Gaming: Devs Recall 'sweating Bullets' At Showing The Beatles Rock Band To...

The Beatles: Rock Band was the single greatest thing to come out of the games industry's plastic instrument craze, an absurdly lavish and beautifully judged tribute to the most important music band in history. It cost me an absolute tonne but I still have an old 360 in the garage somewhere with all the DLC, and outside of the actual music it's probably my favourite Beatles product.

From the game's opening seconds it's obvious this was a massive labour of love for Harmonix, the studio that had kicked-off the whole genre with the original Guitar Hero. Many of those involved in bringing the project to life have now given interviews for The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom, a newly released book by journalist Blake Hester, with an excerpt detailing some of those initial meetings published on Design Room.

The chapter begins with some of the initial enquiries and how the project got started, largely thanks to George Harrison's son Dhani already being a fan of Guitar Hero. Dhani Harrison made the key introduction to Apple Corps, the Beatles' company, and key figures including the surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono.

"With Paul, it was just trying to get him to understand what this experience would be like, you know?" says Harmonix co-founder and CTO Eran Egozy. "And there is this [concern like], 'Wait a minute. Are we going to let people sound bad with our music?' You know, there's concern about, like, how are you treating the music? So if people are playing it and they're screwing it up—is that bad? Like, are we giving people a chance to play Beatles music and make it sound bad? That was a concern."

The parties eventually rationalised that the project was a bit like a Beatles cover band: "You don't really have control over how they're going to sound," says Egozy. "And they're probably going to sound as best as they can, you know?" Happy that players would be doing "their best to sound good on the game", the Beatles' braintrust accepted "the music will sound great."

Then, as Harmonix project leader Greg LoPiccolo recalls, it was time to get started: "It was like a mission from God to do justice to that game."

But The Beatles would retain an element of creative oversight, which meant creative director Josh Randall constantly "flying back-and-forth to Abbey Road, sometimes like every two weeks, and meeting with Sir Paul and Ringo and Yoko and the Harrisons. And the pressure I

Source: PC Gamer