http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/08/09/a_fab_four_reunion_for_a_new_generation/
Cambridge firm's video game chronicling Beatles' career nears its big debut
By Joan Anderman
August 9, 2009
Earlier this year Yoko Ono made a quiet trip to town to visit a small
Central Square building. Arriving at the Cambridge offices of
Harmonix, a video game development company, she sat down in the Star
Chamber, where there's a sofa, a giant TV, and scattered game
controllers that look like musical instruments. When animated footage
of the Beatles appeared on the screen, Ono zeroed in on her late
husband, John Lennon.
"That's not John,'' she told Eran Egozy, one of Harmonix's
cofounders. "He wouldn't have moved that way. That is not John's
spirit.'' Egozy thanked Ono - and his lucky stars.
"We know what John looked like, but not what he moved like,'' Egozy
says. "Having Yoko and the other shareholders involved made the game
so much better. It raised the bar.''
Those "shareholders'' are Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia
Harrison - George's widow - and Ono, and "the game'' is The Beatles:
Rock Band. In a pop-culture coup, Harmonix - founded in 1995 by Egozy
and fellow MIT grad Alex Rigopulos and best known for developing the
popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band series - landed the rights to
develop an experiential music video game chronicling the Fab Four's
career. When it's released Sept. 9, the same day digitally remastered
versions of all the Beatles studio albums hit the marketplace, it
will be more than a big day in the Beatles' cosmos, but a potential
watershed for the $21 billion video game industry.
Since the Beatles broke up nearly four decades ago, Apple Corps, the
corporation that oversees all things Beatles, has been a tight-fisted
gatekeeper of the band's music and legacy, maximizing value by
creating scarcity. Beatles songs are still not available for digital
download at iTunes or any other online music service, and the
remasters, a routine event for other artists, are arriving 22 years
after the Beatles discography first came out on CD.
While the members of the Beatles camp may not be avid gamers, they
are savvy navigators of culture and commerce. With music sales in a
freefall and radio's clout on the wane, the vibrant video game
industry is a prime source of exposure.
"It's one of the ways your music gets listened to these days,'' says
McCartney, "and I'm never going to be snobby enough to say, 'I don't
want it to be listened to unless it's on a vinyl record player.'
That's nonsense, because it keeps changing.''
With the Beatles on board, Harmonix and Rock Band (which has earned
more than $1 billion in sales since Rock Band's 2007 release) are
poised to reach not just the gaming industry's core audience of young
men, but the group's vast, generations-spanning fan base.
"It wasn't 'video games, bah!' They got the potential almost from the
first meeting,'' said Harmonix cofounder and CEO Alex Rigopulos. "The
flip side is it was clear they were going to hold us to a very high
standard. [The game] had to honor the history and art of this band.
It had to be a significant new offering from their catalog.''
Authenticity was the guiding principle throughout the process, a
challenge that led to breakthroughs both technical - this is the
first Rock Band game to incorporate vocal harmonies, an integral part
of the Beatles sound - and conceptual, in the form of what Harmonix
calls the joy filter.
"The band always looked joyful when they were playing,'' says the
game's lead designer, Chris Foster.
"To get that kind of life into the visuals, those moments when
they're looking at each other and smiling, we had to make new rules.''
Even the game's sound effects come from Beatles source material -
from the cheering crowds at Shea Stadium (taken from recordings of
that 1965 concert) to button sounds (a George guitar "kerrang,'' for
instance) to the studio chatter you hear as a new game level loads
(actual conversations were lifted from the master tapes).
Apple Corps threw open the doors to its archives, where designers
chose rare photos and film footage that players unlock as they reach
different thresholds. That's where McCartney, who took to reading and
correcting the essays out loud over grilled cheese sandwiches in the
Abbey Road lounge, revealed his enthusiasm for laboring over
historical details.
Like its Rock Band predecessors, the Beatles edition allows players
to perform in a virtual band, singing and playing in time with
scrolling musical notes that correspond to buttons on replicas of
guitars, basses, and drums. But the chance to bring the Beatles'
artistry to virtual life pushed the folks at Harmonix to up the ante
for their own artistry. And fast.
"Most of the time with games, making things look cool happens at the
very end,'' says Foster, who like many of his 300 Harmonix colleagues
plays guitar in a local band. "But we had to get things looking right
from the very beginning so that it would be demonstrable to the shareholders.''
The game will sell for $59.99, and the premium bundle, which includes
game software, a controller modeled after McCartney's Hofner bass, a
Beatles-branded drum kit, and a microphone with a stand, for $249.99.
In addition to the 45 songs in the game, the full "Abbey Road'' album
and "All You Need is Love'' will be available for download shortly
after the game's launch.
Apple Corps insisted early on that a game would have to span the
Beatles' entire recorded career, from 1963 to 1970, which presented
two fundamental problems. The Beatles' early songs were not recorded
on multiple tracks, which Rock Band requires for interactive game
play. Moreover, the band stopped touring in 1966, and the Rock Band
games are performance-based, with the activity set on stages in
nightclubs and stadiums. How would the game present songs from the
latter half of the catalog?
Enter Giles Martin, son of the Beatles' legendary producer George
Martin, to solve the first problem. Martin the younger, himself a
producer, used cutting-edge audio forensics software on the early
recordings to filter out each instrument's frequencies and rebuild
them on separate tracks.
The work was painstaking, executed over many months, but his success
was critical to moving forward with the video game.
The second dilemma was resolved through a series of brainstorming
sessions between Harmonix and Apple Corps, when the creative team
came up with the idea for dreamscapes. In the game, songs from the
post-"Revolver'' period begin in studio two at Abbey Road; after
several bars the walls fade way and the Beatles are transported to
imaginary environments that mirror the lyrics or the vibe of the
song. Songs from the first part of the Beatles' career are played in
landmark historical settings - Liverpool's Cavern Club, the Ed
Sullivan Theater, Shea Stadium, Japan's Budokan Hall, and the roof of
Apple Records.
Once the scope and content of the game was decided and the game
shifted into serious development mode the shareholders became active
collaborators. Reps for Harmonix, owned since 2006 by MTV, made
regular trips to London to demo the game and gather feedback. Olivia
Harrison felt that the early storyboards for "Something,'' which was
originally Indian-themed, didn't reflect the meaning of George's
song, and encouraged a redesigned dreamscape that connected the
curves of a woman and the curves of a guitar. Ringo took one look at
his avatar and noted that his drumsticks never flew that high in the air.
Despite a blockbuster rollout - Paul and Ringo appeared at this
year's Electronic Entertainment Expo to promote the game and Paul
showed snippets of the game at his Fenway Park concert last week -
some experts are skeptical about the game's prospects.
"I don't believe there's a teenager in the US who cares about The
Beatles: Rock Band,'' says Joe Spiegel, a video-game industry analyst
at Dalek Capital Management in New York. "And I don't think this is
the economic environment to go after new gamers.''
But at the Gamestop in Dorchester, clerks have been taking
reservations at a rate of around 50 a week.
"The kids,'' says 18-year-old Kanaa Malcolm, a store manager, "are
really excited.''
Five weeks before the game's launch, she said, the store had more
than 300 reservations on file - from preteens to boomers.
--
Sarah Rodman of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Joan
Anderman can be reached at anderman@globe.com
.
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