Gaming and Culture

(Credit: Beatles: Rock Band)

Beatles lovers will soon be able to feel what it's like to sing and play with the Fab Four in the interactive game The Beatles: Rock Band. But what famous Beatles tunes will be featured on the disc?

Rock Band makers MTV Games and Harmonix revealed 19 more songs Tuesday, bringing the total of known tracks to 44 and leaving the final tune a mystery.

The Beatles: Rock Band lets players sing, strum the guitar or bass, or hit the drums to play with John, Paul, George, and Ringo as they tour the world. Players can join in with the Beatles, starting from their early days in tiny Liverpool clubs to their final performance on the rooftop at their Apple recording studio.

The game's origins stem from a conversation between Dhani Harrison, son of the late George Harrison, and MTV President Van Toffler. Harrison eventually took the idea to the Beatles' Apple Corps and also sold the concept to Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono.

Though part of the Rock Band franchise, the Beatles game was designed from the ground up with new graphics, menus, and interfaces.

Beatles: Rock Band is set to hit stores on September 9 for Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. The software alone sells for $59.99. The Premium bundle sells for $249.99 and comes with all the Rock Band equipment, including Beatles-branded drums, microphone, and mic stand.

The 44 songs in the game so far are:
A Hard Day's Night
And Your Bird Can Sing
Back In The U.S.S.R.
Birthday
Boys
Can't Buy Me Love
Come Together
Day Tripper
Dear Prudence
Dig A Pony
Do You Want To Know A Secret
Don't Let Me Down
Drive My Car
Eight Days A Week
Get Back
Getting Better
Good Morning Good Morning
Hello Goodbye
Helter Skelter
Here Comes The Sun
Hey Bulldog
I Am The Walrus
I Feel Fine
I Me Mine
I Saw Her Standing There
I Wanna Be Your Man
I Want to Hold Your Hand
I Want You (She's So Heavy)
I'm Looking Through You
I've Got A Feeling
If I Needed Someone
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Octopus's Garden
Paperback Writer
Revolution
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Something
Taxman
Ticket To Ride
Twist And Shout
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
With a Little Help from My Friends
Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows
Yellow Submarine

In the newest version of the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero 5, as many as four players can all play guitar at the same time, instead of just two. Further, any combination of instruments is now possible.

(Credit: Activision Blizzard)

SAN FRANCISCO--The first couple of weeks of September are going to be a banner time for music video games. On September 9 (09/09/09), the much-anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band will hit store shelves, just eight days after Guitar Hero 5 gets its chance to rock living rooms everywhere.

With the Beatles game, it's easy to imagine long lines and huge sales figures. After all, this will be the first time that any of the recent slew of music-oriented video games will feature any Beatles songs, let alone dozens of them.

But with Guitar Hero 5 (see video below)--has so much time gone by already that there could even be five Guitar Hero releases?--one has to work just a little bit harder to envision the big bucks that its publisher, Activision Blizzard, surely is hoping to bring in.

Still, the guys at Neversoft, the game's developer, have proven time and again that they know what they're doing. The Guitar Hero franchise has produced hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and created a dynamic in which people everywhere are now comfortable picking up and jamming away on a guitar, albeit a plastic one with buttons instead of strings.

And with that in mind, one has to give the Neversoft team the benefit of the doubt for their new game, which will be released for all the major video game platforms.

On Thursday, I stopped in at a Guitar Hero press event here and had the chance to speak with two of the executives most responsible for the new game: Brian Bright, the project director at Neversoft for Guitar Hero 5, and Tim Riley, who oversees the Guitar Hero franchise's music licensing.

Among the big-name rock stars who appear in Guitar Hero 5 as characters is Carlos Santana.

(Credit: Activision Blizzard)

One of the things I was most interested in was the rationale for a new Guitar Hero game. To be sure, game companies like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two have a mandate to generate massive revenues, and so franchises like Guitar Hero are tried and true in that regard. But in spite of that, each new edition of a franchise game has to have something significant to offer to entice enough customers to earn its keep.

To hear Bright tell it, the best rationale for Guitar Hero--besides its 85 new songs by 83 artists--is its "Party Play" mode in which players can jump in or out of songs any time they please, all with the click of a single button.

