Post by TTR Dr Payne on Nov 10, 2007 8:25:40 GMT -4
multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2007/11/08/9-things-you-didnt-know-about-rock-band-the-endless-setlist-tattoo-shops-how-online-lag-is-fixed-and-a-cow-bell/
RANDOM FACTOID #1: THE INSPIRATION FOR THE BAND WORLD TOUR MODE
Bang CamaroSenior Designer Dan Teasdale:
“The World Tour mode is definitely one of my babies on the design front. It started off with us talking with a lot of people who have toured here at Harmonix, bands like Freezepop, Tribe and Bang Camaro [pictured], to figure out what the real tour experience is like — hiring managers, driving for like 900 miles to get a gig on time, all that kind of stuff. And we distilled down all these events that happen on tour and turned that into our career mode. So our Band World Tour mode is about the rise to fame. You start off in your garage and do things like hire your manager or buy a van or find some roadies, and then live that experience as you grow to be the biggest band in the world. A lot of it is letting the player decide how they want their bands to progress. We have a moment in the game where you can choose to play a charity gig, and by doing that you get no more money but you get more fans. You could say, ‘Yes I would love to play a charity gig!’ or ‘No! There’s no way, I want the money.’ So that shapes the band as it goes along, but it also means that if you don’t want to do something, we’re not forcing you to do something. You’re in control of the destiny of your band.”
[Photo Credit: J. Harrington]
RANDOM FACTOID #2: HOW HARMONIX FIXED THE LAG FOR ONLINE PLAY
Rock BandCo-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“We actually have some patents in that area. We’ve invented some pretty cool techniques that allow four musicians — or as many as you want, but in our case four musicians — in different locations to all be synchronized together and all be playing the same song feeling like they are playing at the same time without any lag. It’s a pretty cool technology and a lot of fakery happens under the hood to make it all work seamlessly, but the net result is that you feel like you’re right there in the room with someone else, so you get the responsiveness of seeing how they’re playing. So if they’re screwing up on their end, you hear them screwing up on your end, but it is all in time and in sync.”
RANDOM FACTOID #3: WHAT’S IN THE BASEMENT AT HARMONIX
Co-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“We have employees that are in real rock bands, and we have a practice space for them. [Vice President of Product Development] Greg LoPiccolo, who was in a band called Tribe about 15 years ago, had this awesome idea. He remembered the old days of his band’s practice space and what an awesome setting that is, so he pushed for this initiative for Harmonix to have a band practice space. So down in the basement, we have a fully decked-out practice space where we have a couple of drum kits, a couple of amps, a couch, a dirty carpet. If you’re a Harmonix employee, you sign up and you can practice there either with other Harmonix folks or with your own band. We definitely encourage people to be playing music. We want people to be living that vibe that we are all about because otherwise we’d kind of just be fakers. Obviously we are making video games and that’s what we’re about, but we are also musicians, and it’s the combination of us being musicians and videogame makers that really makes us have that special quality. It’s kind of pervasive throughout the entire company. We wouldn’t bother trying to make skateboarding games.”
RANDOM FACTOID #4: “ROCK BAND” ROCK STARS HAVE REAL TATTOOS
Art Director Ryan Lesser:
“We’ve got an enormous amount of apparel to customize your avatar. We actually had apparel designers instead of typical game designers, and many of the apparel designers had in fact never made a video game before. All we wanted was people that knew clothing. We have tons of make-up and tattoo art. I focused a lot on the real things that you could put on your T-shirts, or you can make your own designs. We just wanted lots of flexibility for people to make whatever they wanted. We really wanted your characters to be authentic and really feel like they were rockers whether it was garage-y all the way up to very glamorous. We wanted the apparel and tattoos and all that stuff to be as cool and as real as possible. We sought out a lot of real tattoo artists and tattoo studios so the tattoos in our game, while many are made by Harmonix artists, there’s a ton of them made by real tattoo shops out there in the world, and those are represented in the game as tattoo shops.”
