How ‘Horrendous Failure’ Led To Rock Band
Video game developer Harmonix just launched the wildly anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band, uniting one of the most popular video game franchises ever made with history’s biggest rock band.
The collaboration is the work of a 320-employee company now owned by MTV. But it wasn’t so long ago that Harmonix’ founders — Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, two computer-tinkering hobbyists drawn together by a shared love of music — were disillusioned upstarts running a struggling company.
ERAN: We became interested in the idea of using technology to allow non-musicians to express themselves musically. The big aha! moment came with this computer music system –
ALEX: That could compose music on the fly, algorithmically.
ERAN: It would generate tunes, play music on its own, sort of composing it as it went along. At one point during this, Alex was playing flight simulators –
ERAN: — with a joystick to control the airplane, and he said, ‘What if we use this joystick to control the music system?’ After spending a couple of days hooking up the two things, we were able to configure it so people could physically express whatever emotion or idea of music they had in their heads by moving the joystick around. It made you feel like you were playing music, even if you didn’t know how to play an instrument.
ALEX: We demoed the tech at the Lab, which, at the time, had a lot of corporate sponsors such as Sega and Yamaha. It generated credible enthusiasm — it seemed magical to people to be able to improvise music that matched what they were hearing in their heads.
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