Somatone Sounds Off

I think they are competing only in how any media competes for the entertainment dollar that's out there. In that sense, movies, CDs and gaming all compete with one another for where people choose to spend their recreational dollar.

I think gaming actually is starting to encroach upon some of those other industries because they are giving a lot more for your dollar. You get a lot more entertainment from a $40 game than you can play for 30-40 than for a movie which will be over in 2 hours but will cost you $15 if you want to get some popcorn. Or a CD which may or may not be any good - particularly if you can buy a game that has 40 songs you already know you like on them that you get to listen to and interact with.

I think that's why you're seeing such a huge move towards these music games because it is a really great combination of two known media that people have always responded well to - games and music. You get them both in one package. It is a winning recipe in terms of how it is going to appeal to people and how they will respond to that.

I do. I think that this is just the beginning, actually, of a whole new...I think that the potential for how these music-based games are created is really in its infancy.

I think you are going to see a lot more games that aren't just timing-based reproductions of songs that people already know. Particularly with the development of collaborative gameplay through Xbox Live and multiplayer gaming, I think you are actually going to start to see some games that are clever enough to introduce opportunities for people to create their own content and play inside of the game environment with other people around the world and essentially jam - to have the experience that musicians have.

Only musicians can really tell you the sensation of what it feels like to jam. It is really one of the best feelings there is. Guitar Hero does a decent job of translating that into something that anybody can experience without having to spend the four years you need to spend doing scales and, you know, all the boring stuff before you get to have that sensation.

Yes, you can only do so much in the games because you are limited by what someone else creates for you in terms of the portfolio of songs to play. And you're basically playing "Simon says" to music. That's fun. It's surprisingly fun. I had no idea how fun Guitar Hero was until I played it and I was completely amazed at how - even as a musician - I was enthralled with being inside of that experience. It is really much more exciting that you can hope to explain. But I still think it is limited by the constraints of that kind of game engine

Whereas there is limitless potential to find ways to take elements of music - that you don't need to be a polished musician to understand - and put them into a modular form where you can create new content, you can create original material, in a game environment with either artificial game intelligence or with other people in real time, and create a whole new world - this fusion between simulated guitar playing by pushing buttons and actually getting to choose, to a certain degree, where the song heads and when you want to modulate and how you want the song to evolve in real-time as a creative contributor to the musical process.

You know, one thing I liked about...I worked on American Idol. That's a singing game. We felt that kind of opens up the market a little more to everybody. We find that Guitar Hero and Rock Band tends to be very male based. We thought it opened it up to women and younger people and all sorts of people who love to sing while still maintaining that performance aspect of the game.

What's also particularly unique about American Idol is that it actually does teach you how to sing. You have pitch and time detection that is built into the game engine that will show you in real-time how flat or sharp you are compared to the target note you are trying to reach. Through practice, you can legitimately improve your voice by singing classic songs that you know and love that you might only do in the shower because you are afraid of how you sound.

If you sit with these songs after a few times going through them, you actually find yourself improving as a singer.

That's a good point. I think it would be a lot of fun to progress that direction. And in a lot of the virtual worlds we work on, the trend is towards user-generated content. So it would be really fun to see music performance games move in that direction where you can add some user-based content if you have the facility.

A lot of people are closet musicians. Even though they may not be professionals, they may have enough ability or dexterity to do a little more than just play exactly the quantised notes that they're asking to be played on the guitars and drums and things.

There is definitely some of both.

I think this is a new genre. Guitar Hero I made some buzz, and II did okay, but it is really just now that Guitar Hero is becoming such a name brand product. And then, with the release of Rock Band, that just shows where the focus of the industry is headed and how it has been received by people.

While it has been around for a little while, it hasn't gotten the attention that I think it is getting now. Based upon how well it is being received, there's going to be a lot more interest and attention and a lot of new creative approaches to how these games are developed.

I think the technology could support it - it just hasn't really been exploited. New tools will have to be created to facilitate expanding on this idea. I would expect that to be in the near future based on this trend.

