July 18th, 2008
The Cambridge, Massachusetts. offices of Harmonix Music sit in Central Square, within walking distance of the city's best indie rock clubs, and down Massachusetts Ave. from MIT and the Media Lab. The location is perfect for a company that's fueled by both hackers and rockers, where a poster of Frank Zappa perched naked on the can adorns the door to the rest room, and the office network is connected not by cables or wi-fi, but with a giant laser that hangs in the window next to somebody's desk.
Starting with the title Frequency in 2001, Harmonix Music has become a leader in games that turn music into play. The company broke through with the Guitar Hero series, where players equipped with a simple toy guitar could shred along with a selection of hard rock songs. A surprise blockbuster, Guitar Hero destroyed three myths: that rock is dead, that peripheral-based games cost too much for the mainstream, and that only losers play air guitar.
But in 2007, Harmonix was acquired by MTV and started a new franchise: Rock Band, which expanded the guitar-game concept by adding a drum kit and a microphone. Meanwhile, their publisher, RedOctane, brought the Guitar Hero line to Neversoft, who have taken it in a markedly different direction: Ccameos by real-life stars such as Slash and Tom Morello, a battle mode where players sabotage each other's playing, and an escalation of difficulty and finger-burning solos made Guitar Hero III even crasser-and less realistic-than the earlier game's prequels.
Harmonix loves to hire musicians. Most of the staffers play an instrument, and if you're in a band, you can take indefinite unpaid leave to go on tour and pursue your dreams, a policy they liken to maternity leave. But like most successful game studios, Harmonix demands a lot in return. Every week the company releases new songs or whole albums for sale, and they're aiming for a 500-track library by year's end. They've been working overtime to ship Rock Band 2 in September—just 10 months after the first game—and the cafeteria space in the center of the office has seen plenty of "crunch dinners." Walking around, you hear the constant sound of someone slapping out time on the game's drum kit, and playtesters and note transcribers hunch over their desks, guitars in their lap, banging out yet another solo. It's a living.
For this feature, The A.V. Club spoke with four members of the Rock Band team about the culture and style that make Rock Band what it is—and may set it apart in the upcoming rock game wars. Rock Band 2 ships just ahead of its biggest competitor, Guitar Hero World Tour—the latest edition of the Guitar Hero franchise, which will now have its own mic and drum kit. While everyone we spoke with was courteous to their rivals, see if you can catch a few jabs at the competition-and especially at their rock bona fides. Harmonix pioneered the technology; now they expect to win on culture.
Helen McWilliams: Lead Writer / member of Vagiant
The A.V. Club: What does being a writer on Rock Band entail?
HM: Honestly, trying to take the word "rock" out of the game as much as possible. Which is kind of hard to do, because everyone's first instinct is to make everything like, "And then you're gonna rock out with your rockin' guitar to rock town! Rock out!"
Basically [the writers] just have to nerd out on guitar descriptions, and band information, and everything rock-related— and try to not give it that aggressive tone that is the style that all musical- instrument companies have.
AVC: Why not?
HM: I guess everybody's sick of it. It's so cliched now. WAnd we are trying to appeal to a much broader audience, . We're trying to appeal to, you know, grandma, and the little kids.
AVC: Going from Guitar Hero to Rock Band, what did you change about the tone?
HM: On Guitar Hero people didn't need to have heard the songs before to be able to play them in the game. So we could pick [Blue Öyster Cult's] "Godzilla" over "Don't Fear the Reaper," because we were like, "Well, it doesn't matter if they know it, this song would play better. We think it would be more fun." Or we could introduce people to edgier stuff, as long as it played well and we thought it was cool. One of the things that's changed a lot with Rock Band is because the vocals are so key, we actually do have a responsibility to try to have songs that people have heard before, and know pretty well. I think it's actually worked out really well. And we've had fun with it, putting out Disturbed and Jimmy Buffett on the same week. [Buffett] was a great example. There were people in the office that were like, "Yes! Finally!" And there were other people who were like, "What the..." And that's exactly what we want. We don't want everyone to be necessarily thrilled every week with what's available for DLC [downloadable content]. It shouldn't be like that. You don't get angry at a record store for having music that you don't want to buy.
AVC: There are no real-world stars in Rock Band, as there are in say, Guitar Hero III. Have you ever considered trying that?
