The Beatles: Rock Band - Q&A Feature

Love it or Loathe it, the Rock Band series has become the acceptable face of Karaoke. Where previously Karaoke was confined to darkened corners of Japanese bars filled with sake-fuelled businessmen and young girls, Rock Band has brought it right into our living rooms.  In this respect, by bagging the rights to The Beatles' catalogue, Rock Band has reached a pinnacle. There is perhaps no band more accessible or more revered than the Beatles, making them the ultimate star of the series.

We talk to John Drake of Harmonix about how they have brought one of the most powerful forces in music on to our consoles.

Tell us a bit about the story mode of the game and how you've captured different aspects of the Beatles?

Story mode is chronological and split into two big chapters. One is the early career of The Beatles where they were more of a live band. You'll be playing in historic venues like the Cavern Club, Shea Stadium, Budokon and so on. From there, they go into the studio and retreat from playing publicly where they were recording lots of albums and doing amazing work in Abbey Road Studios. In the game, that part is where you're in your own little world with these dreamscapes. With every song you start off in Abbey Road Studios and then you drift off into this fantasy world and then come back from it. It can be really powerful and intense. There are some really moving moments in the game that revolve around that. For us, the story mode really draws you into playing through The Beatles' career and seeing this rapid change from them going from a club band to a stadium band, to a media sensation, to a studio band, to icons. By the end of their career on the rooftop, this is a group of four icons that are going to forever be a part of our pop DNA. It's a really cool and powerful experience.

All 45 songs are unlocked from the beginning. Is difficulty factored into the game in the same way it was in previous Rock Bands?

This game is a little less about getting harder as you go through, and a little more about the chronology. In previous Rock Bands you go from super easy to super hard. In each little chapter of the game we try to have a linear difficulty, but there's also variety in the playlist. We try to have a fun playlist to break up the flow, so you'll be playing a slow song and then a fast song and so on. Our audio team is probably the best music team in the business and they can make you a playlist all day long and it's perfect.

Is this game then more about The Beatles experience then the gameplay in a sense?

Yes, it's more about playing through the songs as they happen and witnessing how the band evolved than about songs getting harder and more difficult as the game progresses. That being said, there are some hard-ass songs towards the end of this game. Get Back is especially crazy.

The vocal harmonising is a new feature to Rock Band, was it hard to perfect?

It's something we've always wanted to do in general. We've always wanted to incorporate it into Rock Band. It's actually a lot of work getting multiple harmonies on the screen like that. The design team had to go through a lot of iterations to make sure it felt right and worked simply. It's not as simple as it might seem. But it was definitely worth it. Especially with The Beatles, the vocal harmonies in their performances are so instrumental as to how they worked together as a band; three to four people singing at a time, together, really focuses a band. It also means that up to six people will be able to play together in the game.

How did you work the vocal harmonies into the three lines that we see undulating on the screen?

Well, the game is constantly analysing what note you're singing, allowing you to jump around between harmonies. In the middle of a line you can switch to singing the harmony if you want. As long as someone's singing one of the parts right you'll get 100%. But it lets you have the freedom to go outside your comfort zone and try singing a different bit of the chorus or the melody. The way it works all together is that you have three colour-coded note tubes. Usually blue is the melody and orange and brown are the other notes to the song and they're just distinct enough. You have your own little arrow marking your voice on the screen. Your arrow will follow whatever kind of tube you're trying to sing.

There are 45 songs on the disc. How much more can we expect to see in the DLC?

The first will be the Abbey Road DLC, which will be the whole album, and you'll be able to play straight through the album. We're also doing the single All You Need Is Love with Xbox Live for the release, the proceeds of which will go to Doctors Without Borders. Beyond that we have access and plans for more songs, but really at this point we're talking about rounding out the catalogue. I think we have a really great, balanced 45 song track list, but that being said no matter what songs we pick, we're going to end up leaving out someone's favourite song. Doing these album downloads and single downloads will help us to round out the catalogue to try and please everyone. We want to have all The Beatles' music and try to deliver it to you as best we can in these digestible chunks.

Would it be realistic to think that the entire Beatles catalogue might be available at some point?

The entire catalogue might be stretching it a bit. I think we'll have a lot of the relevant and live music with four player band instrumentation. That being said, there's no fixed cap right now. We have a certain number of songs we're working on right now. Apple Corp has said they're interested in working and going forward, so we're hoping to do as much as they'll let us have.

Any plans to look at music from solo projects that came out of the band, or include any characters outside of The Beatles?

That's something we're pretty fixed about. People like Yoko Ono, Billy Preston or Eric Clapton won't be in the game. We had a set of boundaries when we started making the game. The game is all about these four guys playing music together in this time period and their career together. Whether that music appears in other Rock Band games is totally possible, but right now, The Beatles: Rock Band is about the 13 iconic albums from their career.

You've been able to use remastered versions of Beatles tracks. How did you go about bringing the music into the game, especially considering there are three guitar parts compared to the game's two?

