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The Design Failures That Led To Rock Band
CNN is running an interview with Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos, founders of Harmonix, about the long road that eventually led them to the creation of Guitar Hero and Rock Band . It wasn't an quick or easy process, and the two worked on a number of unsuccessful concepts before arriving at the games that redefined a genre. Quoting:
"I was watching people interact with our product, and the realization came crashing down on me — we had spent 18 months on a music system that was fundamentally flawed. Karaoke isn't about personal expression. It's about people reproducing the songs they know as accurately as they can. The whole notion of adding improvisation elements just wasn't connecting. So I retreated to my hotel room and was depressed for the next two days. The company was on the rocks. We had zero revenue. We had been trying for four years to make something work. We were out of ideas. Those first four years had been a graveyard of mis-starts and product concepts that never made it anywhere. Worse, there was adequate information about two years into those four years to realize that our big concept was fatally flawed."
Does this mean Guitar Hero-Abba edition isn't coming out?
Since Harmonix no longer develops Guitar Hero, I'd say the information in the interview has no bearing on that question.
Bow-ties are cool.
CNN is running an interview with Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos, founders of Harmonix, about the long load that eventually led them to the creation of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
What, were they making C64 games?
...thinking that other people are creative too.
Most people aren't (or at least, not in that artistic sense). Adding elements that require improvisation or creativity just makes the game like work for those who aren't inclined that way. There's nothing necessarily wrong in pandering to an audience that would prefer to be entertained rather than try to entertain themselves. That's why rail shooters are popular and Deus Ex was a flop.
They claim they sold to MTV because :"Harmonix has always been about music first -- games are a means to an end for us"
I wish MTV was about music. For at least the last decade its been all trash reality tv and teen celeb gossip.
Call it what you want. They still developed 2 incredibly popular gaming franchises. And had you read the article, youd see that they first tried to be creative, letting people create and modify music (adjust pitch by hand movements and such) but it failed as a final product. This was because for non musicians it simply was boring. For the average person they want to feel like they are playing/singing their favorite tune. When Red Octane approached them with a guitar controller idea, that's when they realized a a rail style game would be fun for the average person, and could be a hit.
Don't blame the game makers because of this, blame the GAMERS. The article was quite a good read, and I never knew how much failure the guys went through before landing on Guitar Hero. Next time you might want to read the article before posting such a useless comment.
If I have to listen to any more GH1 and GH2 I'll climb a clock tower.
I'm assuming you are referring to the music for GH1/2, not the game itself. I can't speak for Guitar Hero, but for Rock Band the game never seems to get old because of the new music I am able to download. Sure, if you have to keep playing or hearing the same songs over and over it can get old, but every Friday I check on Wikipedia to see what songs are being released the following Tuesday. I'm not a big fan of purchasing music (I will admit it - I downloaded most of my MP3 collection) but I think that the Rock Band songs are well worth the money. The amount of entertainment they can provide, when I have a bunch of friends over on a Friday night playing RB until the early morning hours, is well worth it to me. I also pre-ordered Beatles RB and will hopefully be playing it on September 10th and most likely well into the morning hours on the 11th.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious that you've never seen it or played it. It isn't about learning to make music, it's about getting a simulated experience of being a guitar god without having to go through all the work. You get on there, and the crowd cheers when you do well, and the boo for you when you do badly. It's all the excitement of being on stage, without having to go through the work to get there. It's not about pretending to play the guitar, it's about pretending to be a........Guitar Hero. And it works. It's exciting.
Qxe4
Whoa, way to confuse "I just want to play a game for an hour" with, "I think I need a new vocation".
I've seen people play Crysis. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there are some kind of weapons and enemies displayed on a monitor and you try to use the weapons to shoot them. Allow me to suggest an alternative. Buy a real gun and go to the shooting range. Buy a selection of guns, and practice until you're good. When you feel good and up to it, consider joining the Army so you can shoot real life people in the middle east. I've seen people play Forza. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that you take a plastic controller and maneuver a car around a racetrack displayed on a monitor, avoiding other vehicles at the same time. Allow me to suggest an alternative. Buy a sports car and go to your local track. Practice driving a lot, trying to avoid accidents. When you feel good and up to it, consider joining organized races at the racetrack. Wait, that sounds stupid.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Learn how to play a real freakin' guitar.
Don't really want to. Does that mean I'm not allowed have have innocent fun without people telling me I'm not allowed to? I can go get drunk and have a bunch of idiotic fun with my friends right now, without having to spend years learning guitar, and decades to actually be good at it. For what? Growing up (too late) to be a rock star, like the people I acknowledge will always be much better than me at it. I'm never going to be Adam Jones, or Pete Townsend, or Les Paul, or Tom Morello, or Slash, or... You get the point.
Can I play racing games without being an Formula One racer? Can I play an FPS without joining the Marines? A sports game with out being professional Athlete?
Does this also apply to books and movies? I watched the X-Men movies, and I'm not a mutant. I read the Bible, and I'm not God (or even Christian).
