Many moons ago, Andrew Tokuda, then a guitarist for a heavy metal band, sat on a San Francisco bench and wrote words and music notation—on paper—for a song that would eventually evolve into this epic, "Vampire Love." Andrew (aka Droo) soon left the hair band to pursue a concept. That concept was a musical group called Mindgames. Although the concept never solidified, a lot of interesting music was created and produced during the many months of constant musician auditioning, 4-track recording, and woodshedding.
Droo eventually met Ron Gilcreast, a talented keyboardist with a quirky sense of humor who shared the same love for a BBC space comedy called "Red Dwarf." One may argue that this is the reason why Droo and Ron hit it off in the beginning. The two soon began the journey of writing and recording their musical ideas, as well as auditioning drummers. Unfortunately, good drummers were hard to come by, and Ron soon left to study music at the Musicians Institute in Hollywood for six months.
During this time, Andrew got the itch to play with a band, so he auditioned for a heavily gigging, hard rock band called Mischief where he met guitarist Kris Fong. Months later, Andrew and Kris soon tired of the down-tuned, grungy turn that the other band members began to pursue, and they decided to leave to resurrect the Mindgames project, which evolved into a heavy progressive rock band. Ron came back from MI, and the project now consisted of two guitarists and a keyboardist. Still no drummer, no bassist, no vocalist—no problem.
The three employed their multi-instrument talents to fill in the missing pieces, nabbed an awesome singer (who was paid with a Burger King meal), and recorded a 5-song EP in what was dubbed, "Kris' Bedroom Studios" (proof that you don't need to book an insanely expensive recording studio to cut your own CD). All vocals, guitars, bass, and keyboard solo tracks were recorded digitally on ADAT machines. All drum, piano, and synthesizer pad parts were sequenced on a Mac with help from a few sound modules.
The band would later find a bassist and a drummer—just not all at the same time—and eventually the Mindgames project died. Or was it put on hold? As Atrus said in the game, Myst: "The ending has not yet been written."
