SKYRIM CREATORS LOVE KATATONIA

A couple of years back a MetalSucks reader — a videogame writer by day — offered to write a “Vince Neilstein” character into his next game in exchange for my gigantic pile of CDs. A worthy trade indeed, but I opted for a taxidermied duck instead and the rest is history.

Infinitely cooler: the writers of Skyrim included Katatonia guitarist Anders Nystrom in one of the most popular videogames in the world.

Skyrim players should be familiar with “Darkness Returns” mission, in which the goal is retrieve “Nystrom’s journal.” The game’s writers didn’t stop there, dropping all sorts of Katatonia-related easter eggs into the “Darkness Returns” quest; a passage of text in the mission reads, “He also mumbled some nonsensical phrases like ‘night is the new day’ and how he was the ‘ghost of the sun,’” which Katatonia fans should easily recognize as references to the titles of an album and song, respectively.

Nystrom, a fellow gamer, was flattered to find out about Skyrim’s creators love of his band:

“Yeah, it’s so bizarre. I have no idea, actually. One day I just logged on to the computer, checked the emails and everything — and I think it was one of our fans on Facebook that had posted something on our wall, directing us to the Wikipedia describing the whole mission [for ‘Darkness Returns’]. I just started reading it, not really knowing what I was reading, until I actually discovered it was from Skyrim. I didn’t put two and two together because it was so bizarre with the whole character/riddle thing and how they intertwined the titles. Then when it dawned on me that it was actually an objective inside the game, it was just like, ‘Wow, how cool is this?’”

This is probably old news to IMN gamers who will no doubt lambast me in the comments for being late, but it’s a fun excuse to talk about Katatonia’s new album Dead End Kings, out August 28th. Listen to two new songs from the album here.

-VN

Thanks: Nic H., via IGN