It’s a good time to be a fan of music games, as the two dominant forces from the genre’s heyday are coming back for fresh outings on the new generation of consoles. After a few years exploring other gaming ideas and genres, Harmonix are back with one of their most popular and lasting game series, teaming up with Mad Catz to bring you Rock Band 4.
We’ve been hands on with a relatively early build of the game, with more news set to come at E3, but we also had the opportunity to sit down and discuss the game with Product Manager Daniel Sussman, a long standing member of the Harmonix team.
TSA: You’ll have to forgive me for the terribly cheesy way I’m putting this first question.
Daniel Sussman: OK.
TSA: So, you’re kind of getting the band back together for a reunion tour with this game, aren’t you?
Daniel: [laughs] We are, actually. Quite literally!
Part of that is like, if you think about the team that we put together to develop Rock Band 4, it’s got a lot of veterans from the Rock Band days, a lot of veterans from the Guitar Hero days, including myself. So, it’s a metaphor well taken!
TSA: [laughs] I just found it far too tempting…
Daniel: It’s funny, because that was actually first to mind of what our tagline might be from a marketing stand point, but it was too ‘first idea’, you know?
TSA: One of the interesting things, looking at the game’s development from the outside, is that it feels like this is going to be more of a platform rather than the first of a series of games?
Daniel: Well that’s right, and we’ve wanted to get out ahead and address the fact that we feel this category got saturated by products…
TSA: Because at one point it was around one every year, wasn’t it?
Daniel: It was. From 2007 to 2010, we had four new games and a lot of track packs in there and a lot of DLC.
Really what drives these games is content with targeted features and our approach for Rock Band 4 is that we feel we have some really innovative things that we want to build into the platform, and we really want to look at what people are doing. How are people playing the game? What modes are they playing? What did we miss and what are they talking about that they want?
We can develop a dialogue, really talk to people. In this day and age, that’s easy to do and both the PS4 and Xbox One allow us to expand upon a core title in a really elegant way.
TSA: I think what allows you to do this is that you really have the pervasiveness of the internet, unlike 2007 when consoles weren’t necessarily always connected online. That wasn’t a time where you could have just one game and release patches, but you have been very clear to say that backwards compatibility reaches that far back with songs and peripherals. How big a deal has that been?
Daniel: It’s far and away the number one, most requested feature from our community. It’s a thing that people care about and, in fact, it’s a thing that if we don’t do, I think that people would say, “f*@& off!” you know?
There are a lot of people that have spent a lot of money on DLC. They’ve bought their drums, they’ve bought their guitar, they might have multiple instruments, might have bought the bundle in 2007 and again in 2008.
You know, frankly… this is a business, right? But this is not a money grab. We are coming out with this game because we feel like we have a lot to offer creatively, and that’s really important for us.
I’m a f*@&ing game developer! I want people to have fun and I want people to play with whatever they have. I don’t want people to spend a penny more than they want to, and yet I feel like we have an experience here that is absolutely worth paying for, and you can’t always say that. How that relates to the back catalogue, if you’ve already bought it, you should absolutely get to keep it.
Really, that’s not a new strategy for Harmonix. From Rock Band to Rock Band 2, you could bring your DLC forward, you could import your LEGO songs into Rock Band 3. We’ve been pretty considerate and responsible as it relates to honouring the investment that people have made in their catalogue, going all the way back to the beginning.
TSA: Have you looked at what your rivals with Guitar Hero are doing and felt assured in your decision to retain that core style to the Rock Band games and not try to transform it?
Daniel: I think what’s interesting about the landscape of the music game in 2015 is that Rock Band 4 is very unique. We’re doing a lot of things that no-one else is doing in terms of full band gameplay, in terms of player expression, and I think that’s really healthy. You don’t want two games that are both trying to duke it out with the same feature set, so I think that’s really good.
At the same time, our goal is to be first in class. We want Rock Band 4 to be, not just the best music game this year, but to be the best game that’s come out of Harmonix. To be the best Rock Band that we’ve made and those are the criteria to which we are making out decisions, around features around our overall quality bar.
