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 perfect time for Rock Band 4 to rise up from the ashes and reclaim its rhythm action throne…
First and foremost, why is now the right time to revive Rock Band?
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… 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.
You’ve been away from the property for two and a half years – when did you actually start working on RB4?
Well, 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 per cent 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 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.
Do you think people still have an attachment to the game, and to the songs they used to play?
You know, Rock Band has this huge legacy – a back catalogue that’s got thousands of songs – and it’s taken us about five years to get there. So each of those songs has been tested, authored, refined… we really want to leverage a lot of that content. So in terms of figuring out what to do going into this game – well, there’s a lot we need to do to support that [old] content, and that then frames a lot of the creative choices we make. We don’t want to invalidate the library, but it’s a lot of work, propping that content up on the PS4 and the Xbox One.
Did you have any issues with the licensing from your back catalogue – we know some licenses have expired and you’ve had to take track packs down before…
We have over 90 per cent of our back catalogue intact. There’s a constant communication with the [record labels] around the artists and songs we use. We’ve got a great relationship with them, and they’re psyched to go forward with this – especially since we’ve got a lot of new licences, too…
Rock Band was responsible for vast segments of overall music sales in each year of its release – is that something you’ve considered when constructing this game’s playlist?
[Laughs] Well, that’s something we’ve considered during development. You know, we’ve spoken to our fans and they see Rock Band as their jukebox – their entry point to music and music discovery. We take a lot of pride in that; as we think about the library of songs we have, with huge artists in there, there’s still a lot of stuff that’s new to a lot of people. That’s what we aim for with each disc – we need to have some variety in terms of what people know. Rock Band is a lot more fun when you know a song, but it’s also a great way of getting to know songs intimately. We wear our influences on our sleeve, and we want to bring stuff in to people’s living rooms that maybe they’re not expecting [laughs].
How does the team decide what to put in on the original soundtrack – do you have to fight to get your choices in?
We have a lot of really strong opinions that result in some of the most amazing conversations you can have in a workplace [laughter]. Like… Steely Dan or Rush: discuss. Now, I can’t stand Steely Dan, but Greg [LoPiccolo, creative director] loves him so we have that conversation, like, every day. I love the fact we don’t all agree – it makes us really advocate for the stuff we feel strongest about. That negotiation about what ends up in the game is really fun, and makes for a soundtrack that – trust me – is hard fought. That’s exactly what we want.
Did you do any data-mining on Rock Band 3 to see how people played it – and did that have any bearing on Rock Band 4’s development?
We collected a lot of data from Rock Band 3 – where the achievements were popping, what goals were completed, whether people were playing socially or by themselves, leaderboard action… all that kind of stuff gave us this wealth of data that we can look at and use to refine our efforts this time around. One of the key words we’re using to apply to our development is ‘focus’. We really want our work to hit as many people as possible with that core Rock Band experience.
And all that falls in line with our own experience – we’ve worked on Rock Band for years and years, and we’ve been playing it as fans for all that time, too. That’s true for me, that’s true for our folks on the publishing side, that’s true for the rest of the development team. Greg has played in bands – he understands the space we’re working in really well. That’s true for him, for our audio director, for a lot of the folks in key roles in the team. They understand the culture, they understand the brand… we’ve done our homework. We’ve had two and a half years down, away from this game, and that’s let us come back and play through the games with our eyes wide open and understand what a powerful experience we created.
Do you intend to keep Rock Band 4 a ‘live product’ – a release that will stay alive throughout this generation?
So we’ve got a great relationship with our community, and we were emboldened to find there were still a lot of people playing Rock Band 3, and the response to the Rock Band 3 DLC we put out recently was phenomenal. So what that means is that I think we’re in a great position to look at the life of Rock Band 4 on the eighth-gen consoles whilst creating a dialogue with our community that will define our decisions down the road. It’s exciting; it’s something I feel is unique to this generation of consoles.
So are there any plans for Rock Band 4 to take proper advantage of all of this new-gen tech and connectivity?
