14 DAY TRIAL // The music game genre has seen a massive increase in popularity although it has been around for quite some time. It was only until titles like Guitar Hero or Rock Band appeared that people began to see the fun side in playing plastic instruments and envisioning themselves on the stages of the biggest concert halls on Earth.
One of the companies that had the biggest impact on this genre is, without a doubt, Harmonix, the one that worked on the original Guitar Hero and is now backing up the Rock Band franchise. The studio wasn't at its first encounter with music games, as it was also responsible for Amplitude, a game that was, in some ways, ahead of its time, proposing a similar manner of gameplay as most of the titles today.
The game, which was released in 2003, is now under the property of Sony, but it seems that we might expect a sequel sometime in the near future. Alex Rigopulos, the founder of Harmonix, talked with Arstechnica about a new Amplitude game, saying that there was a very strong movement in the studio to create another game and that Sony had realized that a sequel might bring a lot of profit in terms of sales and a big dose of popularity for the PlayStation 3.
“That game is still close to my heart. I love it. I'd love to do a sequel to Amplitude, actually. It's an issue of prioritization. It's challenging enough to keep the Rock Band train on the tracks. For us, that lingering question of "what are we going to do about Amplitude" is still very much out there. I would love to come back and do it right for the PlayStation 3, for example. I think [Sony] recognizes that the environment for that game is different now than it was six years ago when it was first released. I'd love to see us come back to it at some point.”
So there you have it music fans, it seems that an Amplitude sequel might appear in the future. Let's hope that Sony and Harmonix will reach some kind of agreement and that we will all be able to rock out in a new music game. Until then, we will look forward to the Beatles game that the studio currently has in development.