Rock Band: "Not what everyone wants"

Oct 31, 2007

Harmonix and Red Octane once worked together to bring Guitar Hero to the world. But now Red Octane president Kai Huang believes that, while there's room for both its own Guitar Hero brand and Harmonix's new Rock Band, Rock Band's "complex" nature means it won't offer what the "mass market" wants.

"With Guitar Hero, we want to make it as broadly appealing as possible, as market, as casual a game as possible," Huang explains. "With Rock Band [it's] slightly different."

"[Rock Band] will be a very good game, but you need more instruments, more people. I think those things are a little more complex, so perhaps not the mass market, casual game experience that everyone wants," Huang continues, during an interview in the latest issue of Official Xbox Magazine.

And, in case you didn't know exactly how Guitar Hero came about, Huang clears up the matter: "We wanted to do another music game [after In The Groove], another instrument-based game that would appeal to a Western audience. For us [the choice of music]had to be rock and roll. And from there, well, if you're going to make a rock and roll game, and you're thinking about instruments, it has to be a guitar."

"That's how the concept started. We then approached Harmonix and said 'Hey, we'd love to make a guitar game with you guys'. And they said that it was funny, because they'd been thinking of doing a guitar game in the past... And that's how the relationship kicked off."

Now, of course, Activision own Red Octane (and so the Guitar Hero brand), with Neversoft developing Guitar Hero III; while MTV bought Harmonix, who're developing Rock Band for EA. Play nice, guys.