Editor’s note: This article was originally published on July 5, 2012. We are re-publishing it today with an addendum covering the release of Rock Band Blitz.
Due to Rock Band and Guitar Hero ebbing naturally from cultural phenomenon status, rhythm games have had more than their share of dismissive eulogies. There’s a slew of recent and upcoming games that paint a very healthy future, like Rhythm Heaven , Just Dance 4 , Dance Central 3 , Rock Band Blitz , Sing , Final Fantasy: Theatrhythm . Even Sony is remembering Parappa’s existence long enough to put him in a fan service fighting game. Those games also draw greatly from past games and series like Elite Beat Agents , Lips , Karaoke Revolution , SingStar , Vib Ribbon , Gitaroo Man , Space Channel 5 , Dance Dance Revolution , Frequency , Amplitude , and a billion other ancestors. If this return to earlier forms is a pointer towards some kind of cycle, then it’s faintly possible that guitar and band games are only dormant. Still, there’s a lesson to be gained this time around.
Three notes, flat lane, scrolling upward… and mandatory tilts.
First off, here’s a high-speed history lesson on the tangled and often-confused past of plastic instrument music games. Konami’s music game division, Bemani, made arcade cabinets like Drummania and Guitar Freaks , using their experience from series like Dance Dance Revolution and Beatmania but basing them on instrument-shaped peripherals. Soon thereafter, Harmonix brought this idea into people’s homes with home dance pad makers RedOctane handling hardware creation, delivering song selections tailored to Western audiences via Guitar Hero , Guitar Hero II , and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the ’80s . Because of their success, monolith Activision swoops in and buys RedOctane and the IP rights to all the Guitar Hero games from then on, figuring Harmonix was incidental to the games’ success. Harmonix then went on to add other instruments (vocals, drums, bass for all songs) in the Rock Band games. Neversoft, doing software for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and subsequent main titles, played catch-up by going “full-band” in Guitar Hero World Tour , all while keeping out front via name recognition. There are ancillary titles in this timeline as well, like the DJ Hero series by Freestyle Games, the flop Rock Revolution by Konami, and the recent advent of “real guitar” titles like Seven45 Studio’s horrid PowerGig: Rise of the SixString and Ubisoft’s accomplished Rocksmith .
Neversoft, under the supervision of a sequel-crazed Activision cranking on all cylinders, developed titles at nearly 150% the pace of Harmonix, bloating with ever more minor features each iteration for the sake of promotion bullet points: touch strip portions on guitar, double-bass kick drum charts, open bass notes, and so on. The developers traded blows on various fronts: exclusive rights to certain artists’ songs and likenesses, marquee band-focused titles, downloadable content, and exports of songs from past retail titles. Harmonix chose to focus on content and gameplay changes stemming from major hardware additions, like keyboards. Activision’s changes are generally either incremental, gimmicky, or predicated on playing catch-up, all to support a library of songs which numbered in the hundreds as opposed to Harmonix’s thousands. Still, despite all the resistance these games faced from many professional musicians, it was Activision who ended up being dragged to court over their negligence in locking celebrity likenesses to their own songs in Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero .
If you’ve seen this before, this time I recommend you pay attention to the lyrics and song selections.
This history is fairly well represented in the public conscience. What you might not know is when and how Activision and Harmonix chose to empower their fans. Neversoft included with Guitar Hero: World Tourwhat amounted to a glorified MIDI composer call GHTunes, with all the substandard instrument patches and fidelity you’d expect. The most you generally got from this user-content generator were copyright-dodging covers, recreations of old video game themes, and artificially difficult-to-play musical gibberish. Look up examples if you get the urge; YouTube is populated with them. Harmonix, on the other hand, released a set of tools to create charts for properly-recorded studio masters, paired with a peer review system and legal clearance pipeline piggybacking on Microsoft’s XNA/Creator’s Club services. This was all in the service of paving the way for music game’s first legitimate third-party downloadable content: the Rock Band Network, RBN for short.
Since Harmonix knew their own limitations for releasing DLC as a small company, as well as how they needed to maintain sales, this alternative source of content served as a way to give bands they couldn’t focus on a chance. Ideally, Harmonix could focus on the surefire sellers without shutting out independents and up-and-comers from inclusion. That Sub Pop was the first label to sign on with RBN should be an indicator of what was envisioned. Artists from that label, Fat Possum, Polyvinyl, Barsuk, Matador, and even EMI have all made forays into this alternative pipeline to date. This was a major opportunity at expanding the song selection exponentially, and in turn appealing to a wider swath of people and further realizing Harmonix’s philosophy of series-as-platform. For some, there was the faint glimmer of a resurgence.
