Please Do Not Use the Word "Punk"

Content Warning: This article contains links to some outdated websites that contain offensive language. Crude language throughout.

By Jake Spencer

If you haven’t flipped through GamePro’s 2003 holiday gift guide lately, prepare to be shocked. Throughout its eight, densely packed, glossy pages of desirable consumer products, you will not find one Funko Pop! figure. You won’t see any artbooks. There isn’t even a single branded T-shirt.

What will you find? Highlights include:

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Vinyl stickers to decorate your Game Boy Advance with hot-rod flames or bikini babes.
Nyko Power Switch Relocator
A bulky plastic arm that makes it easier to hit the rear power switch on a PlayStation 2.
EverGlide Gaming Mat and Optical Pads
“The best mouse pad you can buy…”
Lexar 64 MB JumpDrive
“...like a tiny hard drive…”
Tecmo Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball Bikinis
For “your unsuspecting girlfriend or wife.”

If you liked video games in those days, you could play games, and you could read about them in magazines or online. You could share your hobby with friends, if you happened to have friends who shared your hobby.

Today, there’s an abundance of game-related culture and merchandise, but back then? The very thought that someone might care about video games enough to write music about them was simply preposterous!

And yet, right there among the Game Boy carrying cases and the CD resurfacers was Zombies In Robots Out, the debut album by a “Nintendo punk” band called 14 Year Old Girls.

Zombies In Robots Out’s careless-yet-evocative album art tells you everything you need to know.

Stylus Magazine’s review of the album opens with equal incredulity:

“Just when you thought you'd heard of every musical genre offshoot under the sun—here's another one for ya': Nintendo punk. That's right, punk rock, about video games.”

Critic Gentry Boeckel goes on to dismiss the album as an “irritating,” “substance-less” novelty that wears out its welcome after a single listen.

An ancient forum post by a user called Gamereviewgod puts it succinctly:

“Ok, just found clips of the songs....and, uh...well, I'll let you guys suffer.”

Nerdy interests had found their way into music before. Nobody questioned The Ramones’ punk credibility when they covered the 1960s Spider-Man theme song. Biggie remained notorious after name-dropping Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis as symbols of his success. The Fresh Prince had a song all about getting hooked on Donkey Kong. Del the Funky Homosapien rapped about Klonoa, Bushido Blade 2, and Bernie Stolar in the year 2000, and indie folk/punk star Kimya Dawson casually slipped the Konami code into The Moldy Peaches debut album in 2001. Cover bands like Minibosses and The Advantage showed up around the same time, as did a curious number of acts inspired by Mega Man, such as The Protomen and Horse the Band.

Likewise, there were countless video game-inspired songs and bands in the wake of 14 Year Old Girls. Post Malone and Katy Perry have scored tens of millions of views this year with Pokémon-branded music videos. Today’s Internet is awash in talented musicians who made a name for themselves through game-related music, from Miracle of Sound’s original metal compositions to Alex Moukala and friends adding some funk to old standards.

Zombies In Robots Out and its 2004 follow-up, Strategy Guide, remain unique, though. There’s a depth to the subject matter that those “can you believe there are songs about video games?” reviews overlooked.

Take, for example, Pac-Man. What celebration of ‘80s nostalgia would be complete without him? It’s an obvious choice, and that’s what makes “Pacman’s In Egypt” stand out even more. There’s nothing in the original arcade Pac-Man that evokes Egypt in any way. There is, however, an Egyptian world in Pac-Man World. And in Ms. Pac-Man: Maze Madness. And Pac-Man: Adventures In Time, and Ms. Pac-Man: Quest for the Golden Maze, and… It turns out Pac-Man has been to Egypt a fair number of times, but none of these games ever seem to inspire much discussion, much less songs.

Other songs similarly act as shibboleths for the hopeless Nintendo devotee. Does “Kage Not Cage” mean anything to you? It does if you used to mispronounce The Legend of Kage’s title before learning that in Japanese, “Kage” is two syllables (か and げ). And if you didn’t get it, you can stop rolling your eyes now. The explanation’s over. (And so is the song, which is only 15 seconds long.)

