In One and One, Game|Life asks a member of the gaming industry two questions: one about gaming, and one about something completely random.
Alex Rigopulos is CEO of Harmonix, a company devoted to combining the thrill of games with a passion for music. Previous Harmonix titles include Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, and Guitar Hero II. The company's most recent game is Rock Band.
Games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are being crediting with expanding the gaming audience to more casual players, but is that really what's happening, or is it just that the existing core audience, for once, has a game on which they can virtually all agree?
Rigopulos: Music games are popular among core gamers, but they really are expanding the audience as well. People at Harmonix see this happening directly among our own families and friends, and we also continually receive fan emails that say some variant of "Hi Harmonix, I just wanted to tell you, I've never even played games before, but I recently tried Rock Band at a party, and now I'm totally hooked. I went out and bought a PS2 just to play this game! And now even my 56-year-old mother can't stop playing."
I believe it's because these games are all about connecting people with their music in a new way, so the appeal of the games is approximately as broad as the appeal of the music itself.
Would you rather have to go through an entire workday naked or be the only one in the company who bathes for an entire month? (No fair copping out and saying you'd work from home, either.)
Rigopulos: Definitely the latter. If I were to come to the office naked, my spectacularly well-toned physique would be a distraction to all of my co-workers. This would doubtless cause a slump in office productivity, which, as a CEO, I absolutely could not condone.