Relax, people do what they want. Its harmless fun. And on the upshot, a certain percentage of the people who play might actually get interested in music, and learn to play something real. Stop caring about what people do, you'll live a longer happier life.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
As stated above: Relax, and stop caring what people do for fun. You'll live a longer, happier life that way.
I love music, but I'm not a musician (unless you count playing the jews harp), don't have the desire to be one either. I support my local musicians, half of my friends are musicians (who play, surprise, Rock Band), I buy them beer, and hype their shows. I don't get my music for free, I pay real money for it. I every time a band is in town that I like I go to it, and spend money on t-shirts to show my support. But I also think Rock Band is a very fun game to play, especially with a couple of beers in my gut. Oddly enough, I also play it with a lot of my friends who are musicians, some of whom are (locally) successful ones. Odd, some of them have seemed to realize that music isn't "serious business". Some of them, I might add, are pretty serious, and classically trained.
And, as I also stated earlier, these games might get a certain percentage of their players actually interested in music. Interested enough to actually pick up an instrument and make their neighbors life hell for awhile. They force people to actually LISTEN to the music that they enjoy, deeply. Not all of them, obviously, but some. This is actually somewhat noble, being that most of the schools I know of have dropped any music programs that they used to have. This, to me as a non-musician, is tragic, as the selection of music would go up if people actually appreciate it.
Another fun thing, the drums in Rock Band is actually decent training for real drums, as is the bass guitar, since they teach actual rhythm and beat, which is pretty difficult to actually grasp for most of us.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
What's funny is that the people who say "learn to play a real guitar" usually don't actually know how to play a real guitar. I play a real guitar. I've spent a considerable amount of money on guitars and stacks and pedals over the years. I even did my part for aspiring guitarists by putting a bunch of tabs up on OLGA back in the mid 90s.
I still love playing Rock Band with my wife.
GH/RB are extremely popular with real musicians. You always hear about them playing on their tour bus.
Hell, did you even read the article? Dhani Harrison is a real musician, plays a real guitar, and "was up all night playing guitar hero".
KAraoke is a much closer correlation When people go out for Karaoke no one calls it a waste of time and that they should get REAL singing lessons. I will never understand how people fail to make this connection regarding rythm games
Good-bye
When you feel good and up to it, consider joining the Army so you can shoot real life people in the middle east.
I've tried that way (not the middle east, but still). I'm still waiting for my friend to respawn...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I just developed an algorithmic composition applet, very similar to the first application by Harmonix. The users can control the music dynamically with the mouse. I thought it was unique idea, but these guys did it already 15 years ago!
I think their earlier ideas were much cooler than the Rock Band franchise, too bad they couldn't sell them.
I've seen people play World of Warcraft. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there are some kind of weapons and enemies displayed on a monitor and you try to use the weapons to kill them. Allow me to suggest an alternative. Buy a real sword and practice on a pell. Buy a selection of swords, and practice until you're good. When you feel good and up to it, consider joining the Crusades so you can kill real life people in the middle east.
I've seen people play Pac-Man. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there are some kind of dots and enemies displayed on a monitor and you try to eat the dots before you get killed. Allow me to suggest an alternative. Buy real pills and eat them until you're good. When you feel good and up to it, consider becoming a hypochondriac.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
You're missing the point of the game. Rock Band isn't about playing a guitar, it's about - doh - being in a rock band, just like Gran Turismo isn't about driving a car, but about racing.
Rock Band isn't a replacement for a real guitar, just like Gran Turismo isn't a replacement for the car in your garage.
I'm looking forward to your "People can't be bothered to drive real cars anymore" rant about racing games, though. It's always fun to read posts from people who have nothing better to do with their lives than complain about what other people do with their lives.
So get off of your bloody high horses and realise that this is all about ENTERTAINMENT, not CREATIVITY.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Halo is a fairly predictable game. It is fun, it is entertaining, but it is predictable. The single-player is very linear. There's generally only one way to complete a level. If there's an obstacle in front of you, there's generally only one way to deal with it. There really isn't any creativity involved in playing Halo.
Deus Ex, on the other game, encourages creativity. There will typically be multiple ways around the obstacle... And if you really want to be creative, you can do all sorts of bizarre things the developers hadn't planned on. But Deus Ex is also entertaining.
The summary doesn't really say anything about people learning to play guitar, so I'm not sure where your comments come from... But if you read the summary you'll see that originally they were trying to build a game that wanted you to improvise. And people didn't want to improvise, they just wanted to play their favorite songs. This is where creativity comes into the discussion. Folks didn't want to create new music, they just wanted to replicate the music they knew.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
From the article:
We naively believed that if we, backed by a big publisher, created a game that was fun, it would be successful. What we failed to recognize was that you have to make games that are easily marketable.
They are saying Frequency and Amplitude were not the commercial successes they had hoped for. I can understand that: the two games have a rather abstract look and the music selection will not suit everyone's taste. However, I love the games because of the look and music selection. And because the different instruments are on separate tracks, which makes for more interesting game play than for example DDR.