14 DAY TRIAL // Rock Band and Dance Central developer Harmonix has announced that it plans to make an important announcement at the E3 trade conference, which will take place in the early days of June, presumably announcing a new project linked to its two main series.
Speaking with Industry Gamers, Greg LoPiccolo, who is a vice president working on product development, has said, “We'll have at least one bit of significant news at E3.”
He added, “I think that we see opportunities in motion gaming that we might be uniquely equipped to pursue and so I think we are broadening our scope a little bit in terms of the studio focus to not only encompass music gaming, but also motion gaming, and that may manifest in a lot of different ways.”
Aware of the fact that he might have already revealed too much, the executive refused to go into any detail about what kind of new project Harmonix might be working on.
Harmonix has already confirmed that it is working on a music-based video game for the Nintendo 3DS handheld, which will presumably use the three-dimensional gaming abilities of the new console to somehow enhance the music simulation experience.
There's one other confirmed console launch for 2011, the PlayStation Portable 2 aka the NGP from Sony, and another one rumored, the Wii 2 from Nintendo, so the Harmonix announcement might be linked to one of those projects, using their abilities to expand the reach of the Rock Band concept.
Harmonix might also be prepared to talk about bringing the Dance Central concept, which is limited to the Xbox 360 home console from Microsoft and the Kinect add-on, to other platform, like the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, using actual controllers for the motion tracking.
Harmonix had a life before the music game boom so it might be ready to announce a whole new intellectual property.