RANDOM FACTOID #5: “ROCK BAND” DRUMS TEACHES YOU REAL DRUMS (REALLY)
rockbanddrummer.jpgCo-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“Me and other people who have not played drums have started on Easy and struggled a little bit at the beginning. Then they got their groove, figured out left and right limb independence, got their kick pedal to work independently, then all of sudden you are playing drums. Then you level up and move to Expert. I don’t think everyone is going to get to Expert, and that’s okay. People can get to whatever level they feel comfortable with. But we could take a bunch of people now at Harmonix and sit them down in front of a real drum kit and they could probably do pretty well, which is awesome. We are essentially creating an army of drummers! I’m a musician , but playing drums was not something I ever did, and now I can keep a basic drum beat and do fills on the real drums.”
RANDOM FACTOID #6: “ROCK BAND” OWES THANKS TO… RINGO STARR AND T.REX?
marcbolan.jpgArt Director Ryan Lesser:
“Because ‘Rock Band’ is going to be a platform for music, we are going to be bringing up new music all the time. So we had to make sure it had a look that matched it’s musical selection. It was going to be vast, and it would have all the metal and hard rock and all that, but it could potentially have all the classic rock, punk, goth and anything that we wanted to throw at it. So we decided to go with a look that was more rooted in the big rock look of the late ’70s, when arena rock was sort of taking off, and it was all about lighting, smoke, atmosphere and stage performance. It wasn’t about the gigantic multi-million dollar stage sets; it was just a little bit more innocent, I guess — the early stages of big rock. So we took a lot of cues from that period, whether it was performances from Queen or The Who, just to see what the musicians were doing and to see what the lighting was all about. I also was really inspired from some footage that Ringo Starr shot of T. Rex on the T. Rex DVD, where it was all really nice and hand-held and really intimate. [T. Rex frontman] Marc Bolan really felt like a gigantic superstar, more so than he usually does, and all that hand-held intimate camera work really struck me. That’s why there is a lot of film grain exposure flicker vignetting, where we go from black-and-white to color. We used ’60s and ’70s trippy visuals, and we really tried to play up the camera to rough it up a little bit and make it a little more like what you might see when you’re watching a documentary or rock-umentary.”
[Marc Bolan Photo Credit: Gary Merrin/ Getty Images]
RANDOM FACTOID #7: HOW HARMONIX WORKS WITH EA AND MTV
Co-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“The relationship between Harmonix, EA and MTV… it’s interesting. First of all, there are three parties that are good at what they do. They are very powerful people, they all have really good people working together but the tricky part is getting everyone to work together and have everyone driving towards the same goal. I think we all did a good job of that, but it was certainly a little challenging at the beginning to understand exactly what everyone’s roles are. MTV is the publisher, but EA is used to being the publisher, and now they are being the distributor with some publisher functions. Harmonix is used to being the developer, but now because we are part of MTV we are doing some things that normally publishers would be doing. So figuring that out was kind of interesting. But at end of the day, everyone was super committed to the project. It was a huge project, and we needed everyone’s abilities to get it to happen. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without any of the people involved.
When it came to the development of the game, everyone left us alone, and it was awesome. I think everyone realized to just let us do what we are good at doing, and you’ll be fine. So we were in the driver’s seat as far as creating the game. EA was there to help, MTV was there to help, and we were doing the thing that we knew how to do best. And the end result kind of shows for it. You would think that a small developer being bought by a big company there would be all these problems, but it has been pretty good.”
RANDOM FACTOID #8: THE “ENDLESS” SETLIST AT THE END OF THE GAME
Senior Designer Dan Teasdale:
“The Band World Tour is open-ended so you can go around and play any cities or venues you want, but we do have a lot of special events at the end that you can play. Like we have the big one which is the endless set list where you can play all the songs back to back. It’s like a six-hour marathon of playing everything in the game. Because it’s a marathon, we do give you something really cool at the end of it… But I can’t tell you what it is yet.”
RANDOM FACTOID #9: WHAT’S NEXT FOR “ROCK BAND”… COWBELL, ANYONE?
morecowbell.jpgCo-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“Where can we go from here? Hmmm. We did sort of shoot for the moon in the first version of ‘Rock Band,’ so it does seem like a pretty complete package. There’s a ton of areas you can go with it. First of all, keeping in the existing peripherals of a four-person band, there’s so many features that couldn’t just make it into ‘Rock Band 1′ — just because we had to finish the game — that could go into ‘Rock Band 2‘ or ‘Rock Band 3,’ And of course, there is the option for more peripherals. Maybe we’ll add keyboards. Maybe we’ll add cowbell. You never know!”
