[Cover photo: l-r: James LoMenzo, Dirk Verbeuren, Dave Mustaine, Teemu Mäntysaari, Photo credit to Ryan Chang]

In October 1994, Megadeth and their label took a chance with a new venture in tandem with the release of the album Youthanasia. They established Megadeth, Arizona, the first-ever band website on the Internet.

Billboard (October 31, 2024) has explained on the site’s 30th anniversary, that it was…

…based on the location of the band’s new studio in Phoenix, and was the concept for the first-ever artist website. In addition to the chat room, called the Megadiner, the site featured an art and digital-postcard repository, Vic’s Cactus Hut and Souvenir Shop, a newspaper titled Horrorscopes and links to videos and online-radio tracks.

Megadeth founder Dave Mustaine reflects on that move:

When the internet came into our lives, we really didn’t understand it, just like anyone else. But we had the greatest opportunity because we were the ones chosen to be the guinea pig. When the people over at Capitol had shown us what this was, the basic layout and some of the artwork, the images were all cool. The woman that had done the images had done a bunch of great images and made it really look cool like the stickers that are on the back of campers and shit like that, so I thought it was really great and exciting. Again, no one really knew what it was, so once we clicked on the launch button and it started all whizzing and banging and all that kind of stuff, it was remarkable. There’s been no looking back since.

Comparing the launch of their website with the way Megadeth uses the internet to engage with fans now, Dave Mustaine says:

When we first started out, we were stuck having to write to our fans, whether it was typing letters out on typewriters if you can believe that, or getting a handwritten letter, and I used to do that a lot, in fact I got something that was a photocopy just the other day from one of my friends of a letter that I had sent them and it was really nostalgic and cool. But you’re trying to conduct business and when you want to be an international band, it sucked. When we started playing, a lot of the bands we knew in town, they really didn’t look at things like it was going to be an international thing. They were just worried about being popular in their hometown, which for me, never crossed my mind, I wanted to be the biggest band in the world, so we would write, write, write. We would trade tapes with people around the world. Every once in a while, I would pick up the phone and make a long-distance phone call and have to deal with the shock of seeing the phone bill later.

But once the Megadeth Arizona site started, that was great. We were able to push the launch button on this site and go into the Megadiner and like I said before, anyone that was a member of Megeadiner in the beginning are definitely IT. They have tremendous street credibility. Now, with the chats and stuff that had happened with the launch of Megadiner, people have chat rooms everywhere. We were just in a chat room the other day getting tech support. You gotta remember that a chat room is a chat room. It was really neat to be able to develop all of this stuff together with the fans that we have become friends with. Megadeth.com was born out of Megadeth Arizona and that has led to some really long lasting friendships.

Megadeth just wrapped their U.S. tour, which followed runs in Latin America (Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and México) and Europe (Sweden, Italy, France, Germany, and more).

Next up, the band will head into the studio to record new music, and look for additional dates to be announced for 2025.