The Beatles: Rock Band painstakingly re-creates live gigs—like the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.
On a brisk summer evening in Los Angeles, a swarm of geeks fill the University of Southern California's Galen Center for an exclusive—and somewhat surreal—event. It's the day before E3 2009—the conference where the gaming industry previews its most high-profile releases of the coming year. The eager attendees are about to witness an impossible feat: the Beatles, reunited. This magical mystery moment comes courtesy of MTV, here to unveil its gaming division's most ambitious and expensive launch in recent history: The Beatles: Rock Band.
On a giant stage, the iconic opening chord of "Hard Day's Night" blasts from the speakers, and on a billboard-sized screen, the Fab Four, or rather, their youthful, mop-topped, computer-generated avatars, are jamming like it's 1964. The attendees, nearly all born well after John Lennon died, are screaming and clapping like schoolgirls, clearly in the throes of Beatlemania.
At the end of the video presentation, the two surviving flesh-and-blood band members, Ringo Starr, 69, and Paul McCartney, 67, take the stage for a surprise appearance. Standing side by side, the pair look slightly befuddled by the moment. For these been-there, done-that rockers, flogging a videogame is a first. "We love the game, it's fantastic," McCartney says. "Who would've ever thought we'd end up as androids?" No one, perhaps, except a few ambitious executives at MTV.
Game|Life talks to the creative director on The Beatles: Rock Band about new features. For more, visit wired.com/video.
A few days after he and his family arrived, Toffler was invited to lunch by Planet Hollywood founder Robert Earl and ended up sitting next to George Harrison's 31-year-old son, Dhani. Harrison mentioned being exhausted from a late-night bout of Guitar Hero. When Toffler told him about the MTV purchase of Harmonix, Harrison's face lit up: "You know what would be cool. If you made a game that featured the whole band."
Toffler was shocked. Harrison had no way of knowing it, but Harmonix was toiling away on Rock Band, which was building on that very idea. Toffler's wheels began spinning. It seemed too insane to contemplate, but what if MTV could get the Beatles on the new game? It would give MTV an advantage over Activision; Rock Band could blow Guitar Hero off the stage.
Toffler returned to MTV's New York offices eager to pursue the prospect. He set up a meeting between Harrison and Alex Rigopulos, cofounder and CEO of Harmonix. When Rigopulos arrived at Harrison's home in Venice, California, he was elated to shake hands with the son of rock royalty and anxious about pitching the outrageous scheme. "Wouldn't it be incredible to make a Beatles game?" Rigopulos asked. To his surprise, Harrison eagerly agreed.
Soon, Harrison began lobbying his mother, Olivia, and the other Apple Corps shareholders: McCartney, Starr, and Yoko Ono. His enthusiasm was contagious: In summer 2006, Rigopulos and Paul DeGooyer, senior VP of MTV's game division, flew to LA to present a Rock Band prototype to Olivia Harrison and Starr, who loved the game. DeGooyer did a repeat performance for Ono's son Sean Lennon.
Rigopulos and DeGooyer still had to meet with McCartney—a task not unlike scoring a sit-down with the Pope. "You don't schedule a meeting with Paul," Rigopulos says, laughing. "You just drop everything and come when he has time for you." In August 2007, the pair got the call. They flew to London to meet with McCartney at EMI's famous Abbey Road Studios. DeGooyer and Rigopulos strapped on their plastic instruments and kicked out the jams. McCartney was friendly and listened closely to their pitch. "We were relieved," Rigopulos recalls. "He seemed genuinely interested." Still, McCartney remained noncommittal.
Upon their return to New York, the duo discovered why: Apple Corps was interested in a Beatles version of Rock Band only if it used songs spanning their entire career, a demand that posed considerable—perhaps insurmountable—technical challenges. "They may have thought we would never come back," Rigopulos says. "They thought it was a polite way of saying thanks but no thanks."
