, bread and butter.

Are you mostly on console or PC nowadays?
Nowadays, I’m mostly on PC just because it’s the easiest way to basically play and own a lot of games. I have as many vintage systems as I can get my hands on. I obsessively collect PlayStation- and PlayStation 2-era horror games, as much as I can find them. Recently, because of Astrobot, I’ve actually turned my PS5 on for the first time in probably, like, two years. Playing that game has been a blast, but other than that, I built a PC, I’ve kept up with hardware upgrades for my PC and I try to buy and play everything I can on PC. Also, with having gotten a Steam Deck kind of recently and I travel quite a bit, the Steam Deck’s just made it easier to keep up and play games while I’m traveling. That’s more incentive for me to buy and emulate and do everything I can on PC, because I can also then do it on my Steam Deck.

The Steam Deck does make quite a few appearances when not at home then? Oftentimes when we ask this question, people say, “I always bring my Switch on the road, I always bring my Steam Deck in my backpack—and it doesn’t get more than one or two uses or it never comes out.”
Yeah, mainly a lot during travel time. I just love playing it on the plane. My fiancée is super into the Yakuza games and those games are, like, 200 hours each. We do a lot of traveling. Half the year, my parents are in Florida. I’m up in Chicago. If I don’t do any other traveling in the year, at least two or three times I’m flying down to Florida. My Steam Deck gets a lot of use whenever I’m traveling. A lot of time playing in bed, too. Before going to sleep, I’ll play a game on it with my fiancée. She’s got a Steam Deck, too, so we just sit there and play whatever. Thankfully, due to the Steam Deck, I’ve been able to get through two of those Yakuza games because, again, they’re, like, 200 hours. They’re awesome and the writing is incredible and the gameplay is really fun, but I just don’t wanna be sitting at my computer for 200 hours playing essentially a Japanese crime drama. I love having the ability to bring that with me everywhere. I still have to get emulation all set up on it, but when I get emulation set up on it, it’s gonna be over. [Laughs] If I’m ever running merch or if I’m ever traveling on tour or anything, you’ll see me probably obsessively playing it when I’m not talking to anyone.

You mentioned watching your dad playing Grand Theft Auto and your cousin getting Halo: Combat Evolved. Was gaming [while] growing up a big family activity for you? Or was it more of an insular, isolated activity?
Not really a family activity as much. My dad would buy games to let that take some of the time off his hands. My mom worked and my dad was the stay-at-home dad, so he would buy games for me to play by myself. Really, it was pretty insular until Halo 2 came out. I had, like, one or two very close friends as a child, one of whom lived in my town. I remember we were, in about third or fourth grade, really big fans of Halo. And then when Halo 2 came out, we both faked sick so that we could stay home and play Halo 2—which was also something we did for Halo 3 and Halo [3:] ODST and Halo: Reach. As soon as Halo 3 came out, [that] was really when I started hitting Xbox Live and online gaming. As soon as I did that, I was able to play with the friends of this one friend, and that whole group of people is still some of my best friends to this day, actually. I was kind of really insular with gaming—and just in general—up until Xbox Live and Halo 3, and then I just all of a sudden got this huge group of friends. Again, we’re still friends to this day. We still hop online and play games with each other all the time. We were just playing the Call of Duty beta that was out the past couple weekends, we were playing Helldivers 2 together.

It’s become something really special between me and my friends, actually. I have my best friends in the world because of playing video games and I don’t think that’s an experience I’d ever trade. There’s always this stereotype of the older generations being like, “Those damn kids! They just sit inside and play video games all day!” But what they’re missing with that critique is that that’s how we are playing with each other. That’s how we are socializing. That’s how we are making friends that last a lifetime. It’s been something that’s positively impacted my life socially. I don’t think I’d be the person I am today. I don’t think I’d have the friends I do. Due to having the friends I do, I don’t think I’d have my music taste or my anything expanded in the way that I do. My parents are metal fans, they’re punk fans—they’re old-school punk and metal fans, though. Growing up, that was my experience musically, and getting through playing those games with friends opened up my whole world to things that I would have never heard otherwise.

