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Thirty years ago today, Megadeth released their sixth studio album Youthanasia.Also three decades ago? The heavy-metal pioneers were the first musical artist ever to hop in a “chat room” (the Megadiner) on their “website” (called Megadeth, Arizona) on the relatively new “internet.” Chatting with Billboard, Dave Mustaine looked back at this very early piece of internet history, remembering how one anonymous troll just kept posting the word “shit” over and over in the chat room.
(For my Internet babies, “chat rooms” were pretty much like interest-based Discords, only way more anonymous — primarily because no one had any social media available to stalk.) “I looked at it like, ‘How do I get rid of this thing?'” Mustaine says of that chat room troll.“I still, to this day, don’t know who the guy was.
There was no one else, so this guy saw that as an opportunity.” In addition to the Megadiner, Megadeth, Arizona (the name was based on the location of the band’s new studio in Phoenix) had an art-and-digital-postcard repository, Vic’s Cactus Hut and Souvenir Shop, a newspaper titled Horrorscopes, and links to videos and online-radio tracks.The whole thing was intended to promote Youthanasia, but in the end it just served as an on ramp to the World Wide Web.
The site was so successful that other artists started asking for their own websites, including KISS’ Gene Simmons.“There was nothing like this before,” Mustaine says.
“It’s such an unfathomable concept: There was no internet back then.” Check out the whole interview with Mustaine here....