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Nobody has rocked the game industry quite like Harmonix Music Systems. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based game company is focused squarely on music and rhythm games, and churned out Guitar Hero, one of the most popular new franchises of any genre, with the aid of publisher RedOctane.
The band broke up somewhat abruptly at E3 2006 when RedOctane, which owned the rights to the Guitar Hero name, was purchased by Activision for $100 million. A few months later, Harmonix was bought outright by MTV Networks, and at GDC 2007 EA announced that it would be distributing the next Harmonix-made game through its EA Partners program.
While it was known that the Guitar Hero franchise would live on through Activision-owned Neversoft, Harmonix has kept the volume down on its next project...until now.
Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos explains Rock Band in his own words.
Harmonix, MTV Networks, and Electronic Arts today officially announced Rock Band. The music-based game will do Guitar Hero two better by featuring guitar, drum, and microphone peripherals, proving rock and roll requires more than just someone who can handle the axe. Rock Band is scheduled to be available for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this holiday season.
Like Guitar Hero, Rock Band will feature licensed music. Thanks largely in part to its new relationship with MTV, Harmonix was able to wrangle multi-track master recordings from the catalogs of some of the biggest record labels in the business. On board to offer access to their portfolios are EMI Music Publishing, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Hollywood Records, and Warner Chappell Music. It is currently unknown how much from each music publisher will be available to Harmonix, but the emphasis going forward will be to work with the artists themselves.
Little is known about the gameplay at this time, but online interaction will be vital to the experience. Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos told GameSpot, "In addition to the music that ships with the game, we have very big plans for building out a huge library of online expansion content." Rigopulos also said that some content will "very likely" be free
As for the controllers, the guitar peripheral will control the bass and lead guitar portions, a microphone will be used for vocals, and a drum peripheral will provide the beats. Rigopulos says the drum is "a really impressive piece of hardware. I'm a drummer myself, so we weren't going to settle for anything less than something that felt like a real instrument." Harmonix is still working out the details of how the peripherals will ship.
When asked if wannabe rock stars would be able to go online and seek out other musicians to play with, Rigopulos excitedly said, "Absolutely. The whole experience is actually about reaching out to other people and forming a band together and that collaborative experience...to form a band and rise from obscurity to fame."
The team behind Rock Band also sees the project as more than just a simple game; they see it as a new platform for experiencing music. "We're at the very front of what will be a major transformation in music entertainment," said Rigopulos. "I really believe that four or five years from now, this kind of active participation in music making is going to be how people expect to experience the music that they love. Rock Band is a huge first step in that direction, but the sky's the limit in terms of the span of genres we eventually intend to reach with this."
For more on Rock Band, read GameSpot's Q&A with Rigopulos and EA Partners vice president David DeMartini.
SAN FRANCISCO--Two years ago, when Will Wright made his groundbreaking demonstration of Spore to a captive audience at GDC 2005, he tried to describe what sort of gameplay mechanics he wanted to incorporate. True to himself, he described them largely by analogy to various toys and pop culture touchstones from his childhood: Etch-a-Sketch, Mr. Potato Head, Star Trek, Erector Sets, and Pac-Man, to name only a few.
Fast-forward two years to GDC 2007. Though returning attendees might have been disappointed at the lack of any additional gameplay footage, Spore design lead Chaim Gingold's session titled "Spore's Magic Crayons" nonetheless proved to be an entertaining presentation, elaborating on some of the toy analogies Wright had presented previously by describing in detail the design challenges of the creature, building, vehicle, and planet editors. The session reinforced the notion that Spore is fundamentally about a return to the basics of game design; a turning away from the question of "Will this sell?" to the questions of "What do people love to do?" and "How do we help them create?"
Gingold attributed his crayon analogy to the children's novel Harold and the Purple Crayon, wherein a child draws objects with a purple crayon that magically come to life. With that simile in mind, Gingold explained over the next 45 minutes how Spore's ultimate goal was to create an editor with the same ease of use, capacity for fun, and transformational ability to make something real.
Gingold first identified several reasons why creativity is fun: disproportionate feedback (large outputs from small inputs, e.g. a slot machine), self-exploration/identification, constructionism (people caring about what they've built themselves), and social pleasure (people loving to show off what they've built).
But Spore's design team quickly discovered that there were myriad challenges with an emergent editor that embraced open-ended creativity. It had to be easy and fun. It had to satisfy a broad range of fantasies and expectations. The output had to work in the animation system and with the game's rule sets. And how do you intuitively design a 3D object editor with a 2D interface for non Maya-savvy players?
Most generally, how do you design an editor that your grandmother could use that still can yield countless creatures of varying size and shape that work with the gameplay?
The short answer is that constraints were applied to the editors that maximize the possibility of well-designed creatures while minimizing player confusion on how to build them. There was a conscious--and as Gingold describes it, necessary--choice to reduce the breadth of the editing tool.
The challenge still remained, though, in creating a design grammar within the editors that players could universally understand. The solution was in finding the essential representation of the object being built (e.g. a vehicle) in terms of its essential and easily-recognizable building blocks (e.g. the cockpit). By utilizing this language of creation, Gingold argued, they could more easily guide player expectations and thus have them more consistently produce nuanced and high-quality creatures, buildings, and vehicles.
Before concluding, Gingold moved on to an interesting philosophical observation, waxing oddly Marxist. In humanity's past, people did everything themselves, and life was communal (albeit tribal). At a certain point, societies begun to form, and work became more specialized (e.g. butchers, blacksmiths, etc.). In today's corporate structure, this specialization seems to have spread out enormously: the programmer who writes the code for hair animation, or the accountant who does the books for a particular department. And despite close living conditions, we still maintain a strong sense of privacy.
The information age, however, has begun to combat that isolation, returning an element of community by allowing us to share our personal content with our fellow human beings around the world. Gingold implicitly argued that tools like Spore's editors are not only enablers of unique content creation, but also facilitators of social interaction.
"The computer can breathe life into the things that the players are making," said Gingold. "And that's one of our superpowers."
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