Chad Kroeger: Game Geek?
By Steve Tilley
- CKXbox.jpg (14.82 KiB) Viewed 352 times
Just in case you weren't already seethingly jealous of rock stars, here's how Nickelback's Chad Kroeger describes his job: "I spend an hour and a half on stage, and I have 22 1/2 hours of the day to do nothing." Uh, say again?
"Anyone who plays in a band and gets to travel on the road, you have more free time than anyone else," says Kroeger. "Which usually leads to drug abuse."
So the piles of money, fame and chicks aren't enough? You have to rub in how easy your life is? Wait ... and there's drug abuse, too? OK, that's the last straw.
Luckily for Nickelback (and their more impressionable fans), the drug of Kroeger's choice right now is video games, specifically the Xbox role-playing game Fable. His chicken-kicking talents must be seen to be believed.
Thus, I dropped in on 604 Records in Vancouver last week, home to Nickelback pals Theory of a Deadman, Thornley, Tin Foil Phoenix and the Organ. You may have had your butt handed to you by mad-skills label co-founder Jonathan Simkin in Unreal Championship, though he warned me not to even think about publishing his Xbox Live alias.
Kroeger, as it turns out, is a video game geek well beyond the normal back-of-the-tour-bus NHL 2005 tournaments. He finished the epic RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, he's owned consoles since the Intellivision days - hell, the guy had a freakin' 3DO! - and he boasts about his "so f---ing hot rodded" PC that he uses for the sole purpose of playing games. And e-mailing cheat codes to his pals. Actually he has three computers, each one running a separate character in the online RPG Lineage II. He even sometimes goes on eBay to buy currency for the game world.
Man, this guy is starting to make me feel less dorky.
"I think it's such a wonderful form of escapism," Kroeger said as he played through Fable's intro segment, doing bad deeds and booting fowl. "A movie allows you to do so much, but you have to do it through somebody else's eyes, and it's somebody else's direction.
"Now with a video game, you're the one making the decisions. This is your own movie, no one else's movie is going to be like yours. That's why I love games like this, because you really get into them. And really piss off your fiancee."
Still stinging from my Def Jam: Fight For NY beatdown at the hands of Fefe Dobson this summer, I challenged Kroeger to a quick game of whatever he happened to have on hand in the studio's library of titles.
We ended up with the Xbox racing game Midtown Madness 3, which I haven't played in months. Kroeger demanded we take the exact same car to make it fair, but it didn't really matter: I beat him easily without even employing my usual tactic of kicking the controller out of my opponent's hands.
Yeah, Mr. Rock Star, you might have the fame and cash and toys and women and a TV bigger than most people's houses, but I can beat you at a video game. This will be my solace as I clutch my pillow at night and cry myself to sleep.
http://wham.canoe.ca/xbox/topspot/2004/ ... ml?cid=ETF
Thank you Jenny for my siggy " It is going to be the first taste of the real dream" - Mike Kroeger