Harmonix is back in the music gaming war that started when the studio left the Guitar Hero project to pursue the much more ambitious Rock Band line of music games, introducing a full band of squeaking over-priced plastic instruments to form a unique multiplyer music game experience.  While Guitar Hero III failed to attract as much of the market as the innovative new Rock Band, Guitar Hero IV proved to offer competitive sales against Rock Band II which aimed for a more “indy music” experience with its track listing.  This approach alienated some of the gaming demographic not steeped enough in musical culture to remember the songs of “Dinosaur Jr,” or appreciate the music of  Bob Dylan. This of course was tampered by peppering the tracklist with popular hits by Paramour and ACDC, as well as bringing back “Carry On My Wayward Son,” one of the more popular tracks from Guitar Hero II.

Now the pendulum seems to be swinging back towards popular music; at least, to some extent. The Beatles certainly offer a range of musicality from which to draw, and I know very few people (and have no close friends) who don’t just love the Beatles. Marketability and artistically speaking, if you have to make a music game drawing from the work of only one band, the Beatles are the most obvious choice. The question is, whether Harmonix will be able to make the best possible game with this strategy.

Up until now, the template for music games had been to create a varied musical selection to ensure that the game could appeal to a variety of users. If you don’t like the Beatles, you’re shit out of luck in this round. However, if you don’t like the Beatles, and here I mean absolutely no song they’ve ever made, I’d suggest a long hard look in the mirror to discover whether that dislike originates with artistic qualms with the work, or from a desire to have “different” and “interesting” tastes to impress people. You might as well say you don’t like rock and roll or candy.

However, purportedly Harmonix will include, like with other releases in the Guitar Hero franchise, a variety of songs by other artists to attract those social reprobates who hate on George, John, Ringo, and Paul (well, Ringo’s ok to hate on). This, plus the fact that what they lose by way of popular appeal they stand to gain doubly in terms of attracting Beatle fans from all generations. My aunts and I don’t have much overlap in musical taste, but right there between Petra and John Denver (don’t judge me) is the entirety of the Beatle’s opus.

Who am I kidding? Harmonix is going to make a fortune, even though they must have paid- and I’m just guessing here- a gazillion-trillion dollars for the rights to all that music. I just hope the game ends with a cut scene of the boys, suits and all, hitting a young Yoko Ono with hammers until she promises to go away to a dark place where she’ll never have any impact on the greatest rock and roll band in history.

Tags: Beatles, Harmonix, Rock Band, Video Games

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Editorial, News, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.