Very entertaining story.

Here’s what I knew about Megadeth: the lead singer, Dave Mustaine, was kicked out of Metallica, and then Megadeth went on to become the most respected heavy metal band of their time, second to Metallica.

During the meeting, the executives stressed the importance of this album release, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do something big and bold on the World Wide Web. Having never heard of the Internet, the record executives were like “yeah, whatever kid” and defaulted to the usual checklist: “Who will shoot the album cover? How many radio stations will play the single? How many posters should we print for the record stores?”

So even though no one had a clue what I was talking about, I wrote a proposal to create a “virtual cybertown in cyberspace.” It would be called Megadeth, Arizona—based on where the band lived and recorded their album.

My boss, Lou Mann, the Senior Vice President of the label, actually signed off on the proposal and gave me a whopping $30 grand.

He had no idea what it was for, and I can guarantee you… neither did I.

Back in 1994, the internet was still a wide open frontier. WebCrawler was the state of the art in search engines. It was able to index the complete text of every site on the web. Excite, the first real portal site, was just getting started. And the music industry had no concept of what was coming.