Holiday Sega In The Media: Sega Genesis featured in “Merry Axe-mas” music video by Ice Nine Kills

Well, it is now December 26th, 2023. We at Segabits hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday, as well as a Happy New Year.

Though it may be a little late, I’d like to share with you all a festive music video that featured a Sega Genesis. This is the 2018 song “Merry Axe-Mas” by the Boston, Massachusetts metal band Ice Nine Kills. These guys are known for lyrics inspired by horror films, with this song in particular being inspired by the 1984 slasher horror film Silent Night, Deadly Night. In the music video, a young child named Spencer receives an ominous Genesis game cartridge from “Santa’s Claws”. The game has him playing as Santa himself and slaughtering everyone in his way with reckless abandon while, in the real world, ol’ St. Nick shows up and brutally murders Spencer’s parents behind him while he’s too fixated on the game.

Check in after the break to see the actual music video, plus a few of the Sega details you might miss.

Observant viewers will immediately be drawn to the packaging of the game Spencer received, which does look rather authentic. Notice the red band where “Genesis” would be shown instead saying Ice Nine Kills, the name of the band, while on top of the box is “INK” (Ice Nine Kills abbreviated) in the iconic Sega logo font, or possibly a close facsimile of it.

You’ll even see that they decided to put the game in an EA-style yellow tab cartridge instead of a standard shape and size Genesis cartridge. These cartridge shells were used for many years by Electronic Arts for their various games, such as the Road Rash series, B.O.B., Haunting Starring Poulterguy, and various EA Sports games. Perhaps this was done to make extra space for “ICE NINE KILLS” on the left side of the cartridge, even though EA never used the red stripe design on their cartridge labels.

Of course, what’s a Genesis game without the console to shove it into and play the game with?

However, notice that when Spencer takes out his Genesis, there is what appears to be an Atari 2600 or Commodore 64 joystick on top of it. While you can actually plug one of these into a Genesis, due to it using the exact same connector, we can’t imagine why you would opt for that instead of an actual Genesis controller even if it really worked.

Seeing this really has me wanting to hear what Ice Nine Kills sounds like with their music recreated in Genesis sound hardware. After all, the famous YM 2612 sound chip is a natural at reproducing rock and metal through a MIDI lens, a strength shown off spectacularly in games like Comix Zone, Road Rash, Thunder Force IV, and, more recently, Xenocrisis. Fans have even covered a lot of vocal rock themes from post-Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games, including songs from Sonic Frontiers, to excellent effect. It’s just something for metal bands to consider when they want to pay homage to Sega’s legendary 16-Bit behemoth.

Merry Axe-Mas is featured on Ice Nine Kills’s album The Silver Scream, which is full of songs inspired by other famous slasher films. You can click here to see where you can listen to or buy the whole album.

Are you an Ice Nine Kills fan? Know any other bands that have paid tribute to Sega in some way? Let us know in the comments below and we may, one day, feature it in Sega in the Media, if we haven’t already. Also, check out my last Sega In The Media article about a Dreamcast being used as an improvised weapon in a professional wrestling match, a moment that had me so excited that I didn’t notice all the embarrassing grammatical errors I made in that article.

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