14 Year Old Girls co-founders and pizza enthusiasts, Sean and Andrew

Who writes stuff like that? What was this band? Was it a joke? To learn the story, I went straight to the source.

“We just joked around one day about starting a band 'cause our friend was having a birthday party in her backyard,” 14 Year Old Girls co-founder Andrew “Honey” Montejo tells me over the phone. “She was gonna have bands play, so we started the band in, like, a month, and we played our first show, and it was really awful.”

Sean “El Halfy” Velasco adds, “We covered a Blink-182 song. We covered Cure songs. I don't even remember if we had anything original at that point. I was 16 or something. It wasn't very video game related from the get go.”

Andrew looks back on that first performance fondly: “It was pretty ridiculous. It was a pretty awful show. I mean, it was a joke.”

Nevertheless, his punk-rock ambitions weren’t going to be constrained by musical ability.

“We had the T-shirts made before we even had songs,” says Andrew.

“You know Edward Scissorhands, in the beginning, those cookie-cutter houses?” Sean asks when describing Santa Clarita, California. “It was like that. A Stepford Wives kind of suburb.”

Against this backdrop, it’s clear why he and Andrew became fast friends.

“He's just such an insanely creative guy,” says Sean. “We went to the same Fine Arts painting class for a brief period, and I remember he had a painting of a frog on the top of the Empire State Building, like King Kong. Where everyone would try to paint things the way the teacher would teach you, in a very layered style, he used, like, paint daubs. The texture of the paint really came out a lot. That's what’s so cool about Andrew. He has this style that he just lets flow all the time. It's the same thing with music.”

“Sean and I are Aquacadets,” he adds, referring to their shared love of campy punk/ska band The Aquabats. “I still remember my Aquacadet number was 280. There were a couple shows where we had made felt belts and goggles. It was 100% an Aquabats rip off.”

Their fanatical love of off-kilter, anarchic punk artists drove every decision. The correct approach was never a serious concern. They wanted to be in a punk band, so they assembled a punk band.

The music video for “Q-Tip Bliss” shows Andrew’s character in a high school band class. I ask him if this has any basis in reality, and he scoffs.

“We're just walking around, like, who do we know that plays a guitar? And Sean was like, 'Oh, my sister can kind of play.' She was a 14-year-old girl. That's how we got the band name.”

Rounding out the original lineup was a drummer Andrew knew from work and another guy who was “kind of a rapper.”

“It was a very odd group at the time,” Andrew says. “It was all about communism and video games.”

“There's ‘Anal Fist,’” says Sean, thinking back to their first original songs. “And ‘Mother Russia,’ which is about being a communist. It's the stuff that I guess we thought would be provocative, or that we thought was funny.”

Bill “Billy” Gray corroborates those memories.

“In the early days—the stuff that didn’t make it to the record—we had songs like ‘Anal Fist’ and ‘Chris Freeman, Fuck Me In the Ass.’”

“I grew up a super— I mean, my parents would never call it ‘fundamentalist Christian,’ but… Pretty fundamentalist Christian. They would never call themselves ‘evangelical,’ either, but you know…” Bill laughs. “Pretty far out on the Christian spectrum.”

Bill was homeschooled, aside from an attempt at junior high where he “just got beat up a lot.” His house was in the same suburban area as Sean and Andrew, but he was living in a different world.

“That’s how I was introduced to everything in my life, was through God, up until I was, like, 14, 15.”

What changed at 14 or 15, I ask?

“Oh, just punk,” he answers. “You listen to enough punk records, and you’re like, Wait a second!”

Jon “Morizy” Gray had a similar experience. Like his cousin Bill, Jon was homeschooled by Christian parents. He spent much of his youth living in a rural, mountainous spot along the border of Stanislaus National Forest before moving to what he describes as “a weird vacation ghost town.”

“It would just be like, our house, and then two empty houses, and then maybe an old couple, maybe another family, but they were these one-acre parcels,” he says. “Only one out of two, one out of three actually had people living in them full time.”

Jon considers his upbringing. “Maybe all that time alone made me kind of a weird kid. Probably.”

Bill’s parents and Jon’s parents were all musicians.

