Trent Reznor Attempting To Enter Video Game World

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has outed himself as a video game nerd in an interview with the Joystiq gaming blog, in which he says he and NIN creative director Rob Sheridan have been working on a video game for a while.

Reznor told the blog he and Sheridan took their idea to game publishers like Midway and Activision, but unfortunately no one sprang for it. Reznor wouldn't reveal what the game's about, but said the idea was "simple," "dumb and obvious, but could be fun." He also described it as "juvenile" with a "kind of fun smartassness to it." Ultimately, he said he thought companies weren't interested in it because it was "too risky."

"[It's] depressing to see that the people in control of those studios and publishesr are much the same as the people sitting at record companies," Renzor said in the interview.

"In a record company, they aren't musicians or people who love music, they're people who want to sell plastic discs. They think they have a formula where if they can eliminate the artist from that equation, even better. You see that in the case of the Pussycat Dolls and some of the other fabricated crap that's out there.

"What we tended to notice in the video game meetings was that it didn't seem that there were gamers there. It's business guys who want to turn the company into a profit making machine. They look at it in terms of numbers, like a Hollywood studio. If it costs 'X' amount to make a game, to compete, then it has to be a proven franchise or it has to be similar enough to something they know is going to sell. They don't want to take the risk."

But there's still a possibility Reznor and Sheridan's project could end up in stores, since Reznor hinted at working on "some things that will start to come into fruition post Nine Inch Nails and post our tour" when he was asked if he would ever fund a game for distribution through Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network.

Elsewhere, Reznor revealed that he's a bit of an old-school gaming nerd, and is particularly into arcade games like Robotron, Metroid and Space Invaders.

"Every time we to go to a different country we try to see if there are still arcades left," he said. "The modern Japanese arcade is not the same, because they're all about these weird resource management, horse racing, car games that nobody can figure out what the fuck is happening. Unless you're Japanese, of course.

"I had a lot of great times in arcades and I miss that experience. I know things move forward, but there's something about discovering an arcade, the aesthetics, the cool cabinet that was built specifically for that game."