Megadeth’s lore made interactive with Rive

Megadeth is a Grammy-winning thrash metal legend, led by Dave Mustaine and shadowed by Vic Rattlehead, their snarling skeletal mascot. When the band launched Megadeth Digital, a generative NFT collection and all-access digital pass, they wanted an experience that went beyond static merch drops. It had to showcase tokens, signpost the project, and immerse the fans in lore. 

“It wasn’t a normal website,” says Ashley Best, the Bristol-based animator and developer who built the post-apocalyptic page in Rive. “The brief was basically a lore dump: lyrics, imagery, story beats from across the discography. My job was to make the Megadeth Digital website feel like an explorable universe.” 

To build that kind of immersive fan world, he needed motion and interactivity that scaled. That’s where Rive came in. 

A map for the metalheads

Megadeth’s team sent over artwork tied to Vic Rattlehead, brand assets, and a loose list of references, everything from historic moments to deep-cut nods. “It was almost like a cheat sheet for Easter eggs,” Ashley says. “I watched videos, read fan interpretations, and tried to figure out what would feel instantly familiar to diehards without shutting out newcomers. 

He built a post-apocalyptic, isometric map with signage winking at lyrics, debris fields hinting at past collisions, and corners rewarding the slow scroll. 

“For the Megadeth purist and the Vic Rattlehead faithful, this is what I imagined when browsing the page and searching for all of our features. This is frighteningly close to what I picture inside my head,” says Dave Mustaine.

Making the wasteland move

Ashley pitched Rive on day one to Megadeth’s team. “I’d done similar projects with Lottie and a lot of custom code. It had been painful with fallbacks everywhere. With Rive, I could build the logic directly and focus on the experience.”

Then timing did what timing rarely does: it helped. “They wanted fire and smoke. I was faking it with frame sequences, then Vector Feathering dropped. Perfect.”

The team also wanted a jumbotron streaming performance footage. “I stacked every frame of a video into a giant sprite sheet and moved the viewport frame by frame,” Ashley says. “It was a bit wild, but somehow worked. And Lance from Rive suggested an optimization that made it cleaner.”

Mobile was the boss fight. “Getting the map to scroll responsively was tough,” he admits. “I’d fix desktop and mobile would break, then the other way around. Ross Plaskow from Rive jumped in, then Phil, then Lance. Everyone pitched ideas to help out. In the end, there was a tiny meta tag and CSS tweak that smoothed everything out. Community saved the day, too.”

(Data Binding wasn’t released yet, so the logic is handcrafted. “If it had been available, I would’ve used it for sure.”)

All told, the build took about 15 days over a few months. “Stop-start worked in my favor. I’m not an illustrator first, so the breaks helped me come back with fresh eyes. I thought about animation, layout, and optimization the whole time.”

How to build digital grime

Megadeth’s iconography is heat scars, oil drips, and bunker metal. To get there, Ashley built with a hybrid stack.

• Illustrator for isometric projection and roughened linework

• Photoshop for layered textures and noise, plus some AI-assisted background fills

• Rive for illustration touches, assembly, and all interactivity

“If it was only vector, it looked too clean,” he says. “They wanted grit. So I created one huge raster-based image, then layered vectors in Rive for anything that needed to move. That way you get the grime without tanking performance.”

Guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari puts it this way: “The World of Vic splash page feels like stepping into a digital comic book of Megadeth’s universe. Ashley managed to capture a strong dystopian atmosphere while hiding deep cuts that reward fans who dig deeper into the page.”

A UFO in Hangar 18

If you know Megadeth’s catalog, there’s no end to the B-side references. “My favorite is the Hangar 18 nod,” Ashley says. “There’s a UFO inside the hangar, a fence ripped open across the way, and a blackened scorch mark on the earth. It’s telling a story without a caption.”

Tips you can steal

Mix raster and vector: Use rasters for texture and grit, vector for anything that moves. Keep performance tight. 

Lean on Vector Feathering: It’s perfect for smoke, fire, and glow effects that scale cleanly without sprite sheets.

Test scroll constraints early: Complex maps and layouts behave differently on desktop vs. mobile. Don’t wait until the end. 

Hack creatively: For the jumbotron, Ashley stacked every video frame into a sprite sheet. Unconventional, sure, but it worked. 

Ask the Rive Community: Rive fans love to help each other out in a pinch. Don’t get stuck in isolation. 

Thrash lore made playable

Megadeth has always invited fans into a universe full of riffs, politics, and apocalypse. Megadeth Digital’s website honors that tradition by making the lore a playable archive. 

“What I love is how the tools adapted to the project, and how the Rive community rallied,” Ashley says. “Fans want to do more than watch. They want to participate — that’s where the future is. And Rive helps us get there.”

As the Megadeth Digital team sums it up: “Our fans don’t just listen to the music. They live the lore. This map gave them a place to explore it. Ashley’s work with Rive to create this map turned out amazing. He packed it with Easter eggs, and while plenty have been uncovered, some secrets are still hiding in plain sight.”