It comes down to these foundational elements we were talking about – I can’t say too much right now, but we really want to make sure the features and the content are well-designed and well-managed, complementary of one another, supported by a really strong infrastructure. Just getting to the point where we’ve got a playable game with enough content, and having [all the tracks] scored, that’s a big deal, a fair amount of work. This version [and the connectivity of the new consoles] means that we really have to get that solid Rock Band 4 foundation worked out [at launch].
Are we right in thinking you’re trying to make all the old peripherals and hardware compatible with the new-generation of consoles and games?
Absolutely, yes. There’s two things to talk about there – we’re developing a new selection of hardware with Mad Catz, and we’re psyched to do that because they’ve got a long history with Harmonix and Rock Band. Working with new stuff allows us to make some important incremental refinements to some of the components [in the hardware]: the tilt sensor, some of the button architecture – we can basically upgrade the guitars and drums from the last gen.
At the same time, we’re consistently surprised by how many people tell us that they still have their hardware – the old guitars and drums. As far as we’re concerned, that’s an investment they’ve made in the franchise, and we’re working as hard as we can to support that investment. It’s a very interesting bit of development work; we can do things to help out the compatibility on the software side, but there’s a lot of heavy lifting on the first-party side, too. Microsoft and Sony need to do some work to make this possible, too.
It’s more complicated on the Xbox One because there’s no way for the 360 controllers to talk directly to that console. So we’re in the middle of all that right now, and we are doing everything we can to support the legacy controllers. We’ll be saying more about that going forward.
In the time Harmonix has been out of the Rock Band market, Rocksmith has stepped in and filled a few of the gaps. Did you learn anything from Rocksmith’s ‘educational’ format?
Well, we’re pretty proud of the work we did with Rock Band 3’s ‘Pro’ initiative – in retrospect, though, I think that feature would have been better as a standalone product. I have a ton of respect for what Rocksmith has done, and I feel they’re filling a niche that’s really valuable in the music games space. When I talk about ‘focus’ as an approach for us during development… well, a lot of what we did in Rock Band 3 increased the breadth of play, but that kind of broke up our audience. The common rhetoric of Rock Band 3 was so broad, and I’m proud of that, but Rock Band 4 brings the game’s emphasis back to what it is about Rock Band that is really strong. The game is about four-player band simulation: guitar, bass, drums, vocals. All of our innovations are hitting that core demographic squarely.
So you want to get back to that ‘party game’ feeling?
Absolutely! What we’re trying to do is manufacture fun. I love the idea that some percentage of the people that play Rock Band walk away with a greater understanding of music or the relationship between the game and its cultural impact, but at the same time, I think it’s more important for us to be honest with ourselves about what we’re making – it’s a simulation.You don’t need to know anything about music to play it, you don’t need to know how to play guitar to be able to have a great time. As we were playing it was one of the things that really stuck out to us; that accessibility is so on point, and we really want to bring that back around.
The studio must love its creative freedom after working under publishers for so long?
Absolutely – where we are now as a bona fide indie studio just gives everyone here so much freedom and passion. You know, we talk about the MTV years… and by the time Rock Band 3 rolled around, we were a big team and had a tight relationship with our marketing department and our retail partners… but that just made it harder to be agile, you know? The most interesting thing about our studio size right now is that the space between ‘idea’ and ‘implementation’ is incredibly small.
If we come up with ideas, we can get them into playtest straight away and then we can develop. It reminds me, in fact, of the approach we were taking in the early 2000s: there’s a ton of trust between every part of Harmonix now, and we’re a really lean, agile studio. In fact, I’d say we are in our creative prime right now. The stuff we’ve been putting out over the last few years is the most aggressively creative work we’ve ever done, and that makes me feel that now, we’ve got some muscles to flex. It feels really good.
For our latest big interviews, with the likes of Tim Schafer, Lionhead and Hearthstone grab a copy of games™ 160 on sale now.