Determined, Harmonix pushed forward, offering to craft a sample demo as a means of clinching the deal. To produce a song for Rock Band, however, Harmonix requires access to an original multitrack recording, in which individual instruments are put down on separate channels. But in the early '60s, when the Beatles were cutting classics like "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the band recorded multiple instrumental parts on a single track. Isolating McCartney's bass from Harrison's guitar was no easy feat. Further complicating matters, Apple Corps had given the team only hissing, low-bitrate audio files, which required extra time and care.
But they did get a little help from a friend. Jeff Jones, CEO of Apple Corps, suggested they turn to Giles Martin, the son of longtime Beatles producer George Martin, for help. Martin had just completed remixing a series of Beatles tracks for the 2006 album Love (featured in a popular Cirque du Soleil show) and was intimately familiar with the band's master tapes. "The stars just aligned," DeGooyer recalls. "It turned out Giles wasn't booked at that time, and he had the trust and confidence of the Beatles."
Martin had discovered a way to isolate the individual instruments and voices using software developed by Cedar, a company based in Cambridge, England. Originally created for audio forensics, the software allowed Martin and the Harmonix team to zero in on the exact frequencies of McCartney's vocals, for instance, and filter out the rest. After weeks in Abbey Road Studios, they disassembled five songs—enough to make the demo.
Meanwhile, the first version of Rock Band was released in late 2007, quickly becoming a hit. In a savvy move, MTV made Rock Band as much a sales platform as a videogame, releasing 6 to 10 tracks a week that could be downloaded for a few bucks a pop. David Bowie, Radiohead, Metallica, and the Clash signed on. While overall sales of the game disc lagged behind Guitar Hero's, sales of downloadable tracks now outpace those offered by Activision.
In February 2008, Rigopulos, Martin, and DeGooyer presented their five-song game demo to the Harrisons, Ono, and Starr. They got the thumbs-up. Next was McCartney. After they played the demo for him in his London office, McCartney gave them a sprig of lavender in a glassine envelope as a parting gift.
Did they have a deal? Was that McCartney's idea of a handshake? DeGooyer and Rigopulos returned to the US and waited. Not long after, they got McCartney's blessing. The Harmonix team had the band; now they needed the rock.
Licensing music for games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a fairly complicated procedure. Gamemakers pay a chunk of cash upfront to several parties to license both the master recording and the publishing rights to the underlying song. Licensing the Beatles, however, is trickier. The recording rights belong to the band's longtime label, EMI. Most of the publishing rights, on the other hand, are held by Sony/ATV (a joint venture with the late Michael Jackson). Complicating matters even further, additional publishing rights for certain tunes are held by Harrissongs, an independent entity set up by George Harrison, as well as by Starr's publishing company, Startling Music.
And that's just behind the music. In order to develop the game's digital doubles, MTV had to license the artists' likenesses from Apple Corps, which meant appealing to the Beatles and their descendants—famous for conflicting views on how to manage the Beatles brand—to reach an agreement. On top of that, the company had to obtain separate rights for any materials it wanted to use for the game's marketing.
After resolving the legal aspects, reviewing the demos, and considering a late-breaking offer from rival company Activision, the Beatles officially teamed up with MTV. On October 30, 2008—almost two years after the first meeting on the beach—MTV and Apple Corps issued a statement that the Beatles were coming to Rock Band. The announcement was met with disbelief and envy from the music industry and game companies alike.
With the deal complete, Harmonix could finally bring all its resources to bear on the project itself. The September 9 release was less than a year away, and although Martin and Rigopulos had figured out how to marry the Beatles' music to the Rock Band format, the developers still had a long way to go. The original Rock Band let players assume the role of a generic rocker and gradually gain experience and a bigger repertoire, thus accessing more fans, cooler clothes, bigger venues, a larger entourage, and all the other accoutrements of rock-and-roll stardom. "Right away, we realized this wouldn't work for the Beatles," Rigopulos says. "They had all that stuff—fans, money, stardom—almost from the beginning."
All Together Now
The Beatles gave Harmonix unprecedented access and materials for their own Rock Band—with Paul McCartney as fact-checker!—and it shows. Sure, it's still based on the note-matching rhythm gameplay that we all know and love, but it's jam-packed with bonus perks and cool features for button-shredding pros and Beatles-loving newbies alike. — Chris Kohler
Fab Four Instruments The $250 deluxe version includes plastic takes on Paul's Hofner bass guitar and Ringo's Ludwig drums. Add George's Gretsch Duo Jet and John's Rickenbacker for $100 apiece.
