Complete with vocal harmony

Apr 16, 2009 20:41 GMT  ·  By

Guitar Hero: Metallica is out, so the biggest music game that is set to come in 2009 is The Beatles Rock Band title that Harmonix and MTV Games are working on. When it was initially announced, people thought the undertaking was much too big and that a game focused on the most successful band of the XX century was just undoable.

Since then, Harmonix released some bits of information related to the title and even said that the limited edition of the game would cost about 250 dollars, which is a whole lot of money even for a music game that comes complete with fake plastic instruments.

Now, it seems that The Beatles videogame might do something pretty radical, adding the ability for more than one player to join on playing the vocals, according to the latest issue of Game Informer. This basically means that if you get the four people needed for a complete band, you can then get and enable four microphones in order to allow them all to sing along to the tune.

Seeing how hard it is to find even one guy brave enough to tackle the vocal part in Rock Band 2, it might seem foolish on the part of Harmonix to add an option that hardly anyone can use. But, looking at most of the records of The Beatles, it's clear that they used a lot of vocal harmony and that a videogame dedicated to the band needs to include the ability for more than one player to get to sing.

The rumor is supported by the fact that the limited edition version of The Beatles Rock Band game is set to include a microphone stand, which can have little use other than allowing for some of the players to provide vocal backup.

With The Beatles, music games are taking another step towards attaining almost the same level of complexity as real music playing. The only question is “Will players be interested in even greater levels of complexity, which might limit the fun factor of the game?”