The Gurn Killers Official Blog

May 7th, 2009, Afternoon: The Gurn Killers arrive at the Harrah’s hotel in Atlantic City, NJ.

Awesomeness is in the air.

Our Gurn Killers prepare for the competition in their luxurious hotel room.  There, they unpack their costumes, props, and rockness.

At 5:00 PM, they descend upon the stage for sound checks, interviews, and band meetings.  There they meet some great competition.  Mario Speedwagon and The Strippers for Stephen Hawking just to name two.   Mario Speedwagon hailing from Portland and S4SH hailing from the good ‘ol Village Pourhouse crowd.  Awesomeness drips out of every pore of these two bands.

Before we get on stage, let’s quickly review the rules of the Regionals.  Each band will play two songs, the first song is a random song (one of these six songs: Ramblin’ Man, Flirtin’ With Disaster, Bodhistattva, Cherub Rock, Battery, or Down With the Sickness) and the second song is one of the band’s choosing from a predetermined list.  Each round is scored independently from each other and is scored as follows: 50% Rock Band score, 25% Style, and 25% Performance.  Whoever has the most “points” after two songs wins!

So, our plan for the first song is to come out with a base outfit (which we call the “Metal Outfit”).  Then, depending on which song we get, we will alter the costume appropriately.  For instance, if Ramblin’ Man comes on, we have cowboy hats, flannel shirts, etc.

We get up on stage and draw Flirtin’ With Disaster.  Not a bad song to get at all.  We quickly get our Flirtin’ props and get ready to rock.  And we did:

After a very epic and button-popping performance, we were treated with very un-epic scores.  Distraught from our low style and performance scores, we head up to the hotel room to change for our second song.

After a quick pep talk, we are ready to go on and perform our next song, Ballroom Blitz.

We get to the stage to find out that we are almost disqualified!  Luckily, we make it there on time.

The whole crowd is flabbergasted by our amazing drag-esc costumes.  We get up on the stage and kick it up a notch with this most epic performance:

Now that’s what I’m talking about!  Great style and performance scores!  But wait!  Why is our Rock Band score so low?  We were doing really good!  Oh no!  Luca’s drum pedal broke in the middle of the performance!  That’s not cool!

After a conference with the MTV staff, they informed us that we could redo the song, but we would be judged again on style and performance.  After finding out that we were tied for first in the first round and with our really great style and performance scores, we decided to stick it out and take our second round scores.

A nail-biter ensues.  We wait in breathless anticipation for the announcement of the winner:

And by one point, your band of destiny, The Gurn Killers take the Atlantic City regionals.

On to tomorrow, where we face the best of the best for national glory…

The Property Finals @ Showboat, AC

The winners are announced! Of course by the lovely Maria…

This was an absolutely amazing night of pure score whoring & defying odds. We (Luca, Miguel, Joel & myself) went into this round of the competition with some huge obstacles to overcome. Going up against MoB (which included Wulfe, IceMage, Supermario & Azuritereaction) all of whom are masters of Rockband & sponsored by legitimate gaming organization. These guys wrecked Tangled Up in Blue with 2.597 Million points, a nearly unbeatable run. Fortunately for us, and the 1st time the thread of destiny shone it’s glimmering strands, the vocalist, Icemage got a couple of “strongs” and broke the 8x multiplier thereby allowing us the “chance” to beat their score. (If they had hit 2.71 or so mil, it would have been impossible to beat them).

The Boardwalk Boys performing Tangled Up In Blue
Vocals – Icemage | Guitars – Wulfe | Bass – Sup3rMario | Drums – Azuritereaction

We went second and absolutely crushed Down With the Sickness with 2.61 Million 5 Gold Stars.

Owned. Miguel's on Bass (1st 100% ever for him, overstrum to be accurate), Luca on Drums (-3 notes), Joel on Vox (misses one phrase), Chris on Guitar (-1 note)

As you can see by our (and the audience’s reaction) when the score clicked over to 2.61 and we realized we had beaten 4 of America’s BEST rockband players, we did not take the matter lightly.

It wasn’t over by a long shot. Next up were the insurmountable wall of full combo-ing & pathing rock band gods (not unlike the 1st band), all of whose videos I’d quite often watch on youtube for tips & general rockband awesomeness, Don’t Call me Shirley (nice Airplane! reference, p43nut xP). These guys are not just fantastic rockband gods, but also good friends from the village pourhouse crew and online.

Guitar – Crazed | Bass – P34nut | Vox – dogfoodnyc
Drums – Gurnkiller   (YES, this is the REAL gurnkiller…. We were coming up with band names in the bus on our 1st trip to qualify for these property finals and we knew Leigh (Gurnkiller would have to be defeated eventually if we did qualify), so we named it The Gurn Killers almost as a joke. Little did we know.

Doing Down With the Sickness as well, they are headed towards a narrow victory over our 2.61mil…

Basically at 4:20 in this video, Crazed the guitarist over-strums during an 8x multiplier and it’s OVER. They come in at 2.599 Million and we basically go apeshit. Statistically it was pretty unlikely that a band that had only once before hit over 2.6 million would OUT score not one, but 2 bands, both of which were scoring in the high 2.67 + range on their songs, RELIABLY. Not to mention do it under pressure & with slightly iffy game calibration & instruments. We felt like we had won the whole tournament right there…. reality didn’t settle in til later.

Honestly no disrespect to any of the bands that played afterwards, but this was it for us… we knew that we, mob & gurn’s band were the 3 top scoring bands and as soon as we knew that they were out, we knew we had basically just advanced to the regionals…

A mjor drinking binge ensues & ego trips were not lost on asking random people to let us use their guitar!

An unbelievable high note in this epic journey.