MAGFest 8: Interview with The Megas

Gabe – I’m Gabriel Pendleton with BaltimoreGamer.com and we’re here with The Megas who just rocked out at MAGFest also, so without further ado we’ll let them introduce themselves.

Greg – I’m Greg of The Megas, I play bass in the band.

Josh – Josh of The Megas, I play guitar.

Eric – You do other things than that.

Josh – I sing too.

Eric – Yeah. I’m Eric and I also play guitar and also sing, and I specialize in rock poses.

Josh – And faces.

Eric – And faces.

Josh – Really good faces.

Eric – Yeah.

Gabe – So what we wanted to do was get a little information about the band. Why don’t you guys go over how the band was formed and give us a little history of The Megas.

Greg and Eric – Josh, you take it.

Josh – [laughs] Well… me and Eric went to college together and I started a song “I Want To Be The One” which has now become “I Want To Be The One and The Dr. Wiley Song”

Eric – Was it called that when you wrote it?

Josh – I don’t know if we had a name for it or anything, but I’d started a song and I played it for Eric one day thinking it was funny and he was like, “That was great! You know I’ve always wanted to do an album out of the soundtrack to that game.”

Eric – Which is true. Some people would say that I might have just said that another day, but that’s true, you can ask Rizzy. And any Megas fan knows who Rizzy is. If you don’t you gotta figure him out.

Josh – I believe you, I think everybody believes you.

Eric – Thanks, buddy.

Josh – Anyway, so I played the song and he was like, he wanted to finish it. So we sat down and…

Eric – Yeah, it didn’t have a chorus at the time.

Josh – That’s right, it was missing a chorus. So we finished the song and recorded it, and started doing more, and started getting way carried away with it, and Greg came along. He played bass in another band and wanted to join up with us.

Eric – Really good successful band.

Josh – Really good successful band.

Greg – So successful.

Josh – So he wanted to join our unsuccessful band. And then Mikey came along and played drums and we somehow became a real band. And we finished the Mega Man II thing and…

Eric – And luckily the scene was there waiting for us, which we didn’t realize at the time, we just thought it was a funny idea and then we started looking around and seeing that there are other bands playing video game music and we were like “we do that too.”

Josh – It’s just one of things, kinda fell into it, so yeah.

Greg – MySpace really created the band in a way, because that’s how people heard of us at first, and that’s how we found all these other video game bands – Entertainment System, who we’ve done a lot of stuff with.

Gabe – Well, speaking of other bands and stuff like that, what about traditional bands and also other gaming bands that inspired you guys along the way?

Josh – Definitely The Minibosses I’d say game-wise, like game bands.

Greg – Yeah, them and The Advantage I think were the only ones that we really had heard of when we were starting. We knew that those bands existed and then we kinda found that there’s like all these other bands.

Eric – Traditional bands?

Josh – I think we’re all over the place traditionally, we all have different music tastes.

Eric – Josh really likes 80’s.

Josh – I really like 80’s… stuff, and Greg’s…

Greg – What did you call it? “College Rock?”

Josh – It’s called College Rock.

Greg and Eric – [laugh]

Josh – Because it’s the stuff thats not pop, where like, I don’t listen to Tiffany, I listen to stuff by like Morrissey, and like Depeche Mode, ridiculous stuff like that.

Greg – 10,000 Maniacs, The Smiths…

Josh – I listen to 10,000 Maniacs.

Eric – But you do listen to The Smiths.

Josh – I do listen to The Smiths.

Gabe – What about the popularity of the band? We seen a lot of people there wearing The Megas t-shirts and stuff like that.

Josh – No, I feel like a lot of people liked us in the beginning and they don’t like us now.

[everybody laughs]

Josh – No and, like Greg said MySpace really helped us out and it’s just grown from there. It’s been one of those things that we didn’t really work at marketing for a while, it was just kind of like a project that we wanted to do and we somehow started getting this online following and then we decided to play shows and then…

Eric – Then people just started singing along in the crowd and we were like “pfff.”

Greg – Yeah, we’re constantly surprised by the amount of people that show up in our shirts, like from show to show it’s like, “They’re the ones that got them last year. Now they all showed up…”

Eric – “…and they brought their friends.” And they all sing along like, I lost my voice tonight towards the end of the show… It’s still lost. This is what lost me sounds like. But you know, they just covered for me in the end of Heatman. I didn’t even sing into the microphone, I just had to mouth the words.

Greg – OCRemix was a big help with kind of having people hear of us at first too. When we first came out with the Get Equipped CD we put one of the songs on OCRemix, and tons of people still to this day are like “That’s the first time I ever heard of you guys was cause I heard the Airman song on OCRemix.”

Gabe – Also some of the shows that you guys played at, like different areas.

Eric – Strangely enough, we play mostly on the east coast, in fact, to the point where a lot of our fans think were from the east coast, but we’re not. We’re from Las Angeles. But just the conventions out here, the convention circuit and we did two tours. One with Entertainment System and then one earlier this year by ourselves. You know, they were all good shows. Nerdapalooza as well.

Greg – Yeah, the first time we ever came out to the east was 32-Bit Genocide in Baltimore. And then we went on a tour with Entertainment System after that and that was just… a year and a half ago?

Eric – Yeah.

Greg – That was like two summers ago.

Eric – Yeah, there were like five, ten people at our shows and then this year we started packing more people in.

Greg – Yeah, so we’ve been playing a lot of conventions.

