Avicii‘s sophomore album, Stories, has been out for nearly a week now, and it looks as though his team is resorting to drastic measures to keep people talking about it. On the young Swede’s Instagram account, a simple choose-your-own-adventure game of sorts has been put together as a means of promoting the album – and perhaps also to get a rise out of his most storied provocateur.
Before anything else, though, I’d like to point out that this “game” doesn’t hold a candle to the NES-inspired instant classic that Nicky Romero released a couple months ago. Avicii’s game features some engaging artwork and creatively utilizes Instagram’s image tagging as its framework, but for its homage to old school video games as well as its depth of gameplay, Romero’s Flash game easily takes the gold.
…But more importantly, has anybody else noticed that Avicii took something of a pot shot at progressive house icon deadmau5 in his game? The ‘mau5 and the ‘Veech have gone rounds on social media for years, but all of that ended back in August when the latter artist blocked the former on Twitter for referencing his alleged substance abuse. It looks like Avicii might want to revisit their feud, however, because one of the possible plotlines takes the user to this image:
If the artwork is, indeed, a jab at deadmau5, then it’s definitely a bizarre one. The silhouette of the Joel Zimmerman’s mau5head trademark is unmistakeable, and the line on the marquee above him is directly copied from a Facebook post that he made to insult Avicii’s “Wake Me Up” all the way back in 2013. Either Avicii wants to demonstrate that he’s got a sense of humor about the whole ordeal, or this is the weirdest comeback in the history of DJ beefs.
No matter his motive, Avicii has made his Instagram game, “Avicii Begins,” available to anyone who wants to play it – so check it out and let us know if you find any other strange Easter eggs in the comments section below.