I Guess Mods Are Something That *Checks Notes* IKEA And Breaking Benjamin Are Into Now

For no clear reason beyond cosmic coincidence, mods—you know, the ones hyper-dedicated nerds (complimentary) create mostly for PC games—have broken containment this week. Twice.

I know games are part of mainstream culture now, but there’s still something whiplash-inducing about seeing two of the world’s most disparate strange bedfellows, butt rock legends Breaking Benjamin and Swedish hell maze IKEA, both get into modding. Maybe it’s the fact that mods remain a relatively niche pursuit in the grand scheme of things. Or maybe it’s because, in both cases, the institutions-turned-modders were not fucking around.

Local Man Benjamin Burnley interrupts a Breaking Benjamin concert with a rant about his True First Person 1.2 Fallout 4 mod
by
u/im_all_ears in
Fallout

As spotted by PC Gamer, the whole Breaking Benjamin incident is truly phenomenal—in large part because it took place on stage, in the middle of a rock show. The band’s frontman, Benjamin Burnley, decided to air out some Fallout 4 mod drama for all the world to see:

“There was a modder in the community that was really mean to me and bullying me, saying, ‘Oh, your mod is shit. You don’t know what you’re fucking doing,'” said Burnley. “So I’m doing this every fucking night, and blowing his fucking downloads out of the water.”

That was a mere two minutes into the four-and-a-half minute rant. Someone behind the scenes at the venue even joined in, putting the mod’s details up on screens.

“Even if you fuckin’ don’t play that game, go and download it. It’s on Nexus Mods,” said Burnley. “Tomorrow I better see all my motherfuckin’ downloads going up.”

…

“When you post a mod, you’re supposed to be able to grow and learn and make it better,” Burnley said. “And right off the bat, this fucking asshole was shitting on my mod.”

Philosophically speaking, he’s not wrong! However, his “True First Person” mod—which has now been viewed by nearly 70,000 people on Nexus Mods—is tagged as “AI assisted,” meaning it was likely vibe coded. So maybe Burnley’s bully was right? 

IKEA’s mod also builds on a Bethesda game—Skyrim instead of Fallout 4—and somehow involves an even more famous person: Matt Berry of What We Do In The Shadows,Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and countless other comedies (as well as his own music career that I only just now learned about on Wikipedia). In it, Berry plays a talking “Kallax” shelf with a full quest line that’s triggered by the player becoming overencumbered. Yes, it’s an elaborate marketing scheme, but you’ve gotta admire the commitment. 

“I am a bulwark against encumbrance,” the shelf explains in Berry’s characteristic bellow after being assembled. “A champion of categorization! I am a practical storage solution of epic proportions! And also, I’m a shelving unit.”

There is, remarkably, way more where that came from. 

Speaking of origins, both of these odd mod stories do make a certain kind of sense. Berry’s already inextricably tied to another Bethesda property—Fallout, the TV show of which sees him voice a Mr Handy robot—and real old heads will remember that Breaking Benjamin contributed a song to the Halo 2 soundtrack. Like Burnley’s Falloutmod, it was fine.

The Painstaking Process Of Adding Rideable Horses To Fallout: New Vegas – Aftermath
“I keep rewriting code over and over again, looking for that ‘OK, this feels close enough’ moment”
AftermathNathan Grayson