Guitar Heroes

Established in 1999, Harmonix has always specialised in producing music-based games such as FreQuency, Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution. But it was 2005's Guitar Hero which brought the company to prominence, becoming an unexpected global success.

A sequel was released a year later, after which Harmonix parted company with publisher RedOctane, later acquired by Activision. In September 2006 Harmonix was bought by MTV, and the company is now working on Rock Band - another music game, but one which will be published by Electronic Arts.

GamesIndustry.biz sat down with long serving art director Ryan Lesser at the Nordic Game conference last week for an exclusive interview. Here, in part one, he discusses how Rock Band is shaping up.

Visit GI.biz next week for part two, where Lesser reveals more about Harmonix's relationships with RedOctane and EA and his thoughts on the forthcoming Guitar Hero game from Neversoft.

Yes and no. I was part of a very small group of people that started Guitar Hero, so it's always sort of my baby, but I don't want to make sequels. Harmonix invents and makes new experiences, and that's very important to us.

We got into the sequel business once before and didn't really enjoy it. So when the time came to choose, we chose to do Rock Band, because we wanted to do something bigger and better. You know, I love Guitar Hero and I always will, but there's plenty more to do.

Harmonix is a small company and even as we start developing partnerships with people like EA or MTV, if you go to Harmonix it still feels like a small company. It's very intimate, and part of that is we really care about our games and we really care about our players.

There's no way we're going to make a game that people are not going to be happy about buying. We scrutinise every little piece that goes into every peripheral to make sure that it's affordable and still really high quality. We're doing our best to ensure that people won't feel that way when they actually see it.

I think when it's just rumour and no one has anything tangible to hold on to, people can be afraid - but the fact is we're very conscious of it, and we're doing our best to make it awesome and affordable.

There are different ways to get into the package, too. We're still developing how people will be able to purchase the game, but one thing is that we're really hoping to have Guitar Hero guitars work on it, for example - so that way, people won't even have to buy a guitar peripheral. Although our new guitar peripheral kind of kills the Guitar Hero peripheral...

I'm not allowed to talk about that part of it, but in almost every way it's better than our past guitars. And I love our past guitars, I was one of the people who designed the first Gibson SG and all the improvements on it - I don't know if it's invisible to people or not, but we've improved that guitar over time.

This one kind of dusts that; the new Fender guitar is quite a bit more sophisticated.

Rock Band is focusing on guitar, bass, singing and drums, and so far we've partnered with a bunch of people. Among those are Roland and Boss and Fender. The instruments are awesome. We just got the final versions of them in the last two weeks, and they're great.

For example, the Fender strat, there's just something that comes from decades of design in a guitar that we were able to use to make our design work. Partnerships like that really do help us, but regardless of who we go with, the instruments are going to be pretty rad.

Seeing as one of my specific orders was. 'Don't let anyone know anything about pricing,' I can't imagine that was true. Because of a lot of reasons that I can't talk about, but we're far from releasing prices at this point. So I wouldn't take any of that stuff too seriously.

Yes and no. We were surprised at the success of Guitar Hero, for sure. We were very afraid that the game - I think we were supposed to ship at $69.99, and the game came out with very limited distribution.

People were very slow to pick up on it but word of mouth picked up and suddenly you couldn't get them anywhere. And stores were selling them above retail, which I have never seen for a videogame before. I've never seen any game have the store actually up the price more than the store down the street just because they had the stock - it kind of blew me away.

So I do think people are willing to pay for something that's going to give them more enjoyment. But at the same time, there are always people out there now with guitars that they've spent and extra $30 on, and we don't want to screw those people - we want to try and allow them to use those guitars in our game.

But then our drum controller is so awesome, I can't imagine people aren't going to want to buy a controller just because it's an extra sum of money. It's not going to be outlandish, so I think it's going to have the same kind of impact Guitar Hero had, where people are okay with it.