We like where we are creatively. We think we have a great game and we think there are a lot of people that are hungry for music gameplay.
TSA: You talked about self expression a couple of times, but what exactly do you mean by allowing people to express themselves?
Daniel: So there are a few things. One is, in terms of the feature that we showed today, really centred around the singer and the singer’s ability to go off script and sing whatever they want, provided they are singing in key. That’s a feature that will appeal to people that like to sing, which isn’t everybody but it’s a fair amount of people, for sure…
TSA: If The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent are anything to go by…
Daniel: Well exactly, right?
At the same time, we have some features for guitar that we’re not showing today – they’re actually being debuted at E3 – that we feel like are, dare I say it, ground breaking? That are a departure from the traditional gameplay and yet tie neatly into the fantasy that we’re all trying to build.
It’s a shame that we’re not showing it today, because it’s really interesting, but it was’t ready.
TSA: One thing that you said was that you’d taken this as an opportunity to be very introspective with what you’d done before. Do you think that it needed you to get away from that yearly release schedule to be able to get a fresh perspective?
Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, I feel like the studio is in an incredibly healthy space creatively right now, and a lot of that is that we’ve worked on some very challenging products over the last five years. If you think about Fantasia: Music Evolved, if you think about… I don’t know how familiar you are with our other games that we’ve released; we had a musical shooter that went to beta.
TSA: Chroma? I was going to ask about that and, though it’s obviously not what we’re here for today, but where is that game at the moment, and the other projects you have going on? You seem to have a lot going on.
Daniel: We do have a lot going on, and that speaks to the level of creative enthusiasm which is rippling through the studio. Certainly that’s there in the [Rock Band] development team, and then we have some very exciting things that we’re working that are not Rock Band. A lot of that is where we are as a studio. We’re at a really good size, we have a driven team that is motivated to do their best work, and we’re seeing that in spades.
As it relates to Rock Band specifically, some of that time down meant it was nice to come back to a game that was familiar and fun, and yet I think we’re just better developers for having worked on games that aren’t Rock Band. It stretched us in healthy ways.
TSA: Finally, you’ve entered into a much closer relationship with Mad Catz, who are co-publishing this game with you. How did that come about?
Daniel: Well we’ve had a long standing relationship with Mad Catz; we’ve worked with them closely going back all the way to 2008, I believe. They do a lot of things very well, and frankly, they do a lot of things that Harmonix doesn’t have an appetite for, one of which is the hardware development piece.
One of the many titles I have held over the years at Harmonix is the director of the hardware development team. I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did on the Rock Band controllers, the Rock Band 2 controllers, the Beatles controllers, which are some of the finest instrument controllers ever built!
And yet, that was a whole staff, and really it was a staff that was a step removed from videogame development. Mad Catz is really strong, they make great products and they understand the retail and the distribution piece of it very well. They’re very strong in Europe, which I think is a very interesting thing, and they have people not just in the UK, but all throughout the continent that understand the game, understand the product and have great relationships with press and gamers.
I feel there were a lot of things that MTV did really well, but we under performed in Europe and I never really understood why. One of the things that I’m really looking forward to is the fact that Mad Catz has a really strong team out here.
TSA: It’s still an interesting challenge for both of you, because I believe that publishing a game itself is new for Mad Catz.
Daniel: Yeah, but you know, we have a lot of experience working with MTV and MTV Games, and then working with EA. So we’ve been on the front lines of the marketing piece many, many times. I feel like there is sort of a renegade component to what we’re doing, which I find to be very romantic and it’s been incredibly fun.
The interesting thing about it so far is that it’s working! We made a lot of noise coming out of GDC, going into PAX East, which was the seat of our announcement, and I feel that we’ve captured people’s interest. People are curious and I feel that we have a product to back it up, which is the most important thing, and the only thing to do now is not mess it up!
Thanks to Daniel for taking the time to talk to us, you can catch our hands on preview with the game here, and obviously stay tuned for more news and details to come out at E3!