You’re splitting the difference between longer-form story games and massive online multiplayer games. Do you have a preference between the two?
Definitely single player games. [Laughs] If I’m playing a multiplayer game, I don’t wanna play with random people. I’m waiting for those friends to get online, I’m waiting for them to be done with their work schedule. I work freelance, so I’m sitting at my computer a lot in my downtime. But in their downtime, they’re recovering from work, they’re doing other stuff, they’re going out with people. My friends are all scattered now, so we’re not all in the same areas or necessarily even in the same time zone. It’s not that I don’t love those multiplayer experiences. I do love those multiplayer experiences, I cherish them. But in my free time, I’m playing single-player games by myself. I’m playing through Resident Evil, I’m playing through Silent Hill, I’m playing through all these games over and over. I’m playing through whatever indie horror game I found because that’s always a fun experience for me. I love sitting there and playing single-player games. I love multiplayer when it comes up, but that’s a very specific time. My friends aren’t on every single day. My friends are on, like, one or two days out of the week, but by myself, I can play single-player narrative games almost all the time.

I live with my fiancée. There’s a lot of time—like with Astro Bot—we’ve been switching off when we die. She never got to play through a lot of the older Silent Hill games, for example, and Silent Hill 2 is my favorite game ever. We’ve been switching through and playing that at every checkpoint. We tried it once before and the agreement was when we die, we would switch off—but I just played through it in one sitting and never died. [Laughs] She just sat there and watched it. It was her first experience with that game and she loved it. We’ve got very similar film tastes where we both really like David Lynch and weird, surrealistic films and horror films and stuff like that. She was really into the game on that level, but she’s like, “I want to play it. I want to experience the playing of it.”

Almost any day of the week, I prefer single-player games. That’s not to knock multiplayer experiences, though.

Horror plays a lot into Earthburner’s material. You are also a big horror fan and you mentioned the classics, like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, and also mentioned indie horror games. What was the game that got you to get over your fear of horror games? What are some of the gems that you feel are worth highlighting beyond the classics?
I think it was a combination of things. When I was 12, 13, that general age range, YouTube was coming into style and I would watch people play through these games. I would watch them play through Resident Evil 4 and F.E.A.R. and Fatal Frame. I’d watch them do that and I’d watch lists of “these are the top horror games that you need to play,” before that all really became this kind of jokey thing to watch a top 10 list on YouTube. I guess the moment that did it for me was I got my hands on Resident Evil 4 on the Wii. Resident Evil 4, it is a horror game, but it’s an action game primarily. Playing that on the Wii—because I kind of always sucked on a controller—being able to aim easier with that kind of opened up this whole world, and then I went out and started searching for these games that I never fully experienced at the time they were coming out because I was too scared. GameStops at that time were still selling PlayStation 2 games, so I would go and buy every Resident Evil and every Silent Hill and every Fatal Frame and every anything that had a scary cover. Anything that I read [about] online, I would just go buy it and then I would go play it.

Really, Resident Evil 4 got me over that, and then the next thing after that was Silent Hill 2, which I still play yearly. Both of those games are two of my favorite games ever, but I definitely end up replaying Silent Hill 2 more just because I think it’s a genius work of art. It’s just so deep and I think it’s beautiful in a way. The ending with Mary’s letter, every time reading or hearing her read that, just… I don’t know, it gets the tears flowing every time, you know? I would say Resident Evil 4 and then Silent Hill 2 kind of broke me out of that. From there, I just became this massive horror game fan.

As far as indie games that have come out, I recently replayed through this game Cry of Fear that’s a mod for the first Half-Life. It’s a little wonky controls-wise because it’s a mod for a game from 1998, there’s some not great voice acting in it, but the sense of dread and the sense of isolation is something that I really haven’t experienced outside of Silent Hill 2. It’s a very lonely game and it’s a deeply haunting experience. I recently also played a game that just came out called Hollowbody. I want to go back in because you can unlock a first-person mode. I thought that game was really good, even though it was kind of short. I know it’s a single developer, so I really want to see where that guy is going next because jumping into that fucking game, I was like, This feels like something I would have bought from GameStop years ago. This feels like something I would have dove into on the PS2 and had a blast with it. I really, really, genuinely enjoyed that game a lot recently. I really love a good puzzle in these games and there’s a good couple puzzles in there that had me scratching my head, like unlocking the safe code with just context clues of the dead girl and her graduation portraits and all that stuff. I thought that was genius and I was like, OK, I gotta see where whoever’s making this—a small team, single guy, whoever’s making it—I have to see where they go next. Given some more time and some more polish, they can make the next great indie horror game.