What that means, Bright added, is that Guitar Hero 5 will offer a potentially broad new audience an entirely new level of "accessibility," in particular because in the previous versions, many people playing for the first time would have found themselves needing a little hand-holding to get started. Now, he said, that's no longer the case, and players new and old will be able to easily and quickly go right into rocking out.

Another important Guitar Hero 5 innovation, Bright said, is an "any instrument" selection that will, for the first time, allow more than two people to play guitar at the same time rather than someone in a foursome having to play drums and someone having to sing. And even if there isn't a mad rush to grab a guitar, this features means that any combination of instruments is, for the first time, possible, whether a group is playing cooperatively or competitively.

Downloadable content
Given that many players of the game's previous iteration--Guitar Hero: World Tour--likely paid to download songs, Activision is making it possible to port most of those songs to Guitar Hero 5. The company said 152 of the 158 downloadable songs from the earlier game will be compatible with the new one, though users will have to pay a "nominal re-licensing fee," the amount of which the company hasn't publicly spelled out yet.

Among the innovations in Guitar Hero 5 is the ability for Xbox players to use their Xbox Live avatars.

(Credit: Activision Blizzard)

And that means that with the 85 songs Guitar Hero 5 comes with, plus new downloadable songs, the new game's players can have set lists of potentially hundreds of songs, Bright said.

I wanted to know a little bit more about how Activision persuades musicians to allow their songs to be included in Guitar Hero, especially after learning how the Beatles were won over for the forthcoming Rock Band game.

Riley, the publisher's music licensing specialist, said that as the Guitar Hero franchise becomes better-known, he and his team have an easier time of it. In part, that's because "the larger the game gets, the more known it gets within the (music) industry (and) with the artists themselves."

And that means that Riley and his team have now had the chance to get musicians like Arctic Monkeys and Elliott Smith--whom they've never worked with before--to contribute songs to the game. Indeed, he said Guitar Hero 5 features songs from nearly 20 artists who have never allowed their music to be in a video game before.

Of course, it doesn't happen overnight. In the case of Arctic Monkeys, Riley explained, it took multiple visits with the band to show them demos and explain what the Guitar Hero franchise is all about to get permission.

One big factor, Riley added, was being able to assure artists that their music is "safe" in Guitar Hero, meaning that users won't be able to easily pirate the songs from the game.

At the same time, he explained that for a lot of musicians, games like this are now seen as an attractive way to get their music in front of large audiences, particularly because the record industry is becoming more and more notorious for doing a poor job of helping distribute new music.

"Just by having a song in the game," Riley said, "kids become familiar with the song, or the artist, and will go out and buy (it) or go out and purchase more music from that artist."

The appearance by Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr at the Microsoft Xbox E3 press briefing on Monday caught the world by surprise, and turned into a perfect way to formally introduce 'Beatles: Rock Band.'

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

LOS ANGELES--If you were among the thousands of people at Microsoft's E3 press briefing on Monday, it's a pretty sure bet that the appearance on-stage there of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Yoko Ono was one of the most unexpected things imaginable.

But if you think about it, the very existence of the game that led to their showing up during the Xbox press briefing, Harmonix and MTV Games' "Beatles: Rock Band," is even more surprising. After all, the Beatles have, over the years, maintained a stranglehold over control of their music. For example the Beatles are still the holy grail that iTunes has not yet been able to corral.

The game will be released on September 9 (09.09.09) on the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, and the Wii.

So how did the game come to pass?

Since the two remaining Beatles weren't able to come to the phone for this article, I decided to stop by the Harmonix booth at E3 and ask the game's lead designer, Chris Foster, for the skinny behind what has got to be one of the biggest coups in video gaming history.

Foster said the story begins a couple of years ago, when MTV President Van Toffler ran into Dhani Harrison, son of the late Beatles guitarist George Harrison, in some random social setting.

"It was just sort of through happenstance," Foster said. "Dhani was a big 'Rock Band' fan, and there was this sort of, 'Wouldn't it be nice if...but it'll never happen.'"

