The city of Chordia is an amalgamation of people with different backgrounds and personalities, but everyone you speak to shares a unified sentiment: They all love Smolder, a popular boy band that has dominated the societal cacophony for years. From public chatter to radio stations, Smolder is an ever-present tune.
Cadence, the protagonist of the rhythm-game-meets-turn-based-RPG People Of Note, wants to disrupt the non-stop Smolder-fest and give her neighbors something new. She’s grown tired of a fanaticism that only seems to get stronger with each new record, despite all of them sounding the same. She’s immediately met with resistance from her friend Cerrin, who argues that people don’t want new things; they just want comfort food, to continue listening to the same stuff they’ve heard for years, because that’s what grabs them. Cadence challenges this conformity, posing the idea that people don’t know what they want, actually, and it’s her job to show them music that is fresh, unexpected, and moving, to convince them otherwise.
The rhythm game genre shares some of this creative appetite, one that has actually been manifested slowly but steadily over the last couple of years. When it comes to home consoles, Guitar Hero and Rock Band used to dominate the genre, as well as every Friday night in so many basements. Yet it didn’t take long for their popularity to saturate the market, launching game after game that, as years passed, stopped differing from their past entry—and a few before that one, too.
Although there was a brief revival of those games in the mid ’10s, the heyday of plastic instruments was pretty much over by 2010. Rhythm games seemed stagnant, until a wave of smaller, independent developers willing to take risks and try new ideas filled the creative void. The likes of Beat Hazard and Crypt Of The Necrodancer opted for adding rhythm game mechanics to existing genres, in a similar way to what People Of Note is doing. Others, like Thumper, took the concept of a rhythm game and made it its own, deliberately alienating itself from the crowd.
This movement has only grown over time. Developers continue to pursue novelty by meshing rhythm mechanics together with existing genres (see BPM: Bullets Per Minute, Dead As Disco, Soundfall), as well as pushing for more experimental approaches (such as Everhood, Unbeatable, Rhythm Doctor). Even bigger developers like Tango Gameworks have dabbled in this emerging trend with Hi-Fi Rush. The boldest, most interesting ideas, however, are all originating from small teams that bet on their communities to carve their own space in the genre.
The premise of People Of Note is centered around recruiting characters for your party that all play different genres, creating a mix—mechanically and thematically. It’s all in an attempt to deliver something new to citizens of Chordia who’ve grown used to comfort—arguably, junk—food. And it’s in this clash of ideas that a parallel is created with the current state of the genre itself, in more ways than one. As much as Cadence wants to break existing norms and push for independence, the presence of overly nostalgic attempts to recreate past experiences, without addressing what caused them to fail in the first place, is still in place.
Take Fortnite Festival, a game built by Harmonix under Epic Games that has tried to recapture the bygone days of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, while preserving some of its worst habits—free songs being in rotation, an ever-growing list of paid tracks, and the presence of real-life artists appearing as guest characters and leading new seasons. Rock Band 4 was fortunate enough to have a decade-long run, and people are still able to access the game and all the DLC they’ve accrued over the years. Yet, it doesn’t bode well for Festival‘s long-term prospects that it’s attached to an online platform. This concern has grown more pronounced after Epic Games laid off over 1,000 workers in late March, with multiple people from Harmonix saying they were hit by the redundancies over social media. That same day, Epic announced that it’s sunsetting one of Festival’s three modes. When asked about the future of the studio, as well as Fall Guys maker Mediatonic, an Epic representative said both teams have been “integrated into the Epic development team for a while.”
But those outside of the pressure of a heavy corporate hand are carving their own space differently. More and more studios are pushing for collaborations between each other, either via Steam bundles or guest appearances in their games by sharing tracks or characters with different audiences. For example: 2025’s Rift Of The Necrodancer features songs from other independent composers who worked on games like Celeste, Pizza Tower, and VA-11 Hall-A.
The sense of camaraderie isn’t exclusive to developers, however, and extends to audiences as well. Games like Frets On Fire paved the way for popular community-led projects like Clone Hero, which have kept the more rudimentary rhythm game genre alive for years. Now, thanks to developers allowing users to create custom tracks, that same spirit is extending to completely new experiences. Doing so not only increases a game’s longevity, but it offers a hopeful alternative to the impending moment when music licenses expire, which has been happening to Rock Band 4 since October of last year. Even games as big as Beat Saber allow for this—players continue to foster an immense modding community while the devs helpfully pretend they don’t see it, continuing to launch official music packs instead.
The premise of People Of Note is one that rings familiar in a broader context, too, as streaming platforms continue to be the comfort food for millions of people worldwide, having algorithms dictating what they’re going to listen to next rather than pushing for a more organic, almost extinct way of discovering music. Games like Fortnite Festival want to push for a similar indoctrination, with selections and ideas that either play it safe or are obsessed with capturing what’s tried and tested. The effort from independent developers, however, is one to take notice of. It’s a movement that is attempting to provide something new, something other than the same old tune. All it needs is an audience willing to listen.
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