The songs are remastered independently from us. We do a little remixing. Since there are three guitars - rhythm, solo, or lead - we weave those together to make a single, coherent guitar part. For example, if there's two guitar parts, you want to hear a little more of the part you're playing than the parts in the background, so you can associate the game with what you hear. We don't remix the songs to have a different sound or different tone. It's more so that while you're playing it, you subtly get a little more emphasis on what you're doing. Overall the experience is mostly trying to hear over the other people in the room who are all singing along really loudly.

What can you tell us about the unlockable content in the game?

One thing that we can talk about today is that there's definitely audio from the sessions leading into every song. Take Octopus's Garden as an example: Giles Martin, our lead at Abbey Road will pull up a recording labelled "warm up take from Octopus' Garden" while indexing all the audio. It's a recording of them tuning their guitars or singing, and you'll hear a little bit of that in the intro and outro to songs. When you're in the loading screen of a song you'll hear a little audio there, and then at the end as well. It sounds like a little detail but it's this kind of stuff that creates the soul of a Beatles game so you feel like you're in the studio with them, without it being too cheesy. We just want to bring you closer to the process.

There is going to be unlockable media in the game like photos, which are deeper into the story mode that we're not really going to talk about today. Hopefully it'll be stuff that will still have a wow factor for even the most hardcore Beatles fan, rather than just another song with another character on the screen. Also, we hope that the unlockables will deepen the experience of getting closer to the band.

The collectable set looks great, but some might say it's a little expensive for the whole set...

You don't need them really; it's a collector's mentality. People who are hardcore Beatles fans and love John Lennon and love his guitar work or love George Harrison - they want to have that guy's instrument in their hands. They want to have the Gretsch Duo Jet that George plays or the Rickenbacker 325 that John plays. That being said, we are interested in you not having to buy more plastic. If you're a gamer and you already have a guitar, we don't want to make you buy new hardware just to play our game, so we've made as many peripherals as possible work on this game.

You're in a band that appears in Rock Band 2 called the Main Drag. How has actually being in a band affected the way you've developed this game?

I'm not unique in being in a band in Harmonix. Upwards of 80% of people in the company play an instrument and there are about 40 active bands, so it's a pretty passionate company of musicians. The gameplay mechanics aren't radically different between all the music games that are out there. They don't necessarily have the same execution or do the same thing, but they have a similar concept of what you're trying to do. For us the best thing that we do is really give you the best game experience of what it's like to play in a group with other people. Features like the bonus of saving somebody, or hitting that band unity score are things we introduced to do that. The way we chart our guitars, it's not like you're playing a real guitar but that you have the general feel of what it's like to go up and down a guitar neck, or the bass is super rocking and super fast. Then again, at the end of the day we're all about accuracy and authenticity. We're trying to give you the most fun and accurate idea of playing in a band you can have without having to be stuck in a van for fourteen hours between songs.

You mentioned getting feedback from Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr on the game. What aspects did they help develop?

They gave us feedback on things like "this hair colour is a little off", or "this isn't the outfit I'd be wearing", to things like "we should be more energetic on stage". A lot of this was aesthetic and on the surface, but they also looked at deeper stuff like going through the story mode and really looking at the facts we have in there, or looking at the tips and tricks we have in there. They're generally invested in what we have in the game. The four of them lived this story, and we want to have the heart and soul of what it meant to them. This is not a title we just dashed off to cash in on The Beatles. They wouldn't have been interested in that; we're not interested in that. This is a catalogue of music we feel a lot of love and respect for, and I think that's why they came to Harmonix. At the end of the day, if it doesn't feel like it's coming from The Beatles, it doesn't feel right. I think we've accomplished that and they're happy with it.

Did they give any feedback on the note highway charting you've done?

I know that Ringo clapped along to a lot of it. He was like "yeah, that's right, I love it!" I don't think they got that detailed into that aspect because they trust that we know what we're doing with it. I think if they were really hardcore gamers they might get into that. For now, they're happy to give us the surrounding feedback to give us a great game.

This is going to be a big hit in the charts. The release date of 09.09.09 is a couple of weeks before Halo ODST, a game that would be considered a more traditional gamer's choice. How do you think you'll compare in sales?

It would be pretty rad if we topped Halo, but I don't know about that. We love Bungie. They're very different games for very different audiences. Just like Halo 3 probably sold a lot of Xboxes to people who wanted to know what this phenomenon was, we're hoping to sell more consoles into homes because people are going to be interested in trying it. In terms of sales figures, we don't know how well anything will sell. It would be naive to say that we're not in it for the money but for us, we're more in it for the passion of working with a band as great as The Beatles.  It's great for the industry too. We hope that people who buy games like these, which are not thought of as hardcore titles, will encourage people to play with hardcore gamers.

TVG would like to thank John Drake for taking the time to talk to us about the biggest Rock Band game to date.