Going to try and start a new series on here focusing on my relationship with music, games, and the stories that might result. Thanks for reading!



Music is a wonderful thing for many, many reasons. One of which is that it can really bring your mind back to a place that you can easily travel back to as easy as moving from one room to another. For me, that usually also comes with reminding me of the games I was playing at the time. This post is me just reminsiscing on some specific instances of that when it comes to one of my favorite bands. In this case, that band is Thrice.

It’s 2003 and Thrice’s Artist in the Ambulance had become a cornerstone soundtrack to my life at that time. There’s just no way that I could have listened to the first track from that album “Cold Cash and Cold Hearts” and not had any other reaction than “holy shit”. From then, I’ve explored all of their music that came beforehand : Identity Crisis (not terribly representative of their stuff, but still an interesting listen to see where they started at) and The Illusion of Safety (an amazing step forward, and still extremely listenable) and followed everything that’s come after, including their tenth album Palms that released earlier in September. But I had never heard of them before one of the best games of the PS2 / Xbox generation came out.



I love racing games. I love snowboarding. So when the SSX series arrived on PS2, it was a beautiful melding of these two loves. And while the series was always strong, SSX3 really refined everything from the gameplay to the presentation in to peak form for the series. It would never really get back to what it was in my opinion, and to this day, I think gaming has a big fat snowboard shaped hole in it where a great snowboarding racing game can live, but racing games are tough these days, so, ok, maybe that’s tough to do now.

Part of what made SSX3 great was the fantastic use of music. You’re snowboarding down some giant mountain at breakneck speeds, beautiful scenery whipping by you as you’re focused on landing and stringing together the most outlandish of tricks, and all the while, some of the best music from 2003 is all up in your ears. And 2003 was a weird year for me. It was one in which I wasn’t exactly sure who the person I was becoming was. I was finally ready to make my transfer from my local community college to UC Davis, and I really had no idea why I was doing that other than that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. I don’t regret it or anything, but it’s interesting to think about what exactly motivated you to do things when you didn’t quite have any strong direction.

I had developed my own comfort zone of going to school, working at the local mall, studying while listening to Final Fantasy Piano Collections and other video game soundtracks, driving back and forth to work / home / girlfriend while listening to Jurassic 5, Linkin Park, Nas, Incubus and the like; and just being on that grind. My relationship with my girlfriend from high school of three years had however come to an end at the start of the year. I dated someone else, but that fizzled out when we both transferred to completely separate schools. So by the time I got to UC Davis in the Fall of 2003, I was a bit lost with no real local friends, and stuck in my insular shell of the routine of studying, working, and playing video games. That had been enough, and that was going to have to be enough for a while.

When SSX3 came out in October of 2003, I played it as someone who was lost. I loved it, but I didn’t know what to think of the life around me. I mentioned the game had amazing music. Stare At The Sun by Thrice was one of those tracks on the game that, at the time, had the right mix of hard hitting drums with blistering guitar riffs and a dash of emo lyrics that perfectly glorified my life’s problems at the time. I needed it. I wasn’t in a dire situation or anything, but I didn’t have much of a vision, and didn’t really get what I was supposed to exactly do. While I dug most of the soundtrack from the game, Thrice ended up sticking with me more than most as I discovered their album which happened to feature the track from SSX3: Artist in the Ambulance. While I didn’t have many friends in Davis at the time, I had my boys back home in Richmond to kick it with, made far too much of a habit of going back there on the weekend, and made a ritual of listening to that album while hot boxing my friend’s car (who happened to have his ride super tricked out with small TVs in the back of the driver and passenger seat headrests with a PS2 hooked up as we’d play GTA: Vice City and Final Fantasy X on rotation, shit was crazy lol). We played the whole album while playing SSX 3, then kept it going as we jumped in to Street Fighter EX3.

That routine would be repeated quite a bit over the course of 2003, and as I went on to eventually find a bit more of a social footing in Davis as 2004 got underway, Thrice would continue to make an indelible mark on my life continuing to be combined with one more incredible video game experience that would arrive in 2005: Shadow of the Colossus. In Shadow, you’re a lone, misguided individual dead set on a quest to resurrect his love from the dead. Most of the game is about the experiencing of discovering a forgotten land aiming to uncover 16 creatures of gigantic proportions (the aforementioned Colossi) and slay them with nothing but your bow and arrow, along with a mysterious blade provided by the land’s caretaker. Shadow is now regarded today as one of the most iconic games of all time, but when it was released, no one had really played anything like it before.

As it turns out, Thrice’s next album and my personal favorite, Vheissu would also release in 2005 on the exact same day as Shadow of Colossus, October 18. Vheissu’s inescapably epic sound- scapes and deep haunting lyrics sublimely complimented the tone of the now classic Shadow of the Colossus. And similar to Shadow, Thrice’s Vheissu held a level of depth and creativity that resonated with me the way no other music had. Like Shadow, it was a departure from an established scene, taking the understood trappings of its respective art form while introducing new and intriguing ways that changed the understanding and experience of engaging with it completely. And combining the two forged an unforgettable aesthetic as Vheissu’s deep and poetic lyrics and sounds matched Shadow’s general tone of desolate beauty and dark disturbing consequences perfectly. And while Shadow’s soundtrack stands well enough on its own (fantastically so btw), there plenty of times where I’d turn the ingame music down, and play Vheissu while journeying the lands.

Thinking back on that time, and those two seminal pieces of art synthesizing into something all its own… I remember it evoking a feeling of being on the precipice of exploring what I was I was going to be about as an individual. I don’t think I really knew it at the time, but there was something so immensely opaque about trying to see what lay beyond my time at UC Davis. I had one more year to go, but no specific career in mind, except I knew that I loved video games and I wanted to somehow be a part of the teams that make these amazing experiences happen. While I’ve found a way to get to a place in the video games industry that I think suits me, the journey there continued to be filled with Thrice’s work, and as my life has grown in countless different ways since those days, Thrice thankfully has kept putting out amazing albums, and here’s hoping they continue to do so.