You mentioned buying whatever physical horror games that you can buy specifically for PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2. As somebody who recognizes the convenience of PC, what is the importance of physical collecting to you? What are some of the gems in your collection?
I’m a collector. I collect records, I collect movies. My fiancée is also a collector. She’s got this crazy encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies, so she also obsessively collects any horror movie that she finds in the same manner. It’s important to me because I always have this fear one day that the internet’s just gonna die. We take the connectivity and the internet and all that for granted. They’ve done a lot of work to make sure that that doesn’t happen, but I grew up in a time when having the internet wasn’t a standard in every household and having that connectivity wasn’t this thing that everybody just had. In my mind, at any moment, Comcast can be like, “Hey, we’re just done. It’s over. We’re not doing this anymore.” And AT&T can be like, “Yeah, sorry, we lost it. It’s not working.” Or even if, for some reason, there’s a fucking internet outage just in my area, I can turn on my PlayStation 2, I can connect it to whatever and I can play a game. I’m not without it.

I also thoroughly believe that video games are an art form just because I believe narrative whatever is an art form. Because of that, I love the idea of physically having it. I love the idea [that] in 10, 20 years, this disc isn’t gonna be unplayable. I’m going to still be able to pop this in and turn it on and play it. I think it’s great for preservation. We saw what Konami has done with P.T., where you literally can’t get that anymore. My PS4 still has it. I never want to be in a situation where I just can’t play the things that I wanna fucking play.

There’s some stuff that just gets lost, too, unfortunately, that was digital only. It’s not like when you buy something digitally, the company says, “OK, we’ll keep providing this to you until you die.” And if you don’t have it downloaded, or if your hard drive fails, or you get into the series at a later date, you just have no access to that.
I genuinely think it’s kind of bullshit. I think it’s disruptive for art and consuming of art. But I also realize that I’m at the mercy of companies making and putting out video games, so just having the physical copy makes me feel a lot better. And plus, it’s cool! It’s a display piece.

As far as gems that I own physically, one of my close childhood friends moved down to Texas recently for work. He visits a vintage game shop at least monthly. He found a Japanese edition of Siren 2—which isn’t the best game in the world—and I now have the Japanese copy of Siren 2 that I can’t even play in my house, because it’s just kind of fucking cool. I have a copy of Resident Evil Survivor on the PlayStation, the first-person one meant for a light gun. Again, it’s not even close to being one of my favorite Resident Evil games. It’s kind not even that good of a game. But I have it!

Semi-recently, I actually picked up a CRT and one of the gun cons for PlayStation 2, so I picked up Resident Evil: Dead Aim. It’s super dated, the Chinese character is a racial stereotype. Outside of all of that, it’s genuinely a really fun game to play! I have every edition of Silent Hill 2 that you could possibly have, at least [that] was released in the U.S. I have just about every Resident Evil game that was released on the PlayStation 2. Sometimes, I’ll even end up accidentally buying games several times. For some reason, I have two copies of [Resident Evil:] Outbreak File #2. Those are some of the gems just off the top of my head. We’ve got a lot of them.

Earthburner gives praise to a lot of the classics—Terrorizer, Napalm Death, Carcass, Repulsion, to name a few. A lot of these survival horror games are going through a kind of revival, kicking off with RE2 remake, but now we have Alone of the Dark remake, Silent Hill 2 remake, the Dead Space remake. Are you more interested in the classic side of these titles or are you interested to see what these remakes have to offer?
Oh, I’m definitely interested in the remakes. The Resident Evil 2 remake I’ve urged every single one of my friends to play because I think it does a really good job of modernizing that experience for a lot of people who don’t want to sit through the tank controls. I also just think it’s an incredible thing. I kind of look at remakes and remasters a little differently than I look at the classics, if that makes sense. The whole point of a remake and remaster for the game company is to make money. But it’s also to take this experience and reintroduce it to a new audience that otherwise might not get to have that experience. There’s varying levels of how good and how successful that’s been. I think the Resident Evil 2 and the Dead Space remakes are awesome. I question the necessity of the Dead Space remake exactly. That being said, I did very much enjoy it. [Laughs] I don’t think Silent Hill 2 needed a remake. I think it just needed a good port, but my feelings on that aside, they’re remaking the game, and of course I’m going to fucking play through it as soon as it comes out.