People worked on this thing and expect you to pay money to own it.
Suffice to say, this did not happen.
Or rather, it delivered admirably on its promise at the outset, but gradually the more reputable sources of artists balked. Songs frequently stalled out mid-process, leading to submissions drying up and content variety plummeting. EMI gave up before fully vetting any of the songs they’d attempted to have authored, Sub Pop ceased licensing tracks, and Matador and the rest of the Beggars’ Group now categorically refuse to use the system… and all these developments are at least a year or two old. Very few artists were safe from failure on the part of the pipeline: upstart acts, recognizable names, and even bands with Harmonix employees in their lineups have all been let down at some point or another by the shortcomings of the service’s core community. A moment of silence for some of the victimized artists:
- Amazing Baby
- Asobi Seksu
- Billy Idol
- Blondie
- Bomb the Music Industry!
- Bon Savants
- Buffalo Gun
- The Dandy Warhols
- Death of the Cool
- Drist
- Fleet Foxes
- Fucked Up
- Megasus
- The New Pornographers
- The Smashing Pumpkins
- Tijuana Sweetheart
- The Tragically Hip
The tragedy of this tale is where the failures ultimately originated from: the “hardcore” fans of the game who made up an overwhelming majority of the workforce of authoring services. Handpicked devotees, many from internet communities like ScoreHero and the Rock Band official forums, were given alpha access to the tools for the system and first crack at licensing deals from early adapter Sub Pop. While practically it made plenty of sense to entrust the work involved in making third-party DLC to people with a strong connection to the game, it resulted in an almost absurdly dramatic shift in content as time went on. Those with roots more in the music industry than in video games or “Internet culture” became the outsiders, and were systematically rebuffed and ignored. Those tracks that weren’t coded by authors from ScoreHero, performed by “musicians” from or associated with ScoreHero, or deemed challenging enough to satisfy the difficulty demands of ScoreHero were almost perpetually neglected. The result was countless nearly-finished files that became nothing but wasted venture capital. Few artists were truly safe from finding themselves put on the back-burner indefinitely, in favor of the next gem-packed opus.
Take for example this breathtaking load of… whatever-it-is.
And what’s most telling is the kind of content that did make it through reliably. Rather than aim to introduce new music to people who played the game, or least take RBN seriously as a business venture, it instead defaulted to catering to only those with obsessive difficulty demands or that reinforced existing “nerd”/”gamer” tropes. Lip service was paid to Surfer Blood and Sleater-Kinney to bide time between releases by Parry Gripp and Amberian Dawn. A band that opened on tour for MGMT couldn’t get enough time and attention to clear the system, while authors fought tooth and nail to clear a band called the LeetStreet Boys. (Sample song titles: “Yuri the Only One”, “Guitar Hero Hero”, “Expert Mode”). Even after the difficulties of having the first two songs submitted and rejected on content grounds, and then having charts for the third song trade several authors’ hands several times over the course of a year, The Leetstreet Boys triumphed when they debuted on RBN.
There are endless stories about the other failures of the system that I can attest to from first person experience. Various broken songs reached market and kicked off author-versus-author witch hunts and “blacklists” which ran against the nature of a peer review system. There were repeated instances of Harmonix being forced to step in and forcefully prohibit things, from anticipated songs racing through the system without proper evaluation to attempts to take songs with double kick pedal charting (already against Harmonix’s own design documents) and then name them exactly the way Guitar Hero did. There was the time an author tried to release John Cage’s seminal “4’33″” as a novelty track, in which it was argued that respect for the history and legacy of the artist was irrelevant to the discussion. Then there was the song in which the vocalist had to say the word ‘boner’ when no vocal part is present in the song, and also decode a garbled Unicode/leetspeak transliteration of death metal growls because aliens from the plot of a prog-metal concept album “hacked into the game”.
Nope, not kidding. Do you have any idea how much I wish I was?
With Harmonix focusing on big sellers and RBN now rooted firmly in the bargain/trash bin, no reliable “middle path” exists for bands with name recognition but no Billboard chart credentials or non-college radio airplay. That was the problem is seemed like the service intended to fix, and for a brief and wonderful while it did. In theory, there’s nothing preventing anyone from having a go at getting their music in a major video game for a couple-hundred bucks… but in practice there’s too much baggage to make it a sound investment. This is what happens when you let the collective Ur-nerd run wild; a distillation of every crummy, note-spamming “custom” chart hack made since the first Guitar Hero game, only now jacked up on legitimate business deals, legal clearances, and the presumption of sound quality assurance protocol. What was supposed to be an extension of Rock Band as a vehicle for music of all stripes has become a sad devaluation of the already shrinking band game genre as a whole. Worst of all, it was committed by the fans Harmonix trusted most, who in the end only sought to cater to their own narrow whims.