Beatles RockBand rocks E3

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But being a "Rock Band" fan, Dhani Harrison took his idea to Harmonix CEO and co-founder Alex Rigopulos and began a conversation about what a Beatles version of "Rock Band" could be. Foster said that the idea seemed like a huge challenge, but, deciding to pursue it, Harrison began evangelizing the idea to Apple Corps, the Beatles' U.K. publisher, and its shareholders, particularly McCartney, Starr, and Ono.

"So then, from that point, it was just sort of getting them familiar with ('Rock Band')," Foster said, "and getting them understanding what the game could be like."

By now, the discussions were far enough along that Harmonix put together a simple demo of the kind of music and conceptual art that could be used in the game, Foster said.

And, amazingly, inexplicably, it worked.

Creative partners
"At that point," Foster recalled, things "moved to (the Beatles) being creative partners" in the project. One of the most vital things to happen at that point was the introduction of music producer Giles Martin to the "Rock Band" project. Martin, the son of the Beatles' original producer, George Martin, helped Cirque du Soleil put together its Beatles show, "Love."

That was crucial, Foster said, because Martin was able to help solve one of the most important problems any Beatles "Rock Band" game would have, adding multitrack capabilities.

"We needed multitrack," Foster said, "because in 'Rock Band,' (players) need to get (individual) feedback about whether they're playing well or not. So with all those pieces in place, we were able to do a demo of what the music (in the game) would be like."

As things progressed, the developers knew that to make the game feel authentic, they'd have to offer players real Beatles venues to play in. So they worked to add famous Beatles locations like Liverpool's famous Cavern Club, the Ed Sullivan theater, Shea Stadium, the Budokan in Tokyo, and the rooftop at Apple Corps.

Then, Foster said, the development team came up with the idea for adding psychedelic dreamscape visions to the game. The game's trailer (see below) does a great job of demonstrating that element, as do some of the best pieces of Cirque du Soleil's "Love."

'We respected them and their music'
To Foster, the chief reason that the improbable game ever came together at all is that "they liked that we respected them and respected their music. I don't want to put words in their mouths, but what was important to us was that we respected them."

That's one reason that the development team made sure to include venues where the Beatles had actually played famous shows. "We weren't shoving them into live venues that didn't make sense," he said.

Another important factor was the developers' adding the ability to include vocal harmonies as part of game play.

"Their music is so much about harmonies," he said. Adding vocal harmonies was something that had never been done in "Rock Band" before, but it was considered vital to accurately representing the Beatles' music in the game.

And that also presented the developers with a hurdle they had to clear.

"The challenge (was) making it so vocal harmonies were fun and challenging, but really accessible, and finding a way to put that in the game, without overwhelming" players, Foster said. "(We didn't want to make them) feel like they failed to sing like the Beatles."

Foster acknowledged that contracting with the Beatles was a huge win for Harmonix, especially when it's been clear for some time that "lots of people were thinking about doing it."

The game is already being anxiously awaited by players, developers, and industry executives alike, and for both game play and business reasons.

"Clearly, (the Beatles) saw an opportunity of reintroducing their music to the current music-loving consumer and it makes perfect sense for them as they try and manage their brand," said Nintendo President and COO Reggie Fils-Aime. "So I think it makes a lot of sense and, candidly, what the music industry is finding is that the games industry is a great way to drive music sales."

And for Microsoft, having McCartney, Starr, and Ono take the stage at the Xbox press briefing at the University of Southern California's Galen Center was a gigantic victory. A Microsoft spokesperson said that the appearance came about because the company is always talking to its publisher partners, including, in this case, MTV Games. And that as "Beatles: Rock Band" progressed, the Beatles decided that the Xbox press briefing would be a very appropriate place to announce the game.

Note to Sony and Nintendo: Work harder at finessing those publisher partner contacts, and next time, maybe the stars will pick your E3 briefing.

To Foster, a big part of what makes the game seem authentic was that the designers concentrated on "telling the Beatles' story" but still finding a way to do so in the context of a "Rock Band" game that fans of both the band and the game franchise would appreciate and recognize. And also because the game will appeal to even the youngest Beatles fans.

He explained that the Harmonix team liked the idea of bringing new, younger audiences to the Beatles for the first time. But reality soon disabused them of that notion.

"The (Beatles') music is like the air we breathe," Foster said, "and it catches every generation...It's sort of presumptuous to think you can introduce the Beatles to anyone."