Thursday, October 30, 2008

The Beatles And Rock Band (That's Not Called Rock Band)

Chris Kohler of Wired live-blogged the conference call with Apple Corps and MTV today, and I think he has more detailed information than anyone else, so let's see if we can piece together what was revealed today.

First off, his live blog is here.

The big questions, for most people, would be the song selection (still to be determined, although it's supposed to cover every era of the band's history), and the release date (not until the freaking 2009 holiday season--argghh).

Here's an excerpt:
The game will not be branded with the Rock Band name. It is a brand new game that does take advantage of some aspects of the Rock Band platform, but is a musical and visual journey through the Beatles' entire career.

If it sounds vague, that's because it definitely IS vague.

Will it make use of the Rock Band instrument controllers? They don't say, although Giles Martin (son of George) did say this:
We are trying to keep to, as much as possible, is for people to play the songs as though they're playing the originals... More of a way for them to interact with what they know very well as opposed to us remixing as we did in Love.

So the phrase "play the songs" seems to indicate that even though they were being very coy, we're still going to get an experience similar to Rock Band, even if it's expanded or changed in some ways. Plus, there's this (a note from Chris on something that I'm guessing Alex Rigopulos said):
"Game takes advantage of the Rock Band platform in many ways that we'll discuss down the road."

At first, I think I was disappointed when I read the conference call summary. I was originally hoping for something like the AC/DC disc, and I was hoping it would be available this fall. However, this is Harmonix, which has made the four best music games I've ever played. They have an enormous pile of "genius equity" with me, and I'll trust them completely until the day they don't deliver. So I trust them to create something (again) that will be incredibly fun and completely addictive.

Oh, and if you hear cash registers, that's the sound of Led Zeppelin counting their freaking money. They're next, and the competition to sign them should be completely insane.

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