The other day I spent time at Harmonix Music Systems to conduct some interviews and take a tour of the office.
It also happened to be only a few days before the release of "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock" (the game ships October 28).
For those who aren't up to speed, Harmonix created and developed the first two iterations of the game, but was bought by MTV Networks last year; they immediately began working on "Rock Band." Meanwhile RedOctane and Activision retained the rights to the "Guitar Hero" franchise and thus, "Guitar Hero III" was handed off to Neversoft, the Activision-owned developer of the "Tony Hawk" series.
With "Guitar Hero" being an unexpected best-seller in 2005 and ultimately the game that put Harmonix on the map, how did they feel about handing off their pet project to someone else? Since I was at Harmonix (and saw tons of old "Guitar Hero" paraphernalia everywhere) and "Guitar Hero III" is just around the corner, I had to ask. So I put co-founder Eran Egozy as well as longtime staffers Eric Brosius (Audio Director) and Ryan Lesser (Art Director) on the hot seat...
Ryan Lesser, Art Director (10 years): I'm actually pretty excited to see the new "Guitar Hero." We worked on it for so long, and it was like our baby for so long, it's really something that I've contributed to and presented to the world that I'm really proud of. And an amazing developer got to work on "Guitar Hero III." I've played the demo and it was pretty fun. You know, it's "Guitar Hero." I don't really feel terribly good or bad in either direction about it. We've been so focused on ["Rock Band"] for however many months, years or whatever that that's pretty much been my focus. I'm psyched to play "Guitar Hero," and I want to play some more songs and stuff in that universe. But at this point, I'm a little more psyched to play drums in "Rock Band" than anything else!
Eric Brosius, Audio Director at Harmonix ("Guitar Hero," "Guitar Hero II," "Rock Band"): I think the press and everything has made it this big war, because both these games are coming out at almost the same time -- "Guitar Hero III" and "Rock Band." But I don't think it's quite as big to us. I think most people at Harmonix are looking forward to "Guitar Hero III," and they're excited to play it. And we think "Rock Band" is going to be a slightly different experience. I think there's room for both games to exist in the market. It's interesting because when we were making the first two games we worked with those guys [at RedOctane]. I worked on the music selection with them for the first couple of games so we kind of know how they think and so it's very interesting. But yeah, I don't think there's any bad feelings at all. It's just that we're doing this game because it's the game that we want to do and obviously they're doing that game because they have a great franchise. I think both will be great.
MTV: In terms of acquiring songs, there seems to be some overlap already, and there's going to be more with DLC. Did you ever cross paths with the "Guitar Hero III" folks when it came to song selection?
Eric Brosius: There will be a few songs that ended up on "Guitar Hero III" that are in "Rock Band," but that's just all coincidence. We went after some of the same songs because they didn't reveal their setlist until we had already had things licensed in the same way. So there was not any of "Oh, they're doing this song, so maybe we should do that song." And it really didn't cause too much of a problem. Maybe there was one or two times where we wanted to get a song and we couldn't get a song because we heard, "Oh that one's gonna be in this game." But most of the time there was no problem at all. We know there's going to be overlap, but it's kind of different experiences. I'm interested in seeing how our guitar parts match up with theirs because it's very subjective how you do them, and it'd be interesting to see if theirs feels different from ours or not.
Eran Egozy, Co-Founder: Honestly, we've been so focused on "Rock Band" for a while, that we haven't had too much time to think about "Guitar Hero III" and sort of what it means. I'm kind of psyched about "Guitar Hero III," and I think "Guitar Hero" is a great franchise. Obviously we feel very attached to it. There is this sort of bittersweet moment, I think it's sort of like seeing your kids off to college or something like that where you have to let go, and we've had to let go of "Guitar Hero." But I think [Neversoft] did a great job of getting up to speed on this type of game, and I'm pretty psyched to play it.
MTV: So you're saying it's not as competitive as people think?
Eran Egozy: If you just look at the developers, the game development community's actually really a fun place to be. The publishers and the marketing people are obviously very competitive. But the game developers themselves, we're kind of supporting each other. At the Game Developer's Conference which happens every year, we all get together, and it's a huge community of people. It's pretty friendly, even though I guess people know that they're making essentially competitive games. Still, we learn from one another and we hang out. So at least in terms of the developers, Harmonix and Neversoft for example, I don't think there's any animosity or anything like that.
MTV: Did Neversoft ever call you for advice?
Eran Egozy: At the very beginning we gave them a bunch of assets and some information to help them get started. But that was a while ago. I'm sure they're so busy with their development effort and we've been so busy with ours that we've just kind of been focusing on what we have to do.
Check back next week for more interviews from my Harmonix visit. (Some of it will even be about “Rock Band.” I swear!)
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