April 3, 2007
Rock and role-playing
Video game publishers seem intent on rocking your world.
In a clear attempt to one-up Activision’s success with Guitar Hero, Electronic Arts has announced it will launch the Rock Band game on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles this November.
Guitar Hero features a plastic guitar accessory that has buttons in place of frets. Gamers can strum with one hand and play the frets with the other while trying to play an on-screen score accurately.
It has sold over 2m copies and boosted Activision’s results in the last holiday season after it acquired Guitar Hero’s publisher Red Octane.
Guitar Hero’s developer is Harmonix, which is partnering with MTV and EA on the new Rock Band game. Players will be able to choose from drum, bass guitar, lead guitar and microphone peripherals and the music they will be playing along to will feature master recordings rather than cover versions of songs like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird.
The official announcement does not mention any online element to the game but this seems sure to be part of it. This would mirror a trend of musicians collaborating online including contributing different parts of songs to sites such as YouTube.
It also follows on from the success of karaoke and dancing video games. In February, EA bought SingShot Media, an online karaoke website it plans to integrate into a number of its online services.
Rock Band is yet another riff on music in games for EA – it announced last month it was setting up its own real-world record label – Artwerk – and would launch Boogie -a dancing game that would take advantage of the Nintendo Wii’s motion-sensing controller.
