Harmonix | Code Like It's 198x

For its first ten years Harmonix was very good at making music programs that nobody bought. Its first product, by its founders’ account, sold about 300 copies, and its two PlayStation 2 games won admirers and hardly any customers. Then, in 2005, it made a game played on a small plastic guitar. Two years later the studio had grown from 90 people to 300, was shipping millions of plastic instruments made in China, and had helped build a market on which Americans spent about $1.9 billion in 2008.

Fast facts

Full name: Harmonix Music Systems.
Founded: 1995, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Founders: Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, who met at the MIT Media Lab.
Best known for: Frequency (2001), Amplitude (2003), Guitar Hero (2005), Rock Band (2007), Dance Central (2010).
Owners: independent until MTV Networks, part of Viacom, bought it in October 2006; sold by Viacom in December 2010 to an affiliate of the investment firm Columbus Nova; part of Epic Games since November 2021.

Music for non-musicians

Rigopulos and Egozy met as graduate students at the MIT Media Lab, where Egozy worked in Tod Machover’s group on programs that generate music. Rigopulos wondered, Egozy recalled, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we took a joystick that’s a more friendly interface and used it to drive the parameters of our generative music system?” That became Harmonix’s first product, The Axe, which let players improvise instrumental solos by waggling a PC joystick. Egozy later called it a “total flop”. The company tried other routes, including a system for Disney at Epcot and a venture with karaoke machines in Japan, before, in Egozy’s words, “it took us quite a while to discover the way to satisfy our mission, which is to let everyone in the world experience the joy of making music. As it turns out, that was through video games.”

The push towards games came from a PlayStation game. “It began with Parappa The Rapper,” Rigopulos told Edge in 2010: “it wasn’t the first rhythm-action game, but it was the first great one, and it altered Harmonix’s trajectory.” He found Konami’s Bemani arcade games “sorely deficient” by comparison, “the gameplay was shallow, the visual design was uninspired, the music selection and sound quality was poor”, and saw “an opportunity to take music games to the next level” (see PaRappa the Rapper and Bemani).

Frequency and Amplitude

Several of the people who built Harmonix’s first game came from Looking Glass, the studio behind Thief. One of them, Greg LoPiccolo, told Edge that they had deliberately set out not to make “a Looking Glass game”. They worked on the Frequency prototype for a year, took it to Sony, and “they bought it in 15 minutes”; LoPiccolo remembered being halfway through the first pitch when Sony said yes: “We were like, ‘But we have eight slides left!’”

Frequency (2001) sent the player down a neon tunnel in which each wall was one instrument of a song; completing a phrase on one track set it playing, and the player moved on to the next until the whole arrangement was running. Amplitude (2003) kept the idea, and Edge gave it 8 out of 10. Neither sold. “Frequency and Amplitude were both really fun games to play — for people who bothered to give them a try,” Rigopulos said. “But those games were… strange.” Harmonix kept going with work for other publishers: Karaoke Revolution for Konami, and EyeToy: AntiGrav for Sony, a hoverboard racer steered by the player’s own body in front of the EyeToy camera, in which, as Edge put it, “Jump is jump”.

Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero, made for the peripherals company RedOctane and released in North America in November 2005, was the game that sold. According to MIT News, Harmonix had 45 people when its sales began rising every month instead of falling after Christmas. LoPiccolo called it “a mutant child of Amplitude and KR”. Rigopulos thought the earlier games had offered “no easy narrative metaphor for people to grasp on to, no aspirational element”; a guitar and a rock soundtrack supplied both.

The success brought offers. “We started getting lots of phone calls from lots of pretty big companies,” the creative director, Josh Randall, told Edge in late 2006, and MTV Networks, part of Viacom, agreed to buy the studio. Viacom’s accounts record that it completed the purchase in October 2006 for an initial $175 million. Randall expected little to change: “MTV isn’t going to be our publisher: we’re still going to be working with other publishers.”

The same year Activision bought RedOctane for $100 million. Harmonix did not own the Guitar Hero name, “and so found itself cut loose”, as Edge put it. It finished Guitar Hero II and left the series to Activision and Neversoft.

Rock Band

Harmonix’s answer was a game for a whole band, and MTV did publish it after all, with Electronic Arts distributing. Rock Band came out in North America in November 2007 with a guitar, a drum kit and a microphone, and songs taken from the original studio multitrack recordings. Building it changed the company. Harmonix grew from 90 to 300 staff in 24 months, “people sitting in the hallways with their laptops resting on skateboards” because there were no desks, and a software company that had never made hardware sent engineers to factories in southern China to oversee the instruments. “A lot of us felt as though we aged five years in 18 months,” Rigopulos said. The risk was real: “Rock Band was our only franchise. If it had failed, it would have posed an existential threat to us as a company.”