RANDOM FACTOID #1: THE INSPIRATION FOR THE BAND WORLD TOUR MODE
Bang CamaroSenior Designer Dan Teasdale:
“The World Tour mode is definitely one of my babies on the design front. It started off with us talking with a lot of people who have toured here at Harmonix, bands like Freezepop, Tribe and Bang Camaro [pictured], to figure out what the real tour experience is like — hiring managers, driving for like 900 miles to get a gig on time, all that kind of stuff. And we distilled down all these events that happen on tour and turned that into our career mode. So our Band World Tour mode is about the rise to fame. You start off in your garage and do things like hire your manager or buy a van or find some roadies, and then live that experience as you grow to be the biggest band in the world. A lot of it is letting the player decide how they want their bands to progress. We have a moment in the game where you can choose to play a charity gig, and by doing that you get no more money but you get more fans. You could say, ‘Yes I would love to play a charity gig!’ or ‘No! There’s no way, I want the money.’ So that shapes the band as it goes along, but it also means that if you don’t want to do something, we’re not forcing you to do something. You’re in control of the destiny of your band.”
[Photo Credit: J. Harrington]
RANDOM FACTOID #2: HOW HARMONIX FIXED THE LAG FOR ONLINE PLAY
Rock BandCo-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“We actually have some patents in that area. We’ve invented some pretty cool techniques that allow four musicians — or as many as you want, but in our case four musicians — in different locations to all be synchronized together and all be playing the same song feeling like they are playing at the same time without any lag. It’s a pretty cool technology and a lot of fakery happens under the hood to make it all work seamlessly, but the net result is that you feel like you’re right there in the room with someone else, so you get the responsiveness of seeing how they’re playing. So if they’re screwing up on their end, you hear them screwing up on your end, but it is all in time and in sync.”
RANDOM FACTOID #3: WHAT’S IN THE BASEMENT AT HARMONIX
Co-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“We have employees that are in real rock bands, and we have a practice space for them. [Vice President of Product Development] Greg LoPiccolo, who was in a band called Tribe about 15 years ago, had this awesome idea. He remembered the old days of his band’s practice space and what an awesome setting that is, so he pushed for this initiative for Harmonix to have a band practice space. So down in the basement, we have a fully decked-out practice space where we have a couple of drum kits, a couple of amps, a couch, a dirty carpet. If you’re a Harmonix employee, you sign up and you can practice there either with other Harmonix folks or with your own band. We definitely encourage people to be playing music. We want people to be living that vibe that we are all about because otherwise we’d kind of just be fakers. Obviously we are making video games and that’s what we’re about, but we are also musicians, and it’s the combination of us being musicians and videogame makers that really makes us have that special quality. It’s kind of pervasive throughout the entire company. We wouldn’t bother trying to make skateboarding games.”
RANDOM FACTOID #4: “ROCK BAND” ROCK STARS HAVE REAL TATTOOS
Art Director Ryan Lesser:
“We’ve got an enormous amount of apparel to customize your avatar. We actually had apparel designers instead of typical game designers, and many of the apparel designers had in fact never made a video game before. All we wanted was people that knew clothing. We have tons of make-up and tattoo art. I focused a lot on the real things that you could put on your T-shirts, or you can make your own designs. We just wanted lots of flexibility for people to make whatever they wanted. We really wanted your characters to be authentic and really feel like they were rockers whether it was garage-y all the way up to very glamorous. We wanted the apparel and tattoos and all that stuff to be as cool and as real as possible. We sought out a lot of real tattoo artists and tattoo studios so the tattoos in our game, while many are made by Harmonix artists, there’s a ton of them made by real tattoo shops out there in the world, and those are represented in the game as tattoo shops.”
RANDOM FACTOID #5: “ROCK BAND” DRUMS TEACHES YOU REAL DRUMS (REALLY)
rockbanddrummer.jpgCo-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“Me and other people who have not played drums have started on Easy and struggled a little bit at the beginning. Then they got their groove, figured out left and right limb independence, got their kick pedal to work independently, then all of sudden you are playing drums. Then you level up and move to Expert. I don’t think everyone is going to get to Expert, and that’s okay. People can get to whatever level they feel comfortable with. But we could take a bunch of people now at Harmonix and sit them down in front of a real drum kit and they could probably do pretty well, which is awesome. We are essentially creating an army of drummers! I’m a musician , but playing drums was not something I ever did, and now I can keep a basic drum beat and do fills on the real drums.”