“They just have the worst fuckin’ taste you’ve ever heard, man…” says Bill with a good-natured laugh. “But they feel it, so it’s good.”

“There was a lot of music, and that's just where my brain went, was playing all these instruments laying around the house,” says Jon.

Kim a.k.a. “Kimmy” a.k.a. “Kimbot” is a self-described L.A. ‘80s kid. She did not come from a family of musicians.

“When I was quite young, my brother and his best friend, we wanted to learn to play. We kind of created a band, but we did not really practice. Like, we weren't skilled at all,” Kim says.

She found her double-jointed fingers made learning to play guitar physically painful.

But singing felt comfortable, I ask?

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely.”

Kim met Sean one summer while they were both working at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

“Through Sean, I met Andrew. Through Andrew, I met Bill and Jon and Sean's sister, Cootie,” she says. “I went to a different school, but we all ran into each other at different shows or different jobs we had in the Valley.”

Bill met Cootie first, though the details are lost to time.

“No fucking clue how we met. I wanna say it was like... at some church shit? And I just thought she was the coolest person ever. She was the 14-year-old girl,” he says. “And so I was just like, ‘Yeeeah, I wanna just hang out with you all the time.’ And then it was like, ‘Oh, my God, you got cool friends that love music and play video games and are into weird shit? Please let me hang out with all of you all the time!’”

Jon wouldn’t become the 14 Year Old Girl until shortly after the first album was recorded, though by that point, he had already joined Andrew and Bill in a band called The Castrati. (“You know, like a choir of castrated boys,” he explains helpfully.)

The group’s lineup was prone to changing from one show to the next, but this was roughly the core: Andrew on bass, Bill on guitar, Jon on keyboard, and Sean and Kim sharing vocals.

They were misfit punks who fit together.

OC Weekly’s recap of Scutterfest 2002 gives us a rare glimpse at the early songs that didn’t make the album.

In 2002, Alex Hinton was working on a video series called Queer Youth TV.

“It was when hardly anyone could watch streaming video online. The whole point of it was telling queer stories for the younger generation about things they weren't seeing focused in was then the queer mainstream media.”

The search for a story brought Alex and his partner, Andy Wombwell, to Scutterfest, a punk LGBTQ+ festival borne out of Rudy Bleu’s disappointment with more commercial Pride festivals.

This was where Alex and Andy discovered “this weird, ramshackle band.”

“We just fell in love with them,” Andy adds. “They were super fun.”

Alex agrees. “Super goofy goofballs.”

Nearly two decades after stumbling across their first 14 Year Old Girls show, Andy and Alex still speak about it with palpable excitement. And if there’s anyone a fresh, new, oddball band might want to impress, it was these two.

By day, Andy worked for Wax Trax! Records and Alex worked for music distributor Dutch East India Trading. They’d been toying with the idea of creating a record label of their own.

“It was a really stupid time to start a label, but we knew that,” says Andy.

“We didn't have grand hopes that this would make us crazy businessmen, or anything like that. It was a passion project,” clarifies Alex. “We styled ourselves off of Wax Trax!, which was, at the core of it, a family of misfits and weirdos that had found themselves via music.”

“I got in touch with Andrew to say, hey, I want to book you for this surprise party, and also, we want to put out your record,” Andy says. “His only question was, 'How much food is there gonna be at the party?’”

The party in question was a massive blowout at The Knitting Factory to celebrate Alex’s birthday. “It was honestly one of the most memorable nights of my life,” he says.

As for the rest of the guests, Andy describes them as “a lot of people who did not get the music at all.”

“Exactly!” says Alex. “That's kind of the running theme of our label days. We just put out music that a lot of people just did not get.”

They both laugh as Andy adds, “And it was only more encouraging!”

“I don't think any of us thought it would lead to anything huge,” says singer Kim. “But it was still really amazing to hear that we were getting signed to a label.”

I ask Andrew if the band would have pursued a record deal if they hadn’t been approached.

“We were a punk rock band, so we probably would have just figured out how to release our own stuff,” he says. “We had released a demo that we made way before that, when we were 19, which had probably 20 really terrible songs recorded on a boombox. And then we had a 7" that we also collaborated on and made before we were signed.”