Exactly. I think we are going to see a lot more ideas and concepts that are permutations of this basic idea. Five years from now, I think we're going to look back at Guitar Hero and it's really going to look like a primitive idea compared to the possibilities of where performance-based games have the potential of going.

I think that is headed in the direction that we're talking about now - introducing other instruments, more collaborative play.

It is more challenging, and I think that these games are going to continue to get more challenging as people get more used to that controller environment. Just as now a shooter is much, much more challenging to jump into and play than it was five years ago - the demands and the expectations for the players continue to go up as people log more and more time on games.

The irony is, if a lot of people spent as much time learning real guitar as they do on Guitar Hero, they'd actually learn how to play pretty decently.

Absolutely.

I think so too. I mean, I don't think you can separate influences you are getting from pop culture and from media as to what's driving you and affecting you.

One thing that I really love about Rock Band as well...When I was younger, I used to actually tour with bands and do different things where we would play large places and stadiums. You really do get a lot of that sense of being in a band - the thrill and the rush and the fun of that. I think it does a nice job of giving you the sense of being right there.

I don't get that same feel from Guitar Hero. I get the rush of the contests thing going on from American Idol, which is a lot of fun, but I really think Rock Band does that really well - gives you the sense of being in it. And I can see that inspiring a lot of people to go into it - not that I would encourage people to go into the music industry. [Laughs] That's a whole other can of worms.

You asked how we got into this industry from where we started, and this is a segue into that conversation.

I was working on giant records with the biggest stars you can imagine. It was around 2000, which was around the dawn of the Napster digital copyright infringement revolution. And within about two years, there was a real, precipitous, notable decline in the activity in the music industry and sales. The sales were dropping 9 to 10 per cent every year, year after year.

At one point I actually traveled out to meet Kane who was in Nashville at the time - Nashville is really one of the heartbeats of the music industry - and it was just dead. There was this doom and gloom about it. Meanwhile, just on the other side of the fence, you could see the gaming industry becoming more interesting, more compelling. Doing content that has higher demand. More of an up and coming industry that had some of the same inspirations that the music industry had - it just wasn't quite as refined and developed.

And it just felt like a natural transition to take those same production ethics, those same high value production skills that we had acquired and apply them to an industry that was really moving into that space instead of kind of moving out of it.

No, no, no. I've been a huge gamer more than I care to admit. I had the first Apple computers and really only played them for the games. The green screens, the 5" floppy disks, the whole thing.

So, I'd been in it for a long time. Had it been an industry the way it is now, honestly I might have taken that path as a kid and gotten more serious about getting into games as a career.

Back then, it wasn't much of an industry. It wasn't the kind of thing you could tell your mom and dad you wanted to get into and have any sort of support. I've got two kids, and my advice to them, ten times over, would be to get into the gaming industry before the music industry.

You know, it is interesting. When we started, one of our founding partners was basically an ex-post production guy who ran a huge studio in Los Angeles for years and years doing hundreds of indie films just under the major motion pictures radar - and actually had done a bunch of major console games that were just starting to emerge looking for that film stuff.

There is definitely a crossover between film and games. Films are lucrative to some degree, but we've actually found that they really quite are a different mindset. We worked on the film The Last Samurai, we worked on The Polar Express, Minority Report...lots of major films. Between the music scores and the sound effects and the dialogue and the voice-over, there really is a difference.

Audio is always audio to some degree. If you are going to bring an actor to a studio and record him, it is not like it is a whole different world completely. But there are mindsets, there are nuances, and there's a lot of production choices that we find make a huge difference between films, videogames, casual games, mobile - you know, all the different platforms.

When we take on new composers, film composers who are really extraordinary in film, it really takes them 6 to 8 months to get their heads around games - the production mindset and the way you think about them and craft the audio and craft the music.

Same thing with sound effects. If we take a post-production guy from the film world and put him into games, it takes months of training his ear and getting him to notice what subtleties really make the difference between the character in those sounds and the audio in the game world.

