4Players: Without wanting to sound disrespectful, but The Beatles are not known to be the most technically advanced band. The songs are rather simple, especially the parts for drums and bass. Is this band a good fit for a game like Rock Band, where you want to have a challenge?
Alex Rigopulos: Oh, two points. First of all I think that people will find through playing the game that their parts are much more challenging than they might expect. I play Rock Band drums on expert myself and even I was surprised how challenging some of the drum parts in the game actually are. But even beyond that, even for
The dreamscapes are surreal, vibrant stages, that follow the lyrics and the feel of individual songs.
people who can master the instrumental part a huge new gameplay feature in The Beatles Rock Band is harmony singing. And any music gamer will find it challenging to play the instrumental part while also singing harmony vocals at the same time. So the real challenge of this game is harmony singing combined with instrument playing which I guarantee you is more challenging than you expect.
4Players: But this is not a new feature. From the first Rock Band game on you could play and sing at the same time. This was even encouraged in some loading screens.
Alex Rigopulos: This time we are focusing on the harmony singing, which is actually a whole different experience.
4Players: But how many people are going to experience that? The usual Rock Band buyer, let's call him that, has one instrument set at home if you're lucky - one guitar, one mic, one set of drums. Under this condition there wouldn't be much harmony singing, would it?
Alex Rigopulos: That true, but it's important to emphasize that even though we're selling new Beatles instruments, our game is compatible to every music game hardware that is available. Every Rock Band and every Guitar Hero instrument will work, as well as every microphone from SingStar or Lips. In the European market in particular I think there are tens of millions Singstar microphones out there in households. So there are already many microphones for people to add to their instruments.
4Players: Is this compatibility available on Xbox 360 and PS3 as well? PS3 gamers are traditionally left behind when trying to play games with other games' instruments.
Alex Rigopulos: Yes, that is all resolved now. The Beatles support all available hardware.
4Players: What does this game bring new and fresh to the Rock Band formula, other than harmony singing?
Alex Rigopulos: Well, from a musical standpoint it's of course the music of The Beatles. They're in for the first time in any interactive entertainment. From a gameplay standpoint the biggest new feature is harmony vocals. There's also some sort of metagame outside of the gameplay, we're introducing a story mode that takes you through the history and career of The Beatles from their early touring period starting in the Cavern Club to Ed Sullivan. But also to the second half of their career in their real life, when they stopped touring and only were recording in their studio in Abbey Road, music that was not very live performant. That created a great creative opportunity for us to try something new visually in the game. So one of the interesting new features are the dreamscapes that we invented, that represent the studio period. You start out in Studio 2 in Abbey Road but then the walls fade away and you are transported in this colorful, imaginary landscape that is driven by the lyrics and the
The game covers the entire career of the Fab Four.
feel of the song. And all of this is wrapped up in a story mode that takes you through what is happening with the band and their lives historically over that period. And as you progress you unlock photographs and other media and memorabilia related to what's been happening to the band at that time. We are all passionate Beatles fans and it was great for us to dive deep into all these elements. That's why this game is also all Beatles, no other bands. These guys wrote more than 200 Songs and they had so many incredible events happening in their lives, so we wanted to really be 100 percent focused on this band.
4Players: What's coming up next after you've finished with The Beatles? Are you going to specialize in band-specific games or are we going to see a real Rock Band 3 in the foreseeable future?
Alex Rigopulos: Oh, we won't focus on band-focused games, although it's likely that we will do some in the future. The list of bands that make sense to have a focused game entirely about them is relatively short, but I think for the right band we'll probably do that in the future. But at the same time we will continue to make a huge investment in the Rock Band franchise. It's worth pointing out that Rock Band 2 is still a major frontline title for us, still very vibrant. There are already more than 800 songs available to play on the platform, we'll be releasing more every week, there will be more than a thousand by the end of this year. And our biggest new story on pure Rock Band platform is the Rock Band Network.
4Players: With which you can create your own music?
Alex Rigopulos: Yes, we're releasing our tools, so very soon any band, everything from huge bands to small garage bands, will be able to publish their music directly to the platform, so there the library of content will surely explode.
4Players: But isn't this going to be difficult to control?
Alex Rigopulos: Yeah, but our agenda there is not to control actually, it's to actually remove Harmonix as the bottleneck so that any music can be available on the platform. There will of course be quality control, meaning we use the Xbox Creator's Club community tools to make sure that there are no profane contents and no bugs or third party copyright infringements and whatnot. And of course the community can rate the quality of the songs.
4Players: Do you have a favorite band that would love to include in Rock Band or even make a whole game about?
Alex Rigopulos: Oooh, I mean, I can't really give a specific answer to that question right now (giggles) because of the aforementioned short list of obvious bands. We're talking to all of them and hopefully at some point in the future will have the opportunity to work with them. There are however some major artists coming to Rock Band this fall, including Queen, The White Stripes, Iggy Pop, Nirvana - tons of major artist continue to be released on a weekly basis.
4Players: Well, there's one question that I'm specifically supposed to ask from my wife: Is there ever gonna be a Rock Band: Bon Jovi?
Alex Rigopulos: Heh, I like your wife! The Bon Jovi tracks are like party favorites. As soon as there's Bon Jovi, everybody starts grouping around the instruments. I guess all I can say is that there's sure to be more Bon Jovi on its way to the Rock Band platform.