“Our first review was for the 7” that Mr. California recorded with us and put out,” says Bill. “He was this, like, weird old dude, fuckin’ super cool. He sent it to Maximum Rock and Roll’s George Tabb, who was in this band Furious George that we all really liked. He said it was the worst thing he had ever heard in his life! And for some reason, I’m more proud of that than the GamePro thing. But to get any kind of positive support—that was a rush!”

Andy and Alex offered to pay for recording time in a professional studio, but the band was content to stick by their D.I.Y. punk ethos.

“With the two records we made, we used a digital 8-track that used Zip disks,” Andrew explains. “It was a really weird machine. We didn't have the money to get a laptop and buy fancy mics and stuff. We just kind of figured it out.”

There were other disagreements when it came to recording.

“I didn't understand why we wouldn't just put all the songs on the album, 'cause, like, who cares? Right? Put them all out there,” says Sean. “But it was a curated list.”

“I tried really hard to get them to do songs that were longer than 30 seconds,” Andy says. “And I remember Andrew saying to me, ‘If you like the song so much, play it twice.’”

Andy and Alex had gone into business with 14 Year Old Girls because they loved the music and the spirit of the band. They knew better than to spoil a good thing.

“I really loved the song 'Release Date,'” says Andy. “I pushed and pushed, and they agreed to add another verse. We tried to take it from 45 seconds all the way up to two minutes, but the second version wasn't any good.”

It went the other way, too, though this is hardly the story of a slick record label forcing some scrappy misfits to go commercial.

“Andrew, drew out just a sketch of an idea,” Andy says on the topic of Zombies In Robots Out’s cover art. “He wanted Sean or someone to, like, make it good. We were like, no, that's the cover. And they really didn't want that to be the cover. But it is. I love that cover.”

“I'm not sure we fully picked up on the video game thing in that very first performance. We knew that was one element of it,” says Alex. “But it was in talking to them and subsequently starting to hear demos and work with them that the video game thing came into focus.”

“From the start, we had an idea and a gimmick,” says Andrew. “I think maybe part of it was we were trying to create these NES punk jackets. It totally was like, 'How do we make a studded jacket, but with Mario on the back?'”

“Most of my relationships as a kid were built on some pretense of, oh, this person has a video game. Let’s go play it until our eyes bleed!” says Bill. “It’s a perfect bonding mechanism.”

“My brother was really into Wolfenstein. I was really into Doom and Rise of the Triad kinda stuff,” says Jon. “We had so much time at home. My mom would leave, and we were supposed to be doing our schoolwork, and of course, we would just be on the computer.”

“We had an original Atari and just a ton of games that we got from our cousins. I remember playing Nintendo and watching my brother play Final Fantasy,” says Kim. “I enjoyed games in my youth, but that took off even further when I met other members of the band and became friends with them.”

“NES came out right when I was the perfect age to be the target for it,” says Sean. I remember seeing Super Mario Bros. at the video store, just being really pumped for that. I cleaned out the fireplace and would mow the lawn to try to get a dollar here and a dollar there. Eventually, my parents brought it home before I had gotten the full amount.”

Even though I’m a few years younger than the band, and I’ve never been to California, it’s incredible how similar their experiences are to my own.

“When I was a kid, everyone had a really limited library of games,” says Sean. “Like, I had five games, and my friend had five other games, and my rich friend had, like, 20 games. You'd go to the other person's house and play their games. In the suburbs, you'd bike over and play Joust, because they had Joust, but I didn't have Joust or Fester's Quest, or any of those random assortment: Mega Man. Duck Tales, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers. One of my friends had Gyromite, but we didn't have the robot, so it was kind of weird.”

Can you believe there are songs about video games?

Of course I can. These are the shared experiences of a generation.

1-800-255-3700 is actually Nintendo’s customer service number; not the Game Play Counseling number. If only there were a hotline to help me overcome whatever brain problem is responsible for me knowing that.

The turn of the century brought video games not only to your stereo, but to your cable provider, as well. X-Play on the G4 network was always hungry for fresh content, which made a band that plays songs about video games an easy pitch.

