14 DAY TRIAL // The music game genre has seen a very big increase in popularity over the past year. People have begun to realize that titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band provide a great experience and, because they can be played with family and friends, are surely worth every precious penny.
With the increase in popularity, the profit of the companies responsible for such titles, primarily Activision and Harmonix, have also seen high ascending trends. Alex Rigopulos, the founder of Harmonix, the company responsible for both the first Guitar Hero game and the recent Rock Band franchise, now comes to talk about how real-life rock stars look at music games and how he met a lot of people while negotiating for their appearance in the games.
“Meeting rock stars comes with the territory,” says Rigopulos. “What they think about our games is all over the map. Sometimes they’re already enthusiastic fans of Harmonix’s games — which is disorienting, and I have to say, “No, wait, sorry, I’m the one who’s attending this meeting in the role of fan boy.” At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes they barely know what we do, or they even have a negative impression of video games in general, and we have to start from square one. Either way, it’s always a trip to engage directly with artists and hear how they think about music games.”
So it seems that, although music games have brought an increase in popularity for the artists who appear in such titles, not every band is very excited about it. We have even witnessed bands like Nickelback say that games are turning kids away from taking up real instruments, which is disproved by some studies.
Hopefully, in the future, all artists will embrace music games and treat them with respect, and as such, we will be able to enjoy our favorite artists in titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.