Three-Part Harmonies Arguably the splashiest feature, this is the first time Rock Band allows players to perform multiple vocals for extra points, which comes in handy for tunes like "Love Me Do."
Rare Recordings Unlock a treasure trove of recordings, including a Christmas-themed 7-inch originally recorded in 1963 for fan-club members and filled with holiday greetings and band banter.
Original Live Audio Harmonix not only used the recordings from live performances, it also pulled the ambient sound. Killing it at the Cavern Club? You're winning over real Beatles fans.
Easy Mode Rookies and seasoned pros can finally share the stage—and never bomb a gig. Harmonix created a foolproof Easy mode. Even if you suck, you don't get booed off the stage.
Musical Authenticity Know how "Sgt. Pepper" goes right into "With a Little Help From My Friends"? It's that way in the game, too. Other songs are presented as seamless medleys. Thank God for the pause button.
Harmonix had to re-create the most mythologized narrative in music history and adapt it to the rather inflexible formula of the videogame. And the company would need to do it without blaspheming the Beatles and offending the fans most likely to plunk down $250 for the game and specially designed plastic drums, bass, and guitar.
Eventually, Harmonix and Apple Corps agreed that the game should reflect the two distinct stages of the Beatles' career: the first half, when they were a live act, and the later, more introverted, psychedelic period, when the band holed up in Abbey Road Studios and produced mind-blowing works like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The first 25 songs are played in painstakingly reproduced settings of the band's most iconic performances—Liverpool's Cavern Club, The Ed Sullivan Show, the infamous Budokan arena in Japan, and New York's Shea Stadium, the site of the first stop on their only US tour, in 1965. "In the Ed Sullivan chapter, we actually quote from the original camera work," Rigopulos says. The final 20 songs of the game, however, take place in what Harmonix calls dreamscapes, confections inspired by imagery the Beatles popularized in albums like Sgt. Pepper's and the movie Magical Mystery Tour.
By spring, the Harmonix crew had completed a rough build of the entire game. Yoko Ono, whose involvement up to then had been minimal, decided to fly to Boston to provide her own distinct brand of input. "She gave the designers hell," DeGooyer says. "She's an artist," Rigopulos adds, "so she was very concerned with the look of the game. She really held our feet to the fire." Ono made specific suggestions, like proposing that the game's final scene—the Beatles' infamous rooftop concert on the Apple Corps building in Knightsbridge—look windier. Her criticism sent Harmonix scurrying to improve the graphics. At that point, the E3 conference and the game's debut was just three months away. "We were like, oh, gee. Thanks," Rigopulos says. "It would have been nice to know that six months ago, but yes, thank you very much."
Several hours after the game's Galen Center preview, the Harmonix crew hosted a VIP party at the Standard hotel. As the sun set, gaming journalists and geeky celebrities like Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse took turns playing John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
The game was a huge success at E3 and has been getting unanimously rave advance reviews ever since—with good reason. Lovingly crafted and thoughtfully produced, The Beatles: Rock Band features three-part harmonies, with previously unseen video footage, rare photographs, and a dense Beatles biography. In other words, it's more than a game; it's like a quantum leap into the Fab Four universe.
None of this guarantees commercial success, of course. It's not an auspicious time to be releasing an expensive, blockbuster videogame. Game sales are not recession-proof, and projections for the holiday season—typically when half of the year's total games are sold—are already grim. Worse, some wonder whether the armchair rock-star craze has already peaked. "Anyone who wants a plastic guitar in their living room already has one," says Joe Spiegel, a partner at videogame investment firm Dalek Capital Management. Just as anyone who wants a Beatles tune on their iPod already has one.
Nevertheless, Toffler, DeGooyer, and the rest of team are optimistic. After all, they've already done the impossible. They've reunited the Beatles. The magical mystery tour is on again.
Contributing editor Jeff Howe (jeff_howe@wired.com) is the author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.
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