An 11-year-old Hunter Watson lies in bed as the camera zooms in on his face. Birds chirp in the background of the shot. Then there’s an electronic “zoom” sound and the location changes from his bedroom to a concert hall packed with pre-teens wearing glowsticks.

Watson is playing guitar in a sleeveless shirt and puka shell necklace. He sings into the microphone: “I just want to play video games, everything else is really lame.”

This video of Watson and his band, Black Out Band, has amassed more than 800,000 views on YouTube since it was uploaded in 2008. It went viral like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” — and as lead singer and guitarist, Watson was the face of it.

“It’s a pretty sh*tty song I guess, I’ll admit that,” said Tug Hunter, a former Syracuse University student and member of Black Out Band. “It’s funny, at Syracuse, I met people in Boston who said Video Games was a thing at their school.”

Watson, who was from McLean, Virginia, and was a former member of Black Out Band, was killed in a car accident last weekend in Dover, Delaware. He was a rising junior in the School of Information Studies at SU and a member of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.

The music video, aptly titled “Video Games,” is emblematic of Watson’s goofiness and his very serious passion for making music, his friends said.

“He seemed to love to be in the spotlight. I just sort of liked playing music, but he always wanted to be the face of it  — and he was good at it,” Hunter said. “Being on stage, being in front of people, talking to people came naturally to him.”

Years later when Watson started college at SU, his friends would still tease him about “Video Games.”

“He would get so embarrassed,” said Matthew Schiff, a member of Watson’s fraternity pledge class. “But we would all just laugh about it.”

But despite the silliness of “Video Games,” Watson was a very talented and serious musician and DJ, his friends said.

“That’s where Hunter got his crazy sense in my opinion,” said Jason Reif, a junior in the iSchool and a friend of Watson’s. “Could you imagine being that age and having people recognize you and asking you for an autograph? He didn’t have a sense of entitlement, but he always dreamed big after that.”

Watson would spend hours in his South Campus apartment using thousands of dollars worth of equipment to mix music. Often, he would DJ for parties at the Phi Psi house.

Reif said wanted to make a career out of making music. It was more than just a hobby to him.

“He loved sampling Kanye West,” Reif added.

If music was Watson’s passion, stand-up comedy was his favorite pastime. Wherever Watson went, he would try to get tickets to comedy shows for himself and his friends. He was particularly fond of Jim Jefferies, Louis CK, Eric Andre, Hannibal Buress and Nathan Fielder.

“He loved comedy and he was really funny,” Schiff said. “He was known as the funny guy, the comedian of the house.”

Watson was at his happiest when he was among some of America’s funniest minds. One weekend, Watson surprised Reif with second row tickets to a comedy show in Brooklyn.

But when the two of them arrived late, Watson got called out and had to get on stage in front of the whole crowd. The comedians sprayed him down with water and made him change on stage.

“It was really, really funny,” Reif recalled.

At the end of the show, Watson got to go backstage and meet some of his comedy idols and huge names in comedy: Hannibal Buress, Nathan Fielder, Trevor Noah and Jeff Ross. He was having the time of his life, Reif said. He was happy.

“It’s one of my favorite memories,” Reif added. “And I think it was one of his too.”

Published on June 26, 2016 at 11:04 am

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu