Rock Band jam with Rob Kay

The lead designer lays down some beats for us

Inspired by the prospect of all our Guitar Hero / SingStar fantasies rolled into one finely tuned ensemble, Paul sits down with Harmonix's lead designer Rob Kay to engage in some lyrical backflips.

Going back briefly to Guitar Hero, was its huge success a surprise or did you expect it to take off to the degree it did?

I don't think any of us here expected Guitar Hero to explode in popularity like it did. It's been incredibly gratifying to see both the first game and sequel do so well.

Rock Band is a fantastic idea, and a natural step on from the Guitar Hero games, was this vision of a full band experience always the dream while you were working on those titles?

Rock Band is the game we've been dying to make for a long time now. Harmonix was founded more than a decade ago with the mission that the joy that comes from making music should be accessible to everyone. Every Harmonix music game has tried to achieve this, but Rock Band really makes our goal a reality.

Guitar Hero 2 was fairly heavily skewed towards the slightly more obscure American heavy metal scene than the first game, while it was still fun for us European gamers less versed in such bands and still included some true classics (Sweet Child Of Mine being a personal favourite) it perhaps lacked the original game's wide ranging track selection. Is there going to be an effort to make Rock Band either localised or at least a bit less hardcore in its song selection?

I think people will be blown away by Rock Band's track selection. Original tracks from The Who, Nirvana, and Metallica are just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the 40 tracks that will ship on the Rock Band disc ranging from classic and punk to alternative rock music, the downloadable content that will come on a weekly basis with Rock Band will give people access to artists' full albums.

You're being able to work with more original recordings in Rock Band than you did in Guitar Hero, while it's obviously great from the players point of view to have the original recordings did it make creating the game trickier as you weren't building each song from scratch?

Actually, working with the original recordings is easier than having cover versions made, so it's just better all round. Hearing and playing to the master recordings is chilling.

How have you found reaction to Rock Band from within the music industry, are bands as keen to get involved as you'd hoped?

The music industry as a whole is embracing Rock Band with a level of intensity and enthusiasm that we're amazed at. Every major music label is with us, and some of our all time favorite bands have agreed to offer up tracks and, in some cases, full albums to be featured in Rock Band. We couldn't be happier.

The question that's been playing on most peoples lips since the game was announced is how well the online modes will actually work in practice. The timing issues that must surround keeping all players perfectly in sync with each other over a sometimes less than perfect internet connection must be a real headache. Are you sure you've cracked it?

Online play is a huge part of Rock Band, fully integrated into all multiplayer modes. I can tell you this was something that we definitely were concerned with, and without going into too much detail let me tell you that we feel we've found a great solution for the problem. I think many people don't realize that this isn't our first online music game. Back in 2001, we released FreQuency, which used the PlayStation 2 network adapter for online multiplayer.

How will playing with people of different abilities be handled, can each member of the band play on their own difficulty setting?

Yep, each band member can pick their own difficulty setting so it's easy to jump in as a first timer or Rock Band pro.

Do you expect to see people buying a copy of the game and one favourite instrument, or are you hoping to see people buying the whole set and will there be pricing incentives to do this?

We'll be making it as affordable as we can, but haven't decided on bundling or pricing yet. Stay tuned...

Talking of price, would it be fair to assume Rock Band with a single instrument is likely to cost about the same as the Guitar Hero games and will pricing differ depending on the instrument?

No firm calls have been made on pricing yet.

How will the accuracy of the vocals be calculated, can we expect a SingStar style system that pays no real notice to the words you're singing as long as your timing and pitch is okay, or have you taken things on a level and included word recognition of some kind?

In Rock Band we adapt the vocal analysis to best suit each part of a song. If it's a sung part we use pitch and rhythm detection, if it's more of a spoken part we use phoneme detection.

What are your plans for downloadable content? The new SingStar on PS3 looks set to lead the way when it comes to adding tracks to music games, is that kind of mass catalogue of songs something you'll be aiming for or will it be a smaller more focused affair?

Downloadable content will be released on a weekly basis after Rock Band's launch. This will include entire albums starting with The Who's iconic rock album 'Who's Next'. Our goal is to amass a library of the best rock & roll ever made, from the sixties right through to modern day.

Is Rock Band as far as this kind of game can go or do you see things evolving even further? Perhaps to allow a way for gamers to be more creative in somehow rather than simply recreating exact copies of songs.

This is something we talk about a lot, and have spent considerable time investigating. Sometimes these experiments even end up in our games, for example the pitch shifting sustained notes with the whammy bar. The tricky part with any creative element is giving players freedom to do their own thing, but not so much that they have no idea what to do and/or sound terrible. For Rock Band, we have a few creative elements, including "Big Rock Endings" which gives people the chance to go nuts and improvise at the end of a song.

Although Rock Band is Harmonix's most ambitious project yet, we really feel this is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to the future of music games. Our job is to make sure we continue to push the borders of this space.

Finally, what's your favourite track and instrument in the game at the moment?

The Who's 'Won't Get Fooled Again' on Drums. Completing this song at expert difficulty last week gave me more pleasure than is probably legal... thank you Keith Moon, you crazy drumming legend, thank you.

By Paul Newcombe