Game On! (Page 1)

On a warm Tuesday in late August, the offices of Harmonix Music Systems are in a state of flux. Located in a fashionably grungy section of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the space was home to Harvard University auxiliary departments before Harmonix moved in last month. Boxes line the halls, electric and acoustic guitars are strewn everywhere, large posters of Pink Floyd and Xena: Warrior Princess dot the otherwise stark-white walls and a sign for what was once the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies has been scribbled over to read: THE SAMMY DAVIS JR. CENTER FOR ROCK 'N ROLL STUDIES.

“We just moved in, so this building is kind of sterile,” apologizes Kasson Crooker, a producer. “But it’s an amazing place to work. When Mötley Crüe were playing, the company took everyone to go see them and hired a bus so we could all drink.”

But at this moment, the folks at Harmonix are all business. Down a quiet hallway and a small set of stairs, a half-dozen guys wearing cumbersome headphones sit staring at their flat-screen monitors, fingering black-and-white plastic guitars and bobbing their heads silently. Perched on a stool behind a four-piece drum pad in the back corner, a young doughy guy with glasses bangs out muted beats and gazes at the screen in front of him.

This is the team charged with testing Rock Band, one of this season’s most hotly anticipated video games. It hits shelves in November — not long after the release of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, the latest installment of the wildly successful Guitar Hero series that, until recently, was also developed by Harmonix.

For the uninitiated, the Guitar Hero concept is simple: Players simulate the guitar parts for a wide range of rock songs by triggering buttons on a plastic ax, earning points and building a virtual career. Rock Band is a natural progression from that model, adding drums and a microphone to allow players to create a fully functioning simulated band.

The fierce competition between these two titles has been the talk of the gaming world. In January, Guitar Hero’s publisher, RedOctane, which had recently been acquired by the gaming giant Activision, shocked many by bringing in a new developer, Neversoft, to replace Harmonix for Guitar Hero’s third iteration. A few months later, Harmonix, which itself had recently been bought by MTV, announced Rock Band would be going head-to-head with the Guitar Hero franchise they’d birthed.

Both Harmonix and RedOctane cite the changing business environment, and some version of the old “creative differences” saw to explain the dissolution of their successful partnership. As is often the case with breakups, this description is both true and woefully inadequate.

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Harmonix was founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, MIT graduates who’d met while working in the ­university’s media lab. Both were musicians — Rigopulos a drummer, Egozy a clarinetist — and conceived Harmonix not as a video-game developer but a music-technology company. “Everybody has an innate desire to make music and tries at some point to learn an instrument,” Rigopulos explains. “Almost all quit in frustration. We felt this problem was tragic and started Harmonix to solve it.”

The company floundered for its first few years, when it was putting out interactive-­music CD-ROMs but turned to video games in the late ’90s after seeing how popular music-based games were in Japan. They eventually achieved moderate success with the Karaoke Revolution series, but when RedOctane — then a small publisher known more for making video-game peripherals — contacted Harmonix about developing the first Guitar Hero, music gaming was still considered a niche category in the U.S. In the months after its 2005 release, Guitar Hero changed that. The game became a massive hit and a cultural phenomenon, spawning a 2006 sequel that added multiplayer modes, downloadable content and the ability to play bass or rhythm-guitar parts. To date, GHI and GHII have sold more than 5 million units, generating $375 million in sales.

Success attracted suitors. In mid-2006, Activision spent $100 million to buy RedOctane; a few months later, MTV snatched up Harmonix for $175 million. Harmonix was under contract to work on GHII and an expansion pack called Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, but fissures in the companies’ relationship soon emerged.

“Honestly, working on Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, we didn’t seem like a team,” says Activision’s chief music executive, Tim Riley. “Not everyone had the same goal in mind.”

By the time the two companies began collaborating on the ’80s disc, RedOctane had already brought in Neversoft — the studio behind the successful Tony Hawk series — to work on GHIII, and Harmonix was working on Rock Band with MTV. “It was a very weird relationship,” explains RedOctane COO Charles Huang. “We had to put up these fake walls so they wouldn’t know what we were doing on Guitar Hero III, and they had to protect whatever they were doing on Rock Band. If you thought of a great song for Rocks the 80s but heard [a colleague] say, ‘We might use that in Guitar Hero III,’ you had to keep quiet.

“The split, sad as it was, was largely predictable, given the vision both companies had,” Huang continues. “We had a vision of taking music games to broader audiences. To do that, we had to put GHIII out on all the different platforms. Harmonix has devoted their resources to including drums and vocals, but as a consequence, Rock Band comes out on just two platforms this Christmas.”

While it’s true that Rock Band will be available only on the Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2007 — as compared to GHIII, which will be released on Xbox 360, PS3, PS2 and Wii — Rigopulos promises it will be on every platform over time and disputes Huang’s assertion that GHIII will appeal to a broader audience. “Neversoft is consolidating the base by going really deep with more metal,” Rigopulos says. “In the case of Rock Band, with everything from the choice of music to the sensibility of the game, we’re really aiming in a more accessible direction.”