“X-Play was, I believe, in San Jose, and it felt like some sci-fi movie,” says Jon. “There wasn't a huge crew. I think it may have even been on a weekend or something. It seemed like there were just a couple engineers and the hosts. It was so sterile and weird.”

“I remember it being awkward,” says Sean. “At the end, we were kind of like, eugh. Hoo, boy... And I remember a family of four. Like, two parents and two kids, I think, and they all had T-shirts that had ‘14 Year Old Girls,’ I don't know, ironed on. They were fans, like actual fans that would come to the TV appearance because they wanted to see us. And I remember thinking, oh, my god, these are young kids. We have songs like ‘Stroke the Pope’ and ‘Mother Russia.’ This is not kids’ stuff.”

Nobody gives the impression they had any strong feelings about the band’s national television debut.

“Like, Andy scored us this gig? Cool, let's do it,” says Jon. “I'd rather be playing a house show and getting drunk with people and breaking shit, but, um, cool, OK.”

“I was aware of G4,” says Sean. “But I didn't really watch it. It felt inauthentic to me.”

Nevertheless, X-Play brought in new fans from outside of the L.A. punk scene who might never have heard 14 Year Old Girls otherwise.

“One of my cousins didn't know that I would be on TV,” says Kim. “I don't even know if he knew I was in a band. And all of a sudden he spotted me and had to reach out, and just was so impressed that we were on TV.”

“That just changed things overnight,” says Andy. “When that aired, our website blew up.”

It’s here that you get a glimpse into what Andy and Alex value as measures of success. “It was the era of message boards,” says Alex. He and Andy are both still friends with many of the then-kids who discovered Nintendo punk on that day.

Not everyone who saw the show was a fan, of course, but as Andy says, “It definitely did not hurt anyone’s feelings. It excited everyone involved to get hate mail.”

It’s hard not to chuckle at comments like, “Please do not use the word ‘punk.’”

Inviting a band to sing about Animal Crossing and Nintendo’s Customer Service phone number on a video game-focused TV show? That makes sense.

There’s not much that makes sense about G4’s Players.

“The main premise of the show was to interview famous celebrities and see if they played video games or not, what their favorite ones were, etc.,” writes a Wikipedia editor who seemingly lost interest midway through that sentence.

Players’ quick cuts, over-caffeinated camera movements, and whoosh! sound effects are straight out of an early MTV reality series. Selling teens on the inherent fun and sexiness of music television was easy, though. In 2004, it was going to take a lot more than Dutch angles and fisheye lenses to convince anyone that the Gamer Lifestyle was chic, no matter how aspirational leading Hollywood heartthrobs like Jason Ritter and Clint Howard made it look.

“Why is that your apartment? What is the story of this completely empty room?” —Andrew, still searching for answers about the location used for Jason Ritter’s segment

I ask everyone if they remember what direction they were given by the Players crew. You’re sitting in a house. You’re sort of playing video games. You don’t play any music. What did they ask you to do?

“You know, before they got there, I remember we just got tanked,” says Bill with a laugh.

“It was just nice to wake up and have doughnuts first thing in the morning. I remember being pretty hungover and really tired,” says Jon, who felt more at home in this segment than he was on X-Play. In fact, he was literally at home.

“Jon and Bill were way cooler than us because they lived in L.A., as opposed to living in Santa Clarita or even in Northern California,” says Sean. “People were sleeping in weird places. There were always people going in and out. You would open up the window, and you could go out on the roof. We'd all be drinking out on the roof in the Hollywood Hills-overlooking... I don't know, maybe it wasn't the Hollywood Hills. But some kind of hills in L.A. Things were a little bit dangerous. It was a cooler, edgier place than the carpeted apartments of my existence, for sure.”

“It was just a big ol' party zone on the weekends,” Jon says. “The Silversun Pickups had a house a few houses down. That summer, it felt like there was a party and one of those two houses every single night.”

“Oh my gosh, I'm so shy!” Kim laughs after watching the video again. “So shy, barely looking at the camera. Although I was actually pretty surprised by how subdued the whole group was, except near the end, when we got a little louder and rowdier, when we were actually playing games. That was pretty realistic, though. We didn't always live in the same exact city, but if we did get together, we had every single console you could imagine set up in the house and ready to play. Any game you’d want was there.”