Gabe – From Las Angeles, you guys come a long way to the east coast but also, there’s another person who came an extra long way tonight, you gonna tell them about that?

Josh – Oh the guy from Russia?

Eric – Or me from the Philippines?

Gabe – Yeah.

Josh – This guy? Oh, got it.

Eric – Yeah, I was in The Philippines with my girlfriend who is now my fiance because I proposed to her and she said yes, thankfully.

Josh – Could have gone bad.

Eric – But my plan though, I did it on top of the thirtieth floor on top of a building, so if she said no I’d just dive right over the edge.

Greg – But you would have missed the show tonight.

Josh – Yeah, that would have been unfortunate.

Eric – Well I wasn’t thinking about that, I was really nervous that she would say no. But she said yes and so I’m getting married at some point, we don’t have any dates or anything like that yet.

Greg – So that’ll be the expiration date of The Megas.

Eric – She supports the band!

Josh – She’s now officially the Yoko.

[everybody laughs]

Gabe – So is your wedding song going to be from the Mega Man series or anything?

Eric – Well, we talked about that, or at least The Megas playing it… But I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that.

Greg – To be determined.

Eric – I don’t even know when we’re doing it. I just got engaged, so I’m just going to be engaged for a while and see what happens.

Josh – Enjoy that. Try that on.

Eric – Put it on, tie it on, see if it fits. So far it fits.

Gabe – There’s a band called Armcannon, and it seems logical that, you know Armcannon, The Megas, do a collaboration. You guys ever think of something about that?

Josh – Maybe.

Eric – We’ve been into more collaborations lately. We’ve been more into that idea. We were supposed to do one with Mega Ran but we just kind of slacked.

Greg – We already did one on Metal Man.

Eric – Right.

Greg – Like he took our song and then rapped over it. And then we did the Megatainment collaboration with Entertainment System where they did music and we did lyrics on top of it.

Eric – So that’s out.

Greg – Yeah.

Eric – You can buy that. And you should.

Greg – Yeah.

Josh – Five dollars.

Eric – Megatainment EP it’s Mega Man I, four songs.

Greg – Armcannon would definitely be another logical combo cause I think this is like the fourth time that we’ve played with them, so.

Eric – We’ve made a lot of friends with these bands too, they’re really good guys.

Gabe – So tell us something about The Megas the fans don’t know.

Eric – I guess one thing that some people know is I also do motion capture. Like stunt work. You know what mocap is where you wear the suit? So I did that for Dragon Age and for Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Gabe – That’s pretty cool.

Eric – Yeah, so that’s pretty fun. And I guess video game-related, Josh is trying to get into some voice acting.

Josh – Oh yeah. I might, cross my fingers, be in the Spiderman 4 game. They’re currently working on it and they shot live footage for it. I am a window washer that gets saved by Spiderman so it’s still in the preliminary phases right now, I could easily get cut out.

Eric – Oh, I got one other thing. Go to Blockbuster and rent a movie called Blood and Bone.

Josh – Ohhh.

Eric – …if you want to see me dressed as the most preppiest white person you’ve ever seen and I get killed by Eamon Walker. Did you ever see Lord of War? The Nick Cage movie? He was like the African badass dude.

Gabe – Yeah, with the guns and everything?

Eric – Yeah, he kills me with a sword. Or no, I guess he stabs me but then he kicks me in the face a bunch of times. I have a whole little scene.

Josh – We’re also in Bachelor Party Massacre, we both get killed in that. Go see that.

Eric – We’re all over the entertainment biz.

Josh – Yeah, look around. You’ll find us.

Greg – You also get fought by Kimbo Slice.

Eric – Oh that’s true, yeah. What Would Kimbo Do? There’s a series.

Josh – Google that, yeah.

Gabe – So what’s in the future for The Megas, and also where can the fans find your music?

Eric – The best place to go is themegas.com. Everything links from there. You can buy our record, you can buy our record…

[Josh makes a motion with his arms]

Eric – You can see Josh doing that.

Josh – Yeah, there’s a big photo.

Eric – The forums are there, which are super-lively. Some of the craziest forums we’ve ever seen.

Greg – Yeah, we had a bunch of forum people come to the show today from all over the place. One of them came from California, and then people came from Boston, and Kentucky.

Gabe – What about that guy who came from like…

Josh – Moscow.

Eric – Moscow.

Greg – Yeah, yeah Mikhail.

Eric – Anyway, go to themegas.com. The Megas… Dot Com.

Greg – And you can follow us on Twitter, themegas. @themegas.

Eric – Yeah, they’re really good at Twitter, I’m not good at Twitter.

Josh – Haha, can’t work it.

Eric – If you are good at Twitter, you can follow them on Twitter.

Gabe – So what’s upcoming?

Josh – We have an acoustic album coming out now, called Get…

Eric – Any day now.

Josh – Any day now. Called Get…

Eric – Supposed to be out right now.

Josh – Called Get Acoustic. It’s the Mega Man II acoustic album, and we have a Mega Man III album in the works right now.

Eric – We’ve got 5 songs written, 13 total to do.

Josh – Yeah, hopefully that’ll be out soon so you guys can rock to that.

Eric – You’ll have to learn all new lyrics, but hopefully they will.

Josh – Yeah, so you guys got homework.

Gabe – Well thank you guys for interviewing with us today, we appreciate it. Everybody again, this is The Megas.