Spencer Jacobs(guitarist) and
Steve Babcock(bassist) from Hudson River School were kind enough to take some time from their busy schedules to answer a few questions for our readers. We thought about grinding them, but then we figured that having to live in Utah was punishment enough.
Charlie Sinhaseni - Gaming Nexus - You guys had a massive listing in Microsoft's Amped 2. I'm sure that there are a number of other bands who would love to get the same billing. How did you get so many tracks into Microsoft's marquee title?Steve - Spencer. You can answer this one.
Spencer - Brenner Adams (one of the Co-designers) is an old snowboarding chum of mine. He heard our new demos and really liked them, so he submitted them to the rest of the Amped 2 team for approval. I got a call from the Microsoft "acquisitions manager" asking if we'd be interested in licensing two of our songs for the game. Further down the road, and into the process, they kept asking for more tracks. We eventually let them use nine songs for the game. We joke that we've released an album on Microsoft.
Charlie - What was your initial reaction to the news?Spencer - We were down.
Steve: Our initial reaction was, "Do we get free X-boxes?"
Charlie - I'm sure those are in the mail as we speak. Do you feel that the band's prominent exposure in Amped 2 has helped your careers?Spencer - Most Definitely. Just about every day we receive a few emails, or someone posting on our message board with compliments and questions about where they can buy our stuff.
Steve - Definitely. Ever since the game was released, we’ve noticed a significant increase in traffic to our
website and people joining our mailing list. We also get a lot of e-mail from people all around the globe
telling us how they heard us on the game. And Bobby is a total video game heartthrob now.
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