Friends. Games. Music. Junk food. Parties. These were the things that drove 14 Year Old Girls. They approached each TV appearance with a good attitude, but the media clearly didn’t know what to do with them.

Nowhere is that more evident than their final TV appearance.

Skip to ~26:30 for...something.

The boys (Kim wasn’t available that day) are interviewed for TechTV’s The Screen Savers by a worryingly ruddy Alex Albrecht, who is seemingly unable to breathe in his Star Trek uniform.

Oh, right, all the show’s hosts are wearing Star Trek uniforms that day.

Once again, the band is not asked to play any music. They’re not even facing their interviewer. Instead, The Screen Savers’ sponsors have decided it would be best for everyone to pretend they’re part of a LAN party. A LAN party where they’re being interviewed by a Star Trek guy, I guess.

“We’re getting a lot of latency,” Sean says in the clip. It’s a subtle signal of how these punks felt about being used as props in someone else’s commercial.

“Our computers weren't connected to anything,” Andrew tells me.”It was so ridiculous. You know, it's TV.”

14 Year Old Girls in their natural habitat

Jon calls 14 Year Old Girls “a vacation band.”

After high school, Sean and Kim headed to the Bay Area for college. Andrew, Bill, and Jon stayed close to Los Angeles.

“We played random shows,” says Andrew. “It was pretty complex, trying to keep a band together when people aren't living anywhere close to each other.”

Fortunately, the band’s songwriting method had always allowed everyone to work independently.

“Most of the songs started with bass and a drum track,” says Andrew “Next would be Bill or Jon or someone adding the guitar/keyboard section. And then from there, we would send Sean and Kim the demos of the music, and they would write the words to it, or we would have words, or we would just get together. We would all go up to Sean's house in the Bay Area and spend the whole weekend recording and writing lyrics together and writing more music.”

“A couple times, Andrew left the 8-track at my house and would just be like, 'Hey, get these songs done,” says Jon. “I'll come pick it up tomorrow,' or next week, or something like that.”

14 Year Old Girls perform for the volunteers at Perhrspace

Sean says Andrew “would give us CDs and CDs of stuff, of music that he had written, of music from bands that he liked.. I probably still have 50 burned CDs in a stack that are from him.”

Kim says, “We got to work kind of in groups or in pieces, right? I didn't write too many of the songs. I was kind of still learning. But when they'd come up and bring music, I remember I would tuck away into a bedroom and try to write some stuff. And then maybe someone would come in and help me with a bit.”

Jon says these writing weekends also consisted of “drinking 40s and eating candy and playing video games, and Andrew trying to get us away from the video game console 'cause Sean had this amazing setup. It would just be Andrew being like, 'Come on!' But at the same time, man, you're just, like, half drunk and eating candy with a giant fucking TV screen in front of you.'”

Sean sums it up best: “It was just nice to see everybody again, because sometimes we wouldn't see each other for months.”

Andrew points to Friends In Other Dimensions as the beginning of the end.

“We would have probably kept playing if the movie ever got released, but because it didn’t, there wasn't this push to keep doing stuff. Andy and Alex were always super supportive and asking about the third record, but other than that, there wasn't a lot of feedback.”

I’m sorry, a movie? I ask Andrew for a little more detail.

“The movie was the story of 14 Year Old Girls going to different dimensions and watching our friends' bands play. There was a zombie dimension, a prom dimension; we had a beach one... We had Abe Vigoda in it. We had The Mae Shi in it. We had HEALTH... Probably 20 bands were in it.”

Each new detail I learn is equal parts confusing and delightful.

“I remember a zombie scene where there was a lot of raw chicken being thrown around,” Kim laughs. “Everything was a total mess. Feathers flying everywhere, and...maybe not paint, but maybe fake blood or something? I don't know. It was total chaos. Some quite messy themes.”

“We shot at the L.A. River,” says Sean. “We would duck into a pipe, and then we were supposed to emerge in the concert venue. I remember there was a zombie apocalypse, where zombies were coming down the road and we're running away from them.