I could go on forever about terrible client price-gouging by authoring services trying to make charting into a day job, self-congratulatory vanity projects ranging from podcasts to botched “megamixes”, contests to bring in “new blood” that gave prizes to former testers, and YouTube after YouTube of ever more ridiculous things for sale in Rock Band, F right now. But the truth is that most of my resentment over the service’s squandered potential has long since cooled off, and only disappointment is left. The critical moment where RBN might have flourished and gained momentum is well in the past; now even the largest of authoring services are huddling together for warmth and attention under the laxest review-trading policies to date. Their panel at this year’s PAX East was scheduled overlapping the keynote address, and the turnout I saw in its last 10 minutes was as minimal as you’d imagine. It was “pitiful” in the most literal sense: it elicited pity.
There’s nothing I can say about this video that doesn’t express itself.
There’s a reason why people remember “Jordan” by Buckethead from Guitar Hero II, “Through the Fire and the Flames” by DragonForce from III, and why when given the keys to a content pipeline in Rock Band there came a surge of Evile and Jonathan Coulton above all else. These people spent time and effort preparing and selling a re-record of “Still Alive”, the credits song from Portal , the original of which was already available for free . And even by a conservative estimate, it doubled the sales of the only available song by The Walkmen in a fifth of the time. Neversoft might be the studio that gave out in the marketplace, but it was Harmonix who had their idealism thoroughly debunked.
And that is the lesson of this parable. Just as attempting to please all people results in pablum, there are dire consequences for going too far in the other direction. And that’s because “nerd culture”, as we’re quickly realizing, is a toxic stew of influences and impulses that endeavors to disconnect from the real, wider world as much as possible and retreat into a hermetic bubble where anything unsanctioned is a threat to rupture it. Whether it’s as morally crucial as respecting oppressed demographic cross-sections or as simple as retiring decrepit jokes (and jokers), anything that could pierce the veil is strictly verboten. And there’s plenty of vested financial interest in the status quo: AAA game studios, console developers, old-guard senior magazine editors, convention operators, novelty/nerdcore musicians, poster printers, wacky T-shirt sellers, and “N-list” pseudo-celebrities are all dependent on the unquestioning fanboy severed from critical capacity and outside points of reference. That mindset is why you end up with a song in Rock Band about playing Rock Band , why thousands buy it, and why it sounds like this.
Behold, the market has spoken; all sales final, and no returns.
The impulse to auto-cannibalize left behind the merits of Lawrence Lessig’s “remix culture” a long time ago; at its core, it’s a feedback loop of stale ephemera, referential artifice, reductive iconography and escapist fantasy. It’s only in recent years that movements to address these pathologies have gained momentum, and even then the victories have been both hard-won and minimal. The places resistance has come from have been both obvious and surprising, from faceless swarms of cowards to well-known personalities who stake their livelihoods on this kind of cultural conservatism. You can take this little cautionary tale and probably extrapolate what would happen in your communities if they let those tendencies towards the familiar win out. I guess you can give credit to the authors of this particular demise for knowing their primary audience: themselves.
The Blitz Addendum
If you’re still wondering who else in “gaming community” this story affects, consider the following. has several songs out; it is the band of Andy Gentile, former Neversoft employee and developer behind the Epic Skater Kickstarter . Their practices of alleged bribery has been covered by the Penny Arcade Report, and PA has not only their own questionable Kickstarter practices but a charity song in RBN as well . Giant Bomb has one song about them released by (the latter of whom is now deceased ) with another by a second artist incumbent. Others with songs that have cleared the system include rhythm game third party WaveGroup , Ratchet and Clank developers Insomniac Games, several songs from , and even Valve via the in-fiction band Midnight Riders from Left for Dead 2.
How much or how little these individual parties know of what went on varies, as well as when their songs were processed and the impressions from the system at that time. If I had a longer history of articles and a more well-built reputation, I would have sought out interviews or statements from these parties as well as the bands and labels who were unable to complete their submissions. I highly encourage anyone with experience in a submitted band or as a reviewer or author to voice their experiences (as well as any objections to the article) and form a more complete pictures.
Further Reading: The State of Music Games (Medium Difficulty)
