This week, the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne, passed away at 76 years old. One could make the argument that without him and Black Sabbath, the heavy metal genre may not even exist today. We could do the usual tribute and memorial article for Ozzy, but we thought this may be a fun and interesting time to look back on a video game that totally rules, yet never had the cultural impact it deserved. That game, of course, is Brütal Legend. As a note, and I never do this, but I highly encourage you to watch the trailer below. It even has the old voice-over guy narrating!

Brütal Legend is an action-adventure game released on the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC back in 2009 (ugh, I feel old writing that). It stars Jack Black as Eddie Riggs, a career roadie jaded by the current state of metal. When a freak accident seemingly kills him on stage, Riggs’ blood lands on his belt buckle, which is in fact an amulet from a different realm. A portal opens and whisks Riggs away to Ormagöden and Riggs finds himself embroiled in a fight between the evil lord Dovilculus (Tim Curry) and a small band of resistance fighters. The game is a mash-up of an open-world action adventure game and a real-time strategy (RTS) game, with Eddie commanding troops from an aerial position after he gains bat wings. You use fans as a resource and send your minions from a base that looks like a giant outdoor stage to fight against the opposing army, and you can jump back down to the ground to get more hands-on with your foes. It could’ve used a bit more polish with this facet of the game, but it was still fun. Oh-and the criminal lack of a jump button was certainly a bizarre choice for an open world adventure game. But hacking up the baddies using axe combos, car combat, and magic spells was certainly fun and where the game was stronger.

Some of the supporting characters in Brütal Legend are voiced by and modelled after real-life metal legends, including Kil Master (Lemmy from Motörhead), Fire Baron (Rob Halford from Judas Priest, who also voices General Lionwhyte), and Rima (Lita from The Runaways and Lita Ford). On his travels, he also comes across the Guardian of Metal, appropriately voiced by and modelled after Ozzy Osbourne, who helps Eddie with his upgrades. Helping Eddie and critical to the plot are Ophelia (Jennifer Hale), Lars (Zach Hanks), and Lita (Kathy Soucie) as they organize their forces to combat and liberate the world from tyranny using the power of metal — literally. And no one is phoning it in; everyone gives great performances, especially Black in the lead role, giving a role that balances self-aware humour, and passion for the subject matter. It also helps that the writing is great, from the witty humour to the overall story of resistance and good versus evil.

Brütal Legend’s world is basically heavy metal album art come to life, and leans heavily into the tropes and imagery from the genre. Stone guitar monuments scatter the realm, spells are guitar solos (such as the perfectly named “face melter”), Eddie’s weapon of choice is an axe (an electric guitar is often lovingly referred to as an axe). A group of headbangers are held as slaves and used as miners who, you guessed it, bash their heads against the rock. If you know anything about the genre, there’s something in Brütal Legend that pulls from the iconography of sound and image associated with metal. There’s an almost cartoony design to the world, which works in making this surreal landscape come to land.

Naturally, Brütal Legend‘s soundtrack is awesome and covers the wide scope of subgenres. There’s 107 tracks in the game, with everything from classic metal, death metal, glam metal, and anything in between. So you’ll hear anything from Ozzy to KMFDM, to 3 Inches of Blood, to Def Leppard, to Dimmu Borgir. It’s quite the spectrum, and the soundtrack aimed to include more obscure bands and songs, as well as the legendary ones.

Brütal Legend is the kind of game that really lands if you’ve ever at some point in your life been a metal head. There’s a lot of in-jokes and references that are tailor-made for fans. But even if you’re not a fan of the music, there’s still a great game here full of adventure, wit, and drama. It’s a shame we never got a sequel to the game though. Brütal Legend was well-received by critics and fans alike, with a score of around 80/100 on Metacritic across platforms. But the game was a hard sell (Metal isn’t mainstream after all), and didn’t hit its sales goals, thus EA shut down any prospects of a sequel getting made. This nearly destroyed Double Fine as they put most of their resources into the Brütal Legend IP. With Lemmy and Ozzy having passed away since the release of Brütal Legend, it’s hard to imagine we’d ever get a second game now and if it’d have the same impact the first game did.

Still, with the passing of Ozzy, Double Fine made Brütal Legend available on PC for free for 666 minutes in honour of the Prince of Darkness. Even if you couldn’t get your hands on a freebie, I’d definitely look into getting a copy. A 360 edition would work on current Xbox consoles thanks to backwards compatibility, and the PC edition is readily available. So, whether you’ve played before or not, if you’ve ever listened to Ozzy’s music or rocked out at a summer festival, I’d recommend this one. It’s a fun time. As for Ozzy, the Prince of Darkness may not be with us anymore, but we still have his music and the impact he had on a whole genre. Gone but not forgotten would be an understatement.