Alex offers a more sober summary of Friends In Other Dimensions:

“It was this great idea where, in every scene, there would be a different band performing. But doing a movie is a lot of flippin' work, no matter how low budget, and doing a performance video movie is even more so, and then doing a pseudo-sci-fi time travel one…”

“When we shot this in 2007 we were young and had sky-high expectations. Technology, at the next-to-no budget level we were at had serious limitations,” the movie’s director, Sean Carnage, tells me over e-mail. “Now we can put those expectations aside, utilize the massively improved capabilities of non-linear edit software, and focus on the performances and the personalities—icons of the L.A. scene—for what they are: genius!”

Wait, wait, wait… What does he mean by “now?”

Maybe the video attached to the e-mail, will explain:

What you’ve just seen is the first clip of Friends In Other Dimensions, set for release in 2021, 14 years after it was shot. Sean Carnage tells me he will be releasing a director’s cut of the movie, as well as “ a playlist on YouTube that fans can reconfigure into any order they like…”

“Jupiter, the ruler of my Tenth House is again, like back in 2007, 2008, making its way back through my first house. The orbit of Jupiter is about a 13 year orbit, so it would make sense,” Jon says when I point out the coincidence of this article and the movie’s release falling within a few months of each other.

“I'm an astrologer, and I'm very into progressions. So, going back to a time when Friends In Other Dimensions was happening was kind of this moment where I was not only doing 14 Year Old Girls, but my band Mae Shi was really taking off. And this movie The Mitchells vs. the Machines just ended up licensing a song from The Mae Shi.”

Most of Jon’s leisure time is now spent skateboarding. He isn’t in a band, but that doesn’t mean he’s stepped away from the keys.

“Right now, any music projects, I just do it for fun; just for myself.”

Bill: “You know, the nicknames were just, like, whatever the fuck Andrew called you.”

“I’ve been in, like... 37 bands now. Put out, like, 20 records. I’m currently in five bands. Everyone else grew up, but I kinda just loved it, so I kept doin’ it!” says Bill.

“I just started a business. A craft services business, so like, I’m a snack man by trade. We run a recording studio called House of Tomothy, too, that’s fuckin’ excellent. Best recording studio in L.A.”

“We were all doing our own thing. Going to school, heading towards different careers. We did this in our spare time, for fun. I mean, I loved it. If I was braver, I would have gone that route instead of, like, a normal-type career,” says Kim.

“Everyday was always something different and honestly didn't always make sense either.”

Photography is her primary artform at the moment, though she still hears music calling her name.

“I'm either going to get a ukulele or a keyboard and finally learn an instrument. And I don't know, I was listening to those songs, and I was so young and so shy. I feel like my vocals— I'd love to just play with it and do something different and see if I could, even with the same songs, make it sound different. I really want to open up that part of my life again and just get more involved musically and take a break from the more serious direction I've been going in.”

“I graduated from CSUN with my Chicano Studies degree. That's not communist, but I went into social work after, so you know,” says Andrew.

“When I started working as a social worker, I had to take the lip ring out 'cause I had to talk to police officers a lot, and it was always a weird situation. Like, I am 23 and telling police officers they can't come into a building.”

He’s not currently working on any music, though Amor por Vida, a small papel picado business he runs with his wife, provides an outlet for his creativity.

“It was not really that serious for me,” says Sean. “I wanted to go to school and be a game developer. This was always a side thing for me. Being on TV... I mean, it was amazing to have albums and to do shows and do tours, but as far as making a career out of it, I guess it always just seemed like something that we could do on the side. We do a show every once in a while, and then that would be that. I wasn't as deep into it, I think, as everyone else was. I'm not as much of a musician as those guys were. I didn't play an instrument seriously. I didn't write too many songs seriously. It always seemed like a hobby, as opposed to being a career.”

I ask Sean “El Halfy” Velasco, founder of Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games, if anyone knows about his Nintendo punk past.

“People that knew me during those days knew that I was in a video game band, but after I started working professionally, not really. I haven't really talked about it. It hasn't really come up. I guess for a brief period, I was a little bit worried that by doing such brutal takedowns of games, I might not be... I didn't want to be seen as a hater in the game industry. Like, if I met someone that worked on Tomb Raider, or Nintendo, my idols, after being dissident about their Wind Waker game, or that kind of thing... At least in the beginning. I definitely don't care now. But back in the day, I sort of thought, I wouldn't want to be looked on in a negative light. So, yeah, I wasn't singing it to the hills or anything.”

