Rock Band

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

Fact: singer is the toughest job in Rock Band, Beatles or otherwise. On Expert difficulty, you’re totally screwed unless you’ve spent loads of time tuning your vocal cords. So here at Radar Labs, we developed an alternate strategy to help you nail that elusive 100% score

Rock Band can make anyone feel like a rock star, but feeling and being are separated by millions of dollars, obsessed fans, and a voice that anyone actually wants to hear ever. For each “Rock Band EXPERT 5 StArS!!!  OMG!” video you find on YouTube, you can find another song mangling performance so atrocious that it would make Simon Cowell's man breasts explode with snideness.

Some think they can actually

Would you look at that, a whole new podcast done sprung up unnerneath our feet! If’n we was a bettin’ folk, we’d rightly say this week’s podcast is a durn-tootin’ romp-a-bout filled with tales of lyin’, cheatin’ and some other such nonsense. Then we scoot on to topics akin to Rock Band, Force Unleashed, Mega Man 9 and a whole mess more.

Give ol’ T-Dar a try, ya shan’t regret it!