14 DAY TRIAL // The music game genre has really seen a very big ascending trend lately, largely due to the fact that the two major franchises have launched new iterations. Guitar Hero received its World Tour title and Rock Band saw its sequel appear in the middle of September.
These music games are well known to almost any type of gamer, be it casual or hardcore, especially because you don't need a regular Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 controller, but a plastic imitation of a real life instrument. Players need to plug guitars, drums or microphones, all made of plastic, into their consoles, which tends to bring more realism to the whole music gaming experience.
The studio behind the Rock Band franchise, Harmonix, has recently talked about the process of developing a new peripheral for a music game. Through the voice of the lead designer of the game, Dan Teasdale, the company stated that all of its prototype instruments would undergo a lot of testing because Harmonix didn't want to deliver faulty peripherals to the customers.
"You don't really realise until you do it, but it's incredibly hard making plastic instruments, even for people who have been doing it for years. Every time you make a new thing you don't know how it's going to break or fall apart until you get it out there. One of the things I'm really happy about with the Rock Band 2 instruments is that we've learned a lot from making Rock Band one drums and Rock Band one guitars. It's one of the cool things of having hardware and software teams in the same house is that we can work on this stuff together, and not just getting hardware from another company and trying to get it to work with our game."
A very interesting statement that just goes to prove that, although some people might take the plastic instruments for granted, a lot of hard work has been put into them in order to get them to work under any circumstance and in the hands of almost any type of user.