In 2007 a team from a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, turned up at a hotel in Guangdong, in southern China, where buyers for Walmart and other Western companies stayed while they had plastic goods made. They were there to put a band together. Harmonix had built Guitar Hero and lost it when Activision bought its publisher. Its reply was a game that needed a guitar, a drum kit and a microphone, came in a box priced at nearly $200, and asked the record companies for something no game had asked them for before: the original multitrack recordings of their songs.
Fast facts
- Developer: Harmonix.
- Publisher: MTV Games, with Electronic Arts handling distribution.
- Released: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in North America in November 2007, followed by PlayStation 2 and Wii versions; Europe in 2008.
- Instruments: a guitar controller, played as lead guitar or bass, a drum kit and a USB microphone, for up to four players.
- Songs: 58 on the disc, with new songs to download every week.
- Sequels: Rock Band 2 (2008), The Beatles: Rock Band (2009), Rock Band 3 (2010), Rock Band 4 (2015).
Cut loose
Guitar Hero, made by Harmonix for the peripherals company RedOctane, was a surprise hit in 2005. In 2006 Activision bought RedOctane for $100 million, and because Harmonix did not own the Guitar Hero name it “found itself cut loose”, as Edge put it. MTV had just bought Harmonix, and it became the new game’s publisher. “MTV were very supportive of what we were doing as a music entertainment endeavour and not just as a videogame endeavour,” the chief executive, Alex Rigopulos, said.
The ambition was huge. “In Rock Band, we had to build a complete guitar game and a complete drumming game from scratch, and a complete singing game — plus a layer of band gameplay that unified them all together, along with the digital distribution platform for digital music, and a character creation system,” Rigopulos told Edge. Harmonix grew from 90 to 300 people in two years, and some of them wrote code “in the hallways with their laptops resting on skateboards” because there were no desks left. The company, which had never made hardware, built machines to hit drum heads “repeatedly at variable (and fixed) force for days on end” and had test engineers drop controllers from set heights. Its hardware team then flew to the factories in China, where the instruments were put through ovens, freezers and humidifiers. Keyboards were considered and dropped: “it was already insanely ambitious to launch a game that had three peripherals,” Rigopulos said.
The multitrack masters
Guitar Hero’s songs were cover versions recorded for the game. Rock Band used the real recordings, and it needed more than the finished record: to let four people play different parts, Harmonix had to have each instrument on its own track. According to Edge, it was “the first game to request the original multitrack master recordings of songs”. “Nobody had ever asked for multitrack masters before,” the project lead, Greg LoPiccolo, said, “because no one had ever thought of a reason to use them.” Some could not be found at all: “There are little gaps in the Rock Band library and in many cases it’s because the multitracks don’t exist any more — they got lost.”
The 16, 24 or 48 separate channels of a studio session then had to be boiled down to drums, bass, guitar and vocals, and each part turned into a stream of notes at several difficulty levels without losing the feel of the performance. MTV’s name helped with the record companies. “Prior to Rock Band, recording artists basically wouldn’t even return our calls,” Rigopulos said. The disc had 58 songs, from David Bowie’s Suffragette City to the Strokes’ Reptilia, chosen, in LoPiccolo’s words, so “you could explore the history of rock from its origins to the present within the game”.
Playing in a band
Each player had a scrolling lane of notes on a shared screen, the instrument lanes side by side with the drums in the centre and the singer’s line across the top. Getting the four to feel like a band took work. “The first versions of the multiplayer game were pretty terrible,” LoPiccolo admitted. “It was essentially four singleplayer games glued together.” The answer was to make players depend on each other. A player who failed dropped out of the song until a bandmate “saved” them, and many songs finished with a “big rock ending” in which, as Edge put it, “everyone gets to shred like crazy”.
Edge’s writer, playing before release, found that it came together “beautifully, after two or three practice songs”, and described the moment when every member hits every note: “the crowd onscreen goes bananas, your band launches into the next section, and there’s never been an experience in gaming quite like it.” The magazine put three exclamation marks on the cover of that issue. Rigopulos saw the living room as its natural home: “The ultimate form of the Rock Band play experience is in a living room with a bunch of friends.”
A music shop
Harmonix promised at least one major release of downloadable songs every week, with whole albums among them, and set up an advisory panel chaired by Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band to help choose them. The download store made Rock Band a way of selling music as well as a game; Edge later called it “both a promotional tool and distribution network” for the record industry. Viacom, MTV’s parent company, reported that in 2008 players downloaded more than 30 million songs through Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. By the end of 2010 the store held more than 2,000 songs.
Success and slump
The launch was a hit. Viacom reported that in 2008 Rock Band and its sequel sold more than 3.8 million instrument bundles, 1.5 million copies of the game on its own and 900,000 separate instruments in the United States. It was not without problems: some of the first guitars developed faults, and Harmonix handled a stream of warranty returns. “There is also the reality of watching first-generation products hit a huge market — no engineer can account for the ways in which real players will handle their goods,” its hardware director, Daniel Sussman, said.
The rivalry with Guitar Hero then hurt both series. “Both of us went into that competition with the mindset that there was really only space for one [franchise],” Rigopulos said, “and therefore we were both aggressive in our approach in a way that didn’t ultimately serve either of us well.” Both overspent on marketing and music licences, unsold stock went out at cut prices, and the boom ended abruptly. Harmonix kept the series going: The Beatles: Rock Band sold “well over a couple of million units”, Rigopulos said in 2010, and Rock Band 3 that year added a keyboard and “Pro” modes that could be played on a real guitar, earning 10 out of 10 from Edge. Rock Band 4 followed in 2015, and new songs for it stopped in January 2024, by which time Harmonix, owned by Epic Games since 2021, had moved its band game into Fortnite (see music games).
Sources
- Edge issue 181, November 2007, from p. 46: Rock Band feature (MTV publishing and EA distributing; the interface and co-operative play; weekly downloadable songs and Steve Van Zandt’s panel; keyboards dropped; Rigopulos on the living room). The cover and editorial of the same issue refer to the three exclamation marks.
- Edge issue 211, February 2010, p. 73: Rigopulos on building Rock Band, the multitrack masters and the launch price of nearly $200.
- Edge issue 219, October 2010, from p. 46: Rock Band 3, its keyboard and real-guitar controller; Rigopulos on sales of The Beatles: Rock Band.
- Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010, pp. 76–78: Rock Band 3 review (10/10; more than 2,000 songs in the store).
- Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 144–147, “The making of Rock Band”: the RedOctane sale; MTV; the scale of the project; the multitrack masters and the Q&A with Greg LoPiccolo; the 58 songs; the multiplayer design; testing and manufacturing in China; the warranty returns; the rivalry with Guitar Hero.
- Viacom Inc., Form 10-K for 2008, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (web): bundles, software and hardware sold in the US in 2008, and more than 30 million songs downloaded. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001339947/000119312509026502/d10k.htm
- Wikipedia, “Rock Band (video game)” (web, secondary): the PlayStation 2 and Wii versions; the guitar controller used for bass; the USB microphone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_(video_game)
- Wikipedia, “Rock Band 4” and “Fortnite Festival” (web, secondary): Rock Band 4‘s release in 2015 and the end of new songs in January 2024; Fortnite Festival in December 2023; Epic Games’ purchase of Harmonix in 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_4 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite_Festival