RANDOM FACTOID #6: “ROCK BAND” OWES THANKS TO… RINGO STARR AND T.REX?
marcbolan.jpgArt Director Ryan Lesser:
“Because ‘Rock Band’ is going to be a platform for music, we are going to be bringing up new music all the time. So we had to make sure it had a look that matched it’s musical selection. It was going to be vast, and it would have all the metal and hard rock and all that, but it could potentially have all the classic rock, punk, goth and anything that we wanted to throw at it. So we decided to go with a look that was more rooted in the big rock look of the late ’70s, when arena rock was sort of taking off, and it was all about lighting, smoke, atmosphere and stage performance. It wasn’t about the gigantic multi-million dollar stage sets; it was just a little bit more innocent, I guess — the early stages of big rock. So we took a lot of cues from that period, whether it was performances from Queen or The Who, just to see what the musicians were doing and to see what the lighting was all about. I also was really inspired from some footage that Ringo Starr shot of T. Rex on the T. Rex DVD, where it was all really nice and hand-held and really intimate. [T. Rex frontman] Marc Bolan really felt like a gigantic superstar, more so than he usually does, and all that hand-held intimate camera work really struck me. That’s why there is a lot of film grain exposure flicker vignetting, where we go from black-and-white to color. We used ’60s and ’70s trippy visuals, and we really tried to play up the camera to rough it up a little bit and make it a little more like what you might see when you’re watching a documentary or rock-umentary.”
[Marc Bolan Photo Credit: Gary Merrin/ Getty Images]
RANDOM FACTOID #7: HOW HARMONIX WORKS WITH EA AND MTV
Co-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“The relationship between Harmonix, EA and MTV… it’s interesting. First of all, there are three parties that are good at what they do. They are very powerful people, they all have really good people working together but the tricky part is getting everyone to work together and have everyone driving towards the same goal. I think we all did a good job of that, but it was certainly a little challenging at the beginning to understand exactly what everyone’s roles are. MTV is the publisher, but EA is used to being the publisher, and now they are being the distributor with some publisher functions. Harmonix is used to being the developer, but now because we are part of MTV we are doing some things that normally publishers would be doing. So figuring that out was kind of interesting. But at end of the day, everyone was super committed to the project. It was a huge project, and we needed everyone’s abilities to get it to happen. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without any of the people involved.
When it came to the development of the game, everyone left us alone, and it was awesome. I think everyone realized to just let us do what we are good at doing, and you’ll be fine. So we were in the driver’s seat as far as creating the game. EA was there to help, MTV was there to help, and we were doing the thing that we knew how to do best. And the end result kind of shows for it. You would think that a small developer being bought by a big company there would be all these problems, but it has been pretty good.”
RANDOM FACTOID #8: THE “ENDLESS” SETLIST AT THE END OF THE GAME
Senior Designer Dan Teasdale:
“The Band World Tour is open-ended so you can go around and play any cities or venues you want, but we do have a lot of special events at the end that you can play. Like we have the big one which is the endless set list where you can play all the songs back to back. It’s like a six-hour marathon of playing everything in the game. Because it’s a marathon, we do give you something really cool at the end of it… But I can’t tell you what it is yet.”
RANDOM FACTOID #9: WHAT’S NEXT FOR “ROCK BAND”… COWBELL, ANYONE?
morecowbell.jpgCo-founder and CTO Eran Egozy:
“Where can we go from here? Hmmm. We did sort of shoot for the moon in the first version of ‘Rock Band,’ so it does seem like a pretty complete package. There’s a ton of areas you can go with it. First of all, keeping in the existing peripherals of a four-person band, there’s so many features that couldn’t just make it into ‘Rock Band 1′ — just because we had to finish the game — that could go into ‘Rock Band 2‘ or ‘Rock Band 3,’ And of course, there is the option for more peripherals. Maybe we’ll add keyboards. Maybe we’ll add cowbell. You never know!”