Harmonix Co-Founder Talks Rhythm Games

Thanks to GameCritics for its interview with Alex Rigopulos of Harmonix Music Systems, discussing how the company "is breaking new ground by putting a uniquely North American spin on the music game genre", including titles such as Frequency, Amplitude, and Karaoke Revolution. He explains of their games: "People didn't want to learn a bunch of new skills, so we decided to use [the gaming skills] that people already had and repurpose them onto the task of making music", but reveals there may not be a sequel to Amplitude, lamenting that "...in order for that to happen, we need to sell, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of units of each title, which is not a sales level we achieved with those games."

Comments

Bleh, no sequel.

[Jerrith]

Amplitude is a great game. I spent a ton of hours getting good at that game last year. Unlocking the last song (only available on the highest difficulty level) was tough, and gave a real sense of accomplishment when you finally did it.

The music they picked for it was probably still the problem. I showed it to a bunch of my gamer friends, and while there were a few of the more mainstream names they liked, their main complaint was they didn't like a majority of the music.

It's a shame there's no sequel in the works. Hopefully whatever Sony has them doing under NDA will be great. :)

Re:Bleh, no sequel.

[Phil Wilkins]

This is the fundamental problem with music games. If you don't like the music, you're not going to enjoy the game. I tried playing Amplitude a few times, and a few tracks were fun, but the rest were like, "I want to finish this, so I don't have to listen to this shit again".

Added on to that, both Frequency and Amplitude are very abstract games, and that seems to confuse the mainstream. At least in DDR it's fairly obvious what you're supposed to be doing.