I think there is, for a couple of reasons.

The game industry is pretty broad. You can get anything from a casual game where you have a cartoon character all the way to a Halo 3 or something that is much darker. The gaming world requires you to be way more versatile and have a much more in-depth thought process as to how you are creating the audio.

Not only do you have to think about how you are creating the audio, but you actually have to think about how it is going to get integrated and how they are going to interact together.

Not only that, but you are dealing with a lot more synthetic material. Movies, for the most part, are based upon real content. You're talking about humans interacting with organic materials. You aren't talking about such a wide variation of possibilities.

Star Trek, or even Star Wars, might be somewhat of an example - something that bases itself on a whole new set of technology. How aliens talk and how they move and what they sound like...You know, there aren't a lot of films that explore that well, but there are a lot of games that have aliens.

There are a lot of games that have weaponry that are completely imaginary. You have to then think about what all those sounds sound like. They are based upon sounds that we are familiar with, but you can't just go and record a photon laser.

I would actually say that's because of games. I think games are inspiring that change. You're not seeing as many dramas. You're not seeing as many writing-based films with more refined plots. You are getting a lot more sensory-driven films.

It's a response to people with access to that [gaming] world - such a visual and aural experience. I think the film industry is struggling to keep up with the creative breadth games industry. There are so many games available that are really visually interesting and that really excite your imagination.

That wasn't true of films for the most part. There would be a few that would come out that were landmark movies that pushed your mind that way, but now they are much more common. And I would actually credit that to the gaming industry.

You know, to be fair about the similarities...Some of the similarities are that you do use a lot of the same tools. We do use a lot of the same sequencers and computer software. We do use a lot of the same conceptual starting blocks.

The point from Nick that I really agree with is...In games it seems to me that the palate is open so much wider. Because if you have a game where you are working with machines, and there is no basis in reality for what you are working with, you pretty much can do anything you want.

And I think it is even expected that the creativity level...To me, the way that we push the sound envelope in games is actually way more than what would be allowed in film. I still feel that film is a pretty conservative place - it takes so much money, there is so much effort behind a film and so many people involved in the film and the decision-making process - that what ends up happening is that people get really concerned with getting too far outside of the box with things.

With games, it seems like people are way more willing to take chances. They are way more willing to push the envelope - to hear sounds and hear music that is creative and unusual. As long as it works, and works well, they are really willing to go with it and use it as a creative craft of the game.

That might be true, actually. We probably have different opinions on this, but one of the things to me that's refreshing about the game industry is that it hasn't conglomerised the way the music and the film industries have.

The music and the film industries have been around for long enough that the top companies have acquired all the little guys - to the point where there are really only a few labels. They're all very conservative because they're all trying to please their stockholders and they are all worried about quarterly profit returns much more than they are about any sort of groundbreaking, artistic work that they are putting out.

That's true of the gaming industry to a certain extent - you have the massive companies that have acquired a lot of smaller ones - but you still have a lot of little studios that are putting out compelling content that the major players really have to be concerned with and compete with.

Part of the reason is that you can still make a great game for a price that independent developer can actually contend with. They can go out and raise the money and develop something. Guitar Hero was created by side money from the people at Harmonix who developed that as a demo and shopped it out and it has turned into such a huge hit.

That's a much more common story in gaming than it is in film or in music.

I think digital distribution has made a huge difference for that in both arenas. I noticed that when music went to more digital distribution, like an iTunes, and when the costs of production from a music standpoint went down, to me there was a lot more creative, interesting content going on because it wasn't as expensive to try.

We probably do...Maybe 60 to 70 per cent of our catalogue all year long is downloadable games - XBLA, casual PC games, Wii downloadables, DS games. You can put out games for a hundred thousand. You can get games together even cheaper. It seems like people are really interested and willing to take these creative risks with the storylines, with the characters...To me, it is a very exciting side of things.

It's really interesting - the juxtaposition between having more money and what goes on versus having less money and the kind of creative freedom that people seem to be willing to take.