First Look: The Beatles: Rock Band
September 3, 2009

The Beatles: Rock Band trailer

The trailer for the upcoming release of the much-anticipated game The Beatles: Rock Band.



Sing along with the Liverpool lads, writes Andrew Murfett.

The Beatles: Rock Band, arguably the most anticipated game of the year, should satisfy the diehard gamers and older music fans who do not own a console.

The stakes are high. Harmonix, a music-based gaming group formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by two MIT graduates in the mid-1990s, developed the million-selling Guitar Hero franchise in 2005. The group splintered when the game's publisher sold the Guitar Hero brand to Activision.
Paul McCartney is a playable character in The Beatles: Rock Band.

Paul McCartney is a playable character in The Beatles: Rock Band.

Harmonix was itself bought by MTV in September 2006. It developed the Rock Band game, which added vocals and drums to the Guitar Hero blueprint. The company is now the chief competitor of the game it originally produced.

Rock Band has sold 10.1 million copies, about half of Guitar Hero's sales.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Do the Beatles remasters capture the Fab Four sound?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dhani Harrison, the gaming-fanatic son of late Beatle George Harrison, met Harmonix co-founder and chief executive Alex Rigopulos and convinced Apple Corps, which controls the Beatles' back catalogue, to consider a game based on Beatles music.

Harmonix began developing demos of Beatles songs set to Rock Band and pitched a game chronicling the Beatles' career.

"It was a year-and-a-half before we started working on art," Mr Rigopulos says.

"Nobody here exhaled until we finished the game."

After several months of negotiations, they cut a deal ensuring "the shareholders" — the Beatles' estates — would be proactive members of the creative process.

Giles Martin, the 39-year-old son of Beatles producer Sir George Martin, was enlisted to administer the painstaking process of separating the instruments on to individual tracks. He was also entrusted to scour the archives for rare audio sources that could also be used.

"My concern was we would provide them with the music and they would just make the game without collaboration," Mr Martin says. "It wasn't like that at all."

Mr Martin had digitised the Beatles' master tapes recently during his work producing the Love project, the group's collaboration with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas.

A list of 45 songs was compiled in consultation with Harmonix and "the shareholders". Giles and his engineer, Paul Hicks, began mixing the multi-tracks.

As Harmonix's sound engineers worked at Abbey Road on audio content for the game, company artists in Cambridge, near Boston, developed a narrative and designed illustrations.

Rock Band is inherently based on simulating live music play.

Long before they finished recording, the Beatles stopped playing live, so the game is broken up chronologically via Beatles live-music high points and "dreamscapes" of the band playing in the famous Abbey Road studios.

The dreamscape sequences, which simulate the chemical influences of the band or images inspired by the lyrics, are arguably the most impressive aspect of the game.

"We'd make a drawing or painting and talk the shareholders through each idea," creative director Josh Randall says.

"They would tell us how each band member moved."

In the past, Harmonix had not attempted to emulate real people. Rock Band simply used generic caricatures.

Not this time.

The game begins with a stunning animated introduction that condenses the Beatles' career into 2 minutes.

The player is then led to a menu offering the choice of an individual song or beginning a Beatles "career".

As each track loads, previously unheard audio clips of in-studio chatter play, delivering a more immersive feel to the game.

As the game progresses, the player unlocks previously photo-based archival material.

In a nod to new players, at its "easy" level, general gameplay is undoubtedly less complex than previous music video games. Still, to pacify hardcore gamers, expert levels have also been retained, as well as familiar Rock Band modes "rock duel" and "tug-of-war".

The writer travelled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a guest of Harmonix.