In 2009, I had been a journalist for, charitably, one year. I was in college, and most of the publications I’d written for paid in exposure rather than cash. Somehow, for reasons that have since been lost to time, I wound up with a press pass to BlizzCon, Blizzard’s official though still-nascent annual gathering in Anaheim, California. What I did not fully grasp the significance of back then – so starry-eyed was I at the prospect of interviewing people who’d worked on StarCraft – was that this meant I had also been handed a front-row ticket to an Ozzy Osbourne show.
It was a different era for games journalism – already removed from the glitz, glamor, and lavish review/preview trips of the ‘90s and early 2000s, but nowhere near as far as we are today. Ozzy’s appearance wasn’t a walled-off press perk, though; this was a show for everyone in attendance, a flex of a tradition that would in subsequent years lead to closing ceremonies headlined by acts including Tenacious D, Foo Fighters, Blink 182, Metallica, Linkin Park, and Muse. At the time, though, only one rock band, The Offspring, had previously heralded BlizzCon’s conclusion, and no offense to The Offspring, but they weren’t Ozzy Osbourne.
Almost two decades later, I remember the 2009 show in bits and pieces. At the time, I marveled at how, despite gaining a reputation for unintelligible speech and half-lucidly shouting “Sharon,” Ozzy’s singing voice was still crystal clear – and strong as all hell. I also recall that even though I was only a burgeoning concert goer at that point in my life, I’d already learned to recognize what a dead crowd looked like. Ozzy repeatedly implored BlizzCon attendees to jump, clap, and move, but many of them were seated, and only during the biggest hits did it really feel like a metal show ought to. (This would continue to be an issue for BlizzConcerts; tired nerds at the end of a convention weekend do not a great crowd make, but that never stopped artists from trying.)
Ozzy did his best, though, and apparently he had a good time.
“I was thinking they'd all be wearing spectacles the size of f****** Coca-Cola bottles, like curly white hair and f****** rimmed glasses, you know, the scientist types,” Ozzy told GameSpot of the BlizzCon audience in an interview after the show (censorship theirs, not ours). “But they were f****** great, man. The vibe was there. The kids had a great time. That's the best part of my job: giving them the best time.”
There are a few pieces of cultural ephemera worth excavating here. Foremost, Ozzy’s presence at BlizzCon feels weirdly incongruous until you consider that he was fresh off a popular 2008 commercial for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King in which he competed against the aforementioned in-game monarch to determine who was the real “Prince Of Darkness” and lost. Never mind that one was a prince and the other was a king, rendering the entire premise nonsensical; I remember enjoying this ad a lot when I first saw it – and then a little less each of the following one thousand times.
Speaking with IGN after the BlizzCon show, Ozzy – who also voiced The Guardian Of Metal in Double Fine’s 2009 cult classic Brütal Legend – explained his relationship to video games.
"To be honest with you, I don't [play World of Warcraft],” Ozzy told IGN. “I'm very computer dumb. My son goes, 'Dad, check this out.' He plays those war games, my son, and I'm a World War II buff. But he sits up there in his room for f****** four days playing this thing going, 'Shhh! Don't get me going!' I'm very slow with the computers; I'm one of the old timers. But it's the future, you know. My kids now – when I was a kid, the big thing with my dad was learning how to work the remote, and I learned that, so I thought, 'I'll always know what's going on.' But now my kids are talking in f****** computer language – megabytes and gigabytes, whatever the f*** that means."
His perspective on Brütal Legend revealed a similarly begrudging open-mindedness that, as someone now being overtaken by the world in the great race we call life, I cannot help but respect.
“You know what, a lot of guys have been doing the things I do for a long time, but they don't get involved with [games],” he said to IGN. “It's the wave of the future – it's sink or swim. I'm very honored to be in the video game. Someone was telling me that the one I did for the rock thing: a billion kids, a billion kids played it! That's f****** unbelievable! That's a f****** tenth of the population of the world! If only that many bought the f****** album.”
It's the wave of the future – it's sink or swim.
Someone lied to Ozzy about Brütal Legend’s sales so boldly and shamelessly that they probably succumbed to spontaneous human combustion immediately afterward, but that’s not the point. What matters is, this is a man who did his best to keep up with what was going on around him because fuck it, whatever, I guess I have to in order to remain an interesting person, and we can all learn from that.
Despite goth-ed up appearances and eternally mistold tales of bat biting, Ozzy’s biggest songs were about learning how to love, forgetting how to hate, and revolting against a world obsessed with war. You don’t write lyrics like that unless you believe in people and the idea that, with sufficient time and collaboration, they’ll become better than they are now. It’s easy to recede into the comforting arms of irrelevance as the world regresses into division and strife. It’s much harder to stay present, grounded, and accept that you’ll never stop going through changes.
How exactly Ozzy squared all of this with latter-day claims that he preferred to "stay away from politics" and his wife's increasingly fascist-friendly support of Israel – which led Ozzy to play shows there in 2010 and 2018 – is a question to which we will never get a direct answer. There is no excusing even tacit approval of such a stance, one that could be chalked up to an admirable distaste for antisemitism – as evidenced by Ozzy's rejection of Ye's request to sample his music in 2024 – but which via his actions, if not his words, went further. Heroes and legends can still be hypocrites, and even as we laud their achievements, we must also grapple with their failings. This is a big one, a stain on Ozzy's legacy that should not be forgotten.
Open-mindedness, selective though it evidently was, ultimately led Ozzy to a reality TV career and, eventually, collaborations with modern artists – like the irritating but undeniably skilled Yungblud – in his final days. He never stopped trying shit. This proclivity was on full display during the 2009 BlizzCon show, with Ozzy bringing a then-nine-year-old guitarist named Yuto Miyazawa on stage during “Crazy Train,” going so far as to heft Miyazawa on his shoulder midsong.
Miyazawa was about as familiar with Blizzard's games as Ozzy, but up on stage, none of that mattered to him.
"I always admired [Ozzy's] first guitarist Randy Rhoads," Miyazawa, now 25, told Aftermath. "When I played on his shoulder, I felt like I [was] Randy Rhoads for a moment. It was and is still my best moment of my life."
Miyazawa also noted that Ozzy went on to send him a Christmas card that year and invite him to Ozzfest 2010.
Back in 2009, Ozzy had no idea why he was at BlizzCon: “You know what? I have not the f****** faintest,” he replied when GameSpot asked him how he wound up playing a convention center full of WoW, Diablo, and StarCraft fans.
But he still went up there and sang his heart out, grinning like a child even younger than Miyazawa when the crowd belted the chorus to “Crazy Train.” He made the same face during the same moment of his final show just a couple weeks ago, weary but possessed by one final purpose – with a voice that, even after 76 years on this Earth, still kicked hard enough to wake the Devil.
RIP to the real Prince Of Darkness.