HM: I don't know if we would consider it. From our perspective, we want it to be about you, and your rock star fantasy. Speaking for myself, I've never in my life played a show where one of my idols came on-stage and challenged me to a guitar [duel]. [Laughs.] I mean, that just doesn't seem to me to be very much in the spirit of rock. But I understand the impulse to do it. It's funny, and it's over-the-top, and it's cool to have these artists appear. But I think we just want to have this sense of like, you're there with your band, for each other, and you're fulfilling your rock star dream together, and the audience is there for you. [It would be] a little like when Stevie Wonder would show up on The Cosby Show. It reminds me that this isn't real.
AVC: You said earlier that you grew up in New Jersey, but you moved here for the rock scene. For someone who doesn't know Boston, how would you explain it?
HM: It's so good! I think the thing that always made me psyched about Boston rock is that it's very hard to get away with bullshit. You can definitely do your own thing, and have an artsy shtick or do something weird. But if it's not genuine, people spot it immediately in Boston, in a way that I don't think they do in other places. It's that weird Boston combination of being very warm and very hostile at the same time. [Laughs.] If people see something that they like, that they see as genuine, they're very supportive of it. Although of course, support in Boston definitely looks different than other places. I play in a punk band, and if [the audience] likes us, if we're playing really well, they spit beer and throw bottles. Give us the finger. And that means we're doing great.
Matt Boch — Creative Designer of Hardware / Member of Blanks and The Main Drag
AVC: Could you describe your role?
MB: It's my job to push forward the musical interaction that people have, think about novel ways of having physical interfaces intersect with musical interfaces, and more or less just do what I can to aid the software designers in creating a dynamic experience for the user. I'd say my not-so-secret ulterior motive is to move these peripherals closer and closer to musical instruments with every passing generation.
AVC: Do you follow the modding community around Rock Band – for example, the programs like Drum Machine that people have written to use the peripherals on their PCs??
MB: Oh yeah. There's not a Rock Band or other music game-related mod that I probably haven't read about, at least. I'm super-proud of the online community that has popped up around [the peripherals]. I think they're an awesome and relatively cheap project box for doing all sorts of crazy, different things. We're hoping to see people plug these things into their computers, and perform in their band with them. I do a bunch of VJ-ing stuff with a friend, and we're working out stuff where we play these drums and we trigger video loops.
AVC: What do you think of the guitar, though? You've only got five buttons. Do you think that's limiting, and do you think that'll expand over time?
MB: I think it's difficult. I have a handful of patents in progress, about different novel ways of interacting with guitar controllers. Once you get to that point where you're really proficient at hitting the gems quickly, how do we take that skill that you developed and make that skill expressive? Because I don't think that what we've been doing is training a bunch of guitarists. I think we've been training a bunch of people who have an idea about guitar in relationship to the game. So we've been sort of training air guitarists. What does the strum bar represent? Is the strum bar the pick dragging across the strings? Is it the strings? Is it the pick-up and the strings? It's none of those things. It's an approximation of guitar, so it's sort of the hand holding the pick, but with no strings at all. And while we have this approximate air guitar interface, people have gotten really good at it and really smart at it, and if you look at any of the bands that started where they're playing these instruments, they've opened up the potential to be expressive with them. And I think that a big question in my mind as the designer is, how do we change the controller to allow it to be more expressive? And how do we utilize the base level of skill that everyone has developed on the instrument, for types of free playing, for its creative potential? Those are the big, open questions still.
Which I think is okay. I think it's largely the reason for the appeal of playing the guitar, or playing the bass, because you get all this musical knowledge that you would have to grind so long for otherwise, in an instant. My standard metaphor for this is, you can go to a really great sandwich shop and you can order an amazing sandwich and it just has one big name, and you eat it, and it's great. But maybe you didn't taste that they'd layered the prosciutto on top of the mozzarella with this special mayonnaise or whatever. You aren't tasting every individual element of the sandwich. You're eating the sandwich and it's a great sandwich. There are a lot of people who turn on a song, and it's a song. And they couldn't tell you what the bass player's playing, versus what the guitar player's playing, versus the synthesizer in the background, or any of those elements. They just hear a song, in the way that you might eat a sandwich. And playing this game does a really easy trick, which is deciding that the success of one event determines the muting of one track. It equates two things which are actually not equal, and does this great trick to your brain which is hugely pleasurable, and educates you in a way by pulling [the track] away. It's this simple, "One of these things is not like the other." And then you all of a sudden have this knowledge that with a lot of other people would take them two or three years playing in a band to figure out. And bang, it's there right in front of you.
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