Our band and a lot of other bands going back to classics and revisiting that and kind of retooling it for modern audiences, modern sensibilities, I think that that’s beneficial because those old things are always going to exist. You’re always going to be able to get to them. Sometimes it may take a little more work to get to them, but if you’re really determined, you’re going to go back and find a PlayStation 2 copy of this game in its original form and play it. If you’re really determined, you’re going to emulate this game and you’re going to play it. On kind of the same page of going back and reviving the old sentiments musically, I think it’s real interesting to go back and repackage, rebrand that for a newer audience that may not have had that experience growing up.

As I said, my parents were metal fans, they were punk fans. And then my parents got divorced and my mom married [Earthburner guitarist] Jeremy [Wagner]. Jeremy came in [and] saw I was interested in metal. We still had iPods at the time. He handed me a stack of old school CDs about this big [holds hands roughly one foot apart] and had me dump them all onto my iPod. That’s kind of how I ended up learning about extreme metal. When I went and started talking to friends who had gotten into metal through Guitar Hero or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater or stuff like that, they just simply didn’t have the experience of having this stuff accessible to them, having it available to them to consume. And so I think that any kind of revival ultimately is better because it brings in newer people.

You can say that you liked the original version of it better over the remake—that’s totally fair and valid. That being said, a lot of people my age, a lot of people younger than me, never got to have these experiences as they were coming out. They never got to be part of the ’90s death metal scene because they simply either weren’t old enough or weren’t born yet. They never got to play Resident Evil 2 right when it came out. And while yes, you can go back and emulate or find original copies of stuff, that takes a very determined mindset that not everybody has the time or patience or will to do. If they can take those original things, rebrand them, repackage them and bring them up to a newer audience who can then decide for themselves, “I wanna go back and see what this was like originally,” I think that’s always gonna be valuable. And I think that’s always going to push the art of it all and the artistic intention to new audiences, which will eventually just push it to new heights.

There’s some kid out there right now who just got into modern grindcore through newer bands like No/Más or Wormrot, and is now going back and exploring what those people were influenced by. That guy is then going to take whatever he/she/they learned and apply it, and they’re going to make the next great grind album that’s gonna come out in 5, 10 years. I think that’s just really cool. The same thing is gonna happen for video games. Some kid who’s playing the Resident Evil 2 remake, some kid who’s playing the Silent Hill 2 remake, the Dead Space remake, et cetera, is experiencing something that they just otherwise would never have gotten to experience. And they’re going to go on and they’re going to become a video game developer—whether an indie one or one that’s going to work at EA or something—and they’re going to get the next great horror game funded and made. I think that’s just incredible.

We understand that when you turned 18, you got an Eddie tattoo. Have you played [Iron Maiden’s] Legacy of the Beast mobile game?
No, I stay away from mobile games as much as possible. [Laughs] I know that if I started playing that, there will be something in my mind that’ll be like, Oh no, I ran out of lives. I can just pay $5 more to get more, and all of a sudden I’m gonna just be like, Oh fuck, I dropped $100 more on the Iron Maiden mobile game. Surprisingly, for as big an Iron Maiden fan as I am—because they’re my favorite band ever—no, I have not played the mobile game. But I play the pinball machine every time I go to any kind of arcade that has it. In Chicago, we have a lot of barcades. I’m straight edge, but I’ll go out with my friends because I don’t like sitting at home if I have the chance to go out and have fun with my friends. They have stories of all of them just sitting at a bar for, like, an hour drinking, and me just sitting on the Iron Maiden pinball machine, just going at it. And then them one-by-one walking up to me being like, “Can I get you a water? Can I get you anything?” and me just sitting there like, “Shut up. Go away, ‘Flight of Icarus’ is on right now!”