It did not fail. Viacom reported that in 2008 alone Rock Band and Rock Band 2 sold more than 3.8 million instrument bundles in the United States, and that players downloaded more than 30 million songs. The Beatles: Rock Band followed in 2009, and Rock Band 3 in 2010 added a keyboard and “Pro” modes played on a real guitar; Edge gave it 10 out of 10 and called it “simply magnificent”.

After the boom

The market collapsed almost as fast as it had grown. Rigopulos later admitted that Harmonix and Activision had both behaved as if “there was really only space for one [franchise]”, overspending on marketing and music licences in a way “that didn’t ultimately serve either of us well”. Harmonix turned to Microsoft’s Kinect camera with Dance Central, a dance game with no instrument to buy, which launched with the camera in 2010. In December 2010 Viacom sold Harmonix to Harmonix-SBE Holdings, an affiliate of the investment firm Columbus Nova.

The independent Harmonix revived its band game as Rock Band 4 in 2015 and made Fuser (2020), published by NCSoft, a game of mixing the vocals, drums and bass of different hit records together like a DJ; Wireframe called it “a hugely impressive piece of music software” whose game got in the way of the fun. In November 2021 Epic Games bought the studio, saying its expertise was needed “to reimagine how music is experienced, created and distributed”. Its Fortnite Festival launched inside Fortnite in December 2023: a band game with lanes for lead, bass, drums and vocals, which the music games entry follows.

Sources

Edge issue 99, July 2001: Frequency preview (Harmonix, PlayStation 2, Sony).
Edge issue 124, June 2003, p. 92: Amplitude review (8/10).
Edge issue 144, January 2005, p. 86: EyeToy: AntiGrav review (developer Harmonix, publisher SCEA; “Jump is jump”).
Edge issue 156, December 2005, from p. 62: “Rhythm Faction”, studio feature: the Looking Glass staff; the Frequency prototype and the Sony pitch; Karaoke Revolution Party for Konami; LoPiccolo on Guitar Hero as “a mutant child of Amplitude and KR”.
Edge issue 169, December 2006, pp. 20–21: interview with Josh Randall on the MTV acquisition.
Edge issue 181, November 2007, from p. 46: Rock Band feature (Harmonix’s history from 1995 and The Axe; MTV, EA and the record companies).
Edge issue 211, February 2010, pp. 71–74, feature on music games: Rigopulos on PaRappa, Bemani, Frequency and Amplitude, and on what the earlier games lacked.
Edge issue 212, March 2010, p. 24: Screen Digest column (NPD figures: US spending on music games of about $1.9 billion in 2008).
Edge issue 219, October 2010, from p. 46: studio report on Rock Band 3 and Dance Central, the Kinect launch title.
Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010, pp. 76–78: Rock Band 3 review (10/10).
Edge issue 226, April 2011: N’Gai Croal’s column, Viacom’s sale of Harmonix among the industry’s cutbacks.
Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 144–147, “The making of Rock Band”: the RedOctane sale and Harmonix “cut loose”; MTV; growth from 90 to 300 staff; the instruments and factories in China; Rigopulos on the risk and on the rivalry with Guitar Hero.
Wireframe issue 46, December 2020, p. 99: Fuser review (developer Harmonix, publisher NCSoft, 79%).
Viacom Inc., Form 10-K for 2006, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (web): acquisition of Harmonix in October 2006 for initial consideration of about $175.0 million. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001339947/000119312507043859/d10k.htm
Viacom Inc., Form 10-K for 2008 (web): Rock Band and Rock Band 2 sales and song downloads in 2008. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001339947/000119312509026502/d10k.htm
Viacom, “Viacom Sells Harmonix Music Systems”, press release, 23 December 2010 (web): sale to Harmonix-SBE Holdings LLC, an affiliate of Columbus Nova. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/viacom-sells-harmonix-music-systems-112381934.html
Zach Winn, “Harmonix keeps innovating, with lasting impact”, MIT News, 14 December 2021 (web, secondary): the Media Lab; The Axe; Disney and karaoke; Egozy on the mission; 45 staff at the time of Guitar Hero; Epic Games. https://news.mit.edu/2021/harmonix-music-gameplay-1214
“Harmonix: A Guitar Hero in Every House”, Newsweek, 22 December 2007 (web, secondary): the founders as graduate students at the Media Lab. https://www.newsweek.com/harmonix-guitar-hero-every-house-94955
Engadget, “Harmonix founders detail the company’s failure-ridden road to success”, 3 September 2009, reporting the founders’ interview with CNN Money (web, secondary): The Axe sold about 300 copies. https://www.engadget.com/2009-09-03-harmonix-founders-detail-the-companys-failure-ridden-road-to-su.html
Game Developer, “Epic Games has acquired Harmonix”, 23 November 2021 (web, secondary): the purchase and Epic’s statement. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/epic-games-has-acquired-harmonix
Wikipedia, “Rock Band 4” and “Fortnite Festival” (web, secondary): Rock Band 4’s release in 2015; Fortnite Festival’s launch in December 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_4 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Festival