But he has been singing. You can hear him (as the evil Skullmageddon) singing over the credits of Double Dragon Neon. He also channeled his inner Sarah McLachlan to pen the tear-jerker credits song for his reboot of A Boy and His Blob.

“I didn't have a whole lot of musical acumen, at least as far as music theory, knowledge, or anything back in the day. That's one of my big hobbies now,” he says. “I live here in Santa Monica. I take my uke to the beach and play songs and sing. And that's pretty much it.”

I ask Sean if he remembers the moment when it occurred to him that games were made by people, and that he could make them, too.

“There was a book that Nintendo Power put out called Mario Mania. They had an interview with Miyamoto about Super Mario World. He's talking about the trials and tribulations and the struggles and... Who knows what will happen to Mario in the future? Maybe he'll even wear metal clothes!”

We both laugh. Metallic clothes! It seemed like a silly non sequitur at the time. Then Super Mario 64 came out, and it all made sense.

“You know, people really hated gay people back then,” Bill says of his early days in the band.

“A lot of us were having so many questions about our sexuality and like… What the fuck is happening? I mean, George Bush just started another war, 9/11 happened—it was very confusing.

“I’d wear some glitter, some bell-bottoms at the mall, and some fuckin’ jock dude would be chasin’ me down.” He laughs. “Like, what the fuck, dude? Peace and love, brother. That shit was wild. So I think video games were just the most wholesome thing we could talk about.”

Sean says, “Santa Clarita was kind of racist and homophobic. I guess that was also just the era back then. We struggled against that, as kids that were a little bit outside the mainstream. So promoting unity through video games and through music was definitely one of our goals.”

“Those worlds didn’t really intermix too much. You were a music fan, or you were a video game fan,” says Alex. “I know that sounds strange now, but the two worlds really really didn’t intersect much.”

As someone who was listening to a lot of punk music and playing a lot of video games, I thought it was strange then, too.

The first time I head, “Step forward, step back,” I understood what it meant.

“Runnin’ errands for people is fun / Gettin’ rewards like the stupid oil drum,” was, and still is, the perfect encapsulation of the Animal Crossing experience.

“Glass” captures the feelings I get from playing Marble Madness and from my battles with clinical depression.

There’s more here than disposable novelty.

Alex tells me about his time at Dutch East India Trading.

“I literally never met my bosses because they were all in New York and I was their west coast salesperson. Everything was done by fax and phone.”

The distributor “was just a home for the super strange releases you would see floating in your local record store. Everything from Peel Sessions to... One thing we distributed was a record that was a collection of subphonic-kind-of spy notices between Eastern European countries.”

Like numbers stations, I ask?

“You’re the one who bought it!” Andy exclaims.

Alex was born just outside of Chicago, but soon moved south. Andy was born in Louisville, but he got his first music industry job, at Wax Trax! Records, while living near Chicago.

Andy tells me about an old family photo, from years before the couple met, featuring Alex in a Wax Trax! t-shirt.

At the time of writing, another Pride month is coming to an end. The corporations are shipping their unsold merchandise to a storage facility and scrubbing the rainbows from their Twitter logos until next year.

The untouchable subcultures of not so long ago are cool now, or at least profitable.

I ask Bill how it felt to put video games and punk together in a time before video game culture, as a concept, really even existed.

“It never felt weird. It felt stupid,” he laughs. “Like, why does anyone care about this? But it never felt weird.”

I ask Kim about being the only girl in 14 Year Old Girls.

“Honestly, the circle that we hung out in was just so open and inclusive and fun. You almost didn't even think about anything like that,” she says.

14 Year Old Girls wasn’t a massive commercial or critical success. Were they a joke! Of course! They were exactly the joke that some of us misfits and weirdos needed to hear.

“When you’re just playing music with your best friends, the funnier you can be, the better it’s gonna be, right?” says Bill.

And if you like the songs, play them twice.

In memory of Mitchell “Mitchum” Dubey.