We haven’t had many examples of metal band crossovers, but would that crossover into video games be something that’s appealing? Something like Fortnite, the fact that Metallica is playable in that game, or Dead by Daylight that had Slipknot skins and Iron Maiden shirts—is that appealing to you or does that kind of seem superfluous or pandering to the underground community?
It’s definitely superfluous. That being said, I still rock that same mentality I had earlier—some kid is discovering Slipknot because of this. When I think of those modern examples, I think back to [how] I discovered Dead Kennedys through Guitar Hero III. I ended up loving punk because of Guitar Hero III. Granted, they were in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater beforehand, but when the Tony Hawk games came out, I wasn’t really listening to the music in depth. So of course it’s a little superfluous, but some kid’s going to discover something they would have not discovered otherwise because of it.

I also remember in the first Skate game, you could buy band shirts of the bands that were on the soundtrack. It was a feature that I was very sad was not in the other games because all I fucking wear is band shirts, you know? When you talk about those bigger bands, specifically Metallica and Slipknot, those bands are businesses in and of themselves. I love music from both those bands, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I would be where I am today without hearing Ride the Lightning. Even more in-depth with Slipknot, I have a bigger feeling and idea that with Slipknot’s Iowa being as massively popular as it was, it kind of primed my whole generation to start accepting extreme music. “People = Shit” starts out with blast beats and almost an Incantation riff. You don’t realize that when you hear it at the time, but then you start getting into heavier music later on in life and then you are like, Oh, this is similar to what I heard already. They’re definitely putting Slipknot in Dead by Daylight as a fucking business decision. They’re definitely putting Metallica in Fortnite as a business decision. That being said, some kid is discovering those bands because of that. Some kid is falling in love with metal because of that. I can find very few negative things to say about getting more people into a subculture that they otherwise wouldn’t have experienced.

It sounds like you have plenty on your plate in terms of gaming. What are you looking forward to in the immediate future?
The Silent Hill 2 remake, for better or worse, is the top of my list right now. I do think it is looking better than I thought it would have. Generally, I try to stay away from any kind of previews for games for the most part. There’s a real bad habit with the internet right now seeing something and then reacting immediately without ever getting to try out that thing. Especially with the Silent Hill 2 remake, the first gameplay trailer, everyone decried it and they were like, “It’s becoming an action game!” And it’s like, well, of course they’re going to do that. Konami is a business. They are trying to make the game look appealing to people. And unfortunately, the people they are trying to make it look appealing to aren’t the people who have played Silent Hill 2 every single year. No matter what was going to happen with that remake—no matter what—I was always going to buy it. Almost every person who’s a Silent Hill fan is going to buy it at least out of the morbid curiosity of it, so they’re not trying to make it appeal to me.

I have a whole list of games coming out in October that I’m looking forward to that is written out on my phone. A lot of them are escaping me right now. I know Silent Hill 2 for the “me sitting alone” experience, but then I know the new Call of Duty game for the “me playing with my friends” experience. Those games are complete slop, and they’re the slop that I like. [Laughs] We played the beta of the new one and you could sprint in any direction and dive like it’s a John Woo film. How am I not supposed to have fun with that with my friends? How am I supposed to dive and be able to dome a dude from across the map and not be like, That’s one of the best things I’ve ever done! That’s awesome!? Those are the two top of my list things. Very opposite experiences. [Laughs] What’s one without the other? You gotta be balanced in life.

What game are you bringing with you to Denver?
I’m gonna be bringing my Steam Deck. If I’m still doing runs on the Dead Rising remake, it’s gonna be that. I’ve loved Dead Rising since I got my hands on it, and having it modernized is amazing. It’s gonna be that, or it’s gonna be that Silent Hill 2 remake or one of the Yakuza games, or possibly one of the Persona games, because again, the fucking Steam Deck is just amazing for playing those long form, 200-hour experiences. Any JRPG has always been better on a mobile console that you can bring with you. There’s just no ifs, ands or buts. Oh! It was rumored that the [Metal Gear Solid 3] remake is coming out in November, I think. If that MGS3 remake is out, then I’m probably just going to be playing that for several months. From the previews, it’s just Metal Gear Solid 3, but on a modern engine with modern graphics. I don’t know a single person who likes Metal Gear Solid 3 that doesn’t want that. Every single one of my friends that’s into Metal Gear is like, “It’s the exact same game! Awesome!”