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The Beatles: Rock Band might have been the peak of the plastic instrument boom – a lavish passion project built in tribute to arguably the most influential rock and roll group of all time. The developers at Harmonix were serious about getting it right, and that meant enduring meetings with Yoko Ono where she'd tell them just how much their in-development depiction of John Lennon sucked.
"I would have meetings where it's like, 'OK, Yoko, here is our depiction of your dead husband singing this super impassioned song ... What do you think?'" studio creative director Josh Randall recalls as part of The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom, a new book by journalist Blake Hester. An excerpt from that book, in part running down Harmonix's experience working with Ono, was recently published by Design Room.
Ono's first reaction to seeing Lennon's digital counterpart was not a positive one. In fact, "she hates it," according to CTO Eran Egozy. "She's like, 'That looks stupid. He doesn't act like that.'"
"The thing is, she was totally right," Randall admits. "I don't know how this happened – I mean, I know how it happens, because videogames are hard. John was less developed by the time Yoko came to visit us, compared to some of the other band members. He looked like a mopey shoe-gazer guy. He was like this, looking down at the ground. We hadn't figured out how to depict his personality. And so in this meeting, she's like, 'No, he was a tough guy. He could be mean. Like, that's not him. Who is this guy?'"
"She was holding the development team to a very high standard with respect to how John was represented in the game – as she should have," CEO Alex Rigopulos says. "She was a tough customer – as she should have been."
Rigopulos adds that the artists and animators on the project were "sweating bullets having to justify the work to Yoko. But she was right! Her criticisms were spot on." He and many of the devs say they were grateful for the level of scrutiny they got on the game, because given the band's stature, they wanted to nail it on every level.
So how did they address Ono's criticisms? By scrutinizing some footage from the height of Beatlemania – a recording of the group's legendary 1965 performance at Shea Stadium in New York City.
"I put on footage of Shea Stadium," Randall says, "and immediately there's John Lennon standing at the front of the stage looking down his nose at everyone, like balls out rock and roll God not giving a fuck. We saw that, and me and our animation director just had this mind meld. We looked at each other and Chris, the animation director, clicked on the back of John's spine [and lifted him up a bit]. And she's like, 'That's John. There he is.'"
