When Rock Band 3 came out in 2010, there was a fatigue around the genre – people were beginning to get tired of the onslaught on games that tried their hardest to make you feel like a rock star. The bubble burst – plastic guitars and drums kits were relegated from the living room to the closet, and people began to forget.
But with the release of Rock Band 3’s final piece of DLC – Tenacious D’s ‘Rize of the Fenix – Harmonix made a statement: it’s time to return. We caught up with the studio’s producer, Daniel Sussman, about why now is the right time for Rock Band to rise up from the ashes and reclaim it’s rhythm action throne…
First and foremost, why is now the right time to revive Rock Band on PS4 and Xbox One?
Well, we had some good down time when we were working on some other projects, but it’s been really interesting to watch how the [Harmonix] team has rallied around a game that a lot of us have very deep experience with, and a real deep attachment to – including myself.
When we were starting to think about why we wanted to bring Rock Band back, and why this – right now – might be the right time, we had to go back to it. We went back and started playing it, and played through it all. Rock Band, Rock Band 2, Rock Band 3, The Beatles version. As we were playing them, we realised there are quite a few things we had learned, in terms of our relationship to Rock Band and also our maturity and designers and developers.
So we were playing through them, and we could just see all this stuff that we could improve, right? So when we’re bringing them back to PS4 and Xbox One, we’re going to be looking very closely at the foundational level of those platforms. Rock Band has a lot of elements that are pretty simple, and the core fantasy it’s about is pretty easy to explain – they’re what I love about it the most. But that means that Rock Band is elevated to have this evergreen quality: it’s a fantasy, for me at least, that will not go away. If you like music, you will like Rock Band.
So you’ve been away from the property for two and a half years – how recently did you start working on Rock Band 4 itself?
Well, it’s interesting because one of the elements of the studio that’s unique this time around is that we have a lot of things running in parallel… there are a few things that are part of our over-arching plan that have been in the percolator for quite some time. So we have these small, scrummy development teams working on this feature or that feature and we don’t exactly know where these features will fit, but they’re fun and cool… we never would have taken [this approach] to development a few years back, because so much of our team was wrapped up in Rock Band 3 – like 80% of the company were committed to it at the time.
So bits and pieces of the dev team have actually been working for over a year on these features without any real awareness of whether or not they’d end up being in Rock Band. We were in the early stages of creative development over [Summer 2014], but things really started to settle in September. That was when we started asking ourselves, y’know, ‘what do we want to do here?’, ‘what’s the platform?’, ‘what’s the audience opportunity?’
Where we ended up, well, we only wanted to make something that was designed to push the envelope and change people’s perceptions about what a band sim can be. We absolutely have to innovate, and that’s the thing that rallied the team – we’ve got some really interesting things up our sleeve, and as we’re playing with the prototypes, it’s already framing my relationship with the game. There are things that we’re doing that I miss when I go back to check out Rock Band 3. I can’t talk about too much just yet, but really – we’re doing some pretty neat stuff.
Did you learn anything from the over-saturation of the genre that reached its peak last-generation?
Yeah, sort of. During our time down we’ve worked on some very interesting games. Like Fantasia – oh my goodness! It was such an interesting game for us to work on – we learnt such a lot about the relationship between music and gameplay.
Even looking at the work we did on Dance Central Spotlight, getting our heads wrapped around things like DLC entitlements and Xbox One architecture… we learned a lot! It was nice to be able to apply those lessons to another project. It’s… it’s been really fun going back to a brand that we all have a ton of respect and appreciation for.
Harmoix has been self-publishing for a little while – are you going to continue with that for Rock band 4, or are you going into the generation via Microsoft and Sony?
We’re looking at a co-publishing relationship with Mad Catz, actually; their skillset really offsets ours in a great way. We’ve got a lot of experience working with the brand – with MTV and going back before then to Sony in the [PS2] days. We worked with a lot of publishers over the years, and we’ve always been really hands-on. Our ability to market the game, to talk about the game, to demo the game… we’re confident with all of that.
So Mad Catz has an international distribution arm that handles and ships all their products – therefore, our relationship with them is very compatible. They have a lot to offer as a co-publisher and partner.
For the full interview with Daniel Sussman, pick up games™ issue 159, on sale March 26 online and in stores.