It's Dangerous to Go Alone...Take This!

I had my first legit panic attack in 2005. No juicy details there, except it was terrifying and I was a college student. Rather than seek legitimate help though, I decided to buy a copy of the (then brand new) Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore and play my roommate’s NES. It’s an obsessive pattern I continued for a week, reading the book a chapter at a time, then listening to the albums discussed within while playing Contra or Faxanadu or WWF Superstars. I got better too. Like...I only had one more panic attack, 6 years later. Soon, I was conceptualizing death metal inspired NES games and making crude versions of them in MS-Paint. After trying to recreate the Realm of Chaos cover, I almost drove myself into another nervous breakdown and that’s when I decided I needed to get my ass back to class.

Here’s a relic from that weird time in my life, a recreation of Obituary’s Cause of Death on a 32x32 pixel board that I made on my phone.