September 4, 2007

Those About to Rock, We Salute You: Harmonix’s Sean Baptiste talks Rock Band
by: Steven Hopper

“If you think that you’re playing a video game when you’re playing Rock Band, we didn’t do our job right.”

When fans heard the news many months ago that Harmonix was being bought by MTV to develop a brand new franchise for them and therefore would no longer be the developer of the popular Guitar Hero franchise, collective gamers everywhere let out a collective sigh. However, when it was revealed that the team would actually be working on a game that could very well trump Guitar Hero in everyway, effectively allowing players to form a cohesive band unit with several different instruments, from vocals to guitars and even drums.

The game plays extremely well and is a lot of fun, even if you’re really sucking it up (share in my embarrassment here). The team elements are handled extremely well also, allowing bandmates to save others who failed and bring them back into the game.

At last weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, GameZone was able to have a sit down with Sean Baptiste, Harmonix’s Manager of Community Development, to talk about the aspirations of the game, what it holds for the gaming community, and what we may see for the future of the rhythm game genre.

As one of the developers of the successful Guitar Hero franchise, what was behind the decision to move on?

Sean: I’m not exactly sure with that level, but Rock Band has always been something that Harmonix has wanted to do. We wanted to make this music game that allows for lots of people and is totally co-operative and awesome like that. I’m not sure what happened on the upper parts, but they’re doing their thing and we’re doing ours.

What have been some of the difficulties in making Rock Band as opposed to the Guitar Hero series?

Sean: As far as our design challenges go, it’s a shift towards how to get all of this stuff in there. One of our big design principles that we have at Harmonix is that if you’re playing well, it has to sound good and doing that with four people on four different instruments all playing together. Having it sound good when they all play good is a huge thing.

We’ve had other ideas on other games where is was kind of a cool idea, but it was impossible to ever make it sound good and it would get cut, or there was no way to fix it in time and we’d have to cut it. That’s our whole thing. If you’re playing well, then you should really feel that you are rocking.

For a game like this, thematically it’s all there, but to make all of the technical stuff come together to really hit it is a huge deal, and it’s difficult to implement. Luckily, we have some really smart people working in code to take all of these aspects and smooth them out so when the person is playing it, they don’t have to think they’re playing a video game. That’s the thing, is that if you think that you’re playing a video game when you’re playing Rock Band, we didn’t do our job right. You should really fell like you’re a rock star.

Can you explain how your relationship with MTV has helped (or hurt) your development process for Rock Band?

Sean: It’s helped a lot. They’re huge, and everybody knows them, all the bands know MTV, and having them by our side as the heavy hitters and getting some of these tracks has been awesome. We’ve been able to get some really cool stuff that we may not have had access to before, and they just have those relationships that you need to have to get those tracks. You can’t just show up to somebody’s house and say, “Uh, can I have your master tracks? That’d be cool.” MTV can do that, going through the proper channels and get some really great stuff.

What can you tell us about some of the community elements that the team is working on for the game?

Sean: What we’re working on now is a website where people have their own profiles. It’s more of an extension of the game and [web producer] Melissa McCauley and I are really working to make it so that it’s not a website that’s just about the game; it’s a whole music experience that’s a place to come and talk about music and talk to us. We’re on there all the time, talking to fans and finding out what people want, what they want to play, what their thoughts are about the game.

We also wanted to make the website an extension of the game, allowing you to bring your persona online. I think it would be the best thing ever if somebody became famous for their avatar, and their fake character in game becomes famous for being a pseudo-rock star through our game, and how that somehow translates through to real-life fame. I mean, that would be the awesomest thing ever [laughs]. We want to facilitate that to happen.

Are you guys familiar with the Guitar Hero fansite ScoreHero?

Sean: We’re real good friends with ScoreHero. Our CEO, Alex, one of the founders of Harmonix, a few months ago donated 2,000 dollars of his own money so that they could get their servers back up. We also sent them a guitar signed by all of Harmonix to auction off on eBay, which the last I checked was up to 710 dollars for just a signed controller. Everyone’s going to feel so famous when I get back [laughs]. We don’t get that feeling a lot, so it’s like “Yeah! They wanted our autographs! That’s so sweet!”

Going along with ScoreHero, are those some of the community elements you’re looking to see for Rock Band?

Sean: Yeah, we really want to encourage that. In no way do we want to take over any of the fansites. We really want to support them as well. We feel that if they want to put in the effort of putting up a site, then that’s awesome in every way. That’s part of my job, too, to make sure that they’re taken care of and we can help them out whenever we can within reason, and that they feel like they’re part of the whole experience. And ScoreHero’s awesome [laughs]. They’re good guys.

What do you anticipate to be the future of rhythm games, not just with Rock Band? What do you see to be the next step?

Sean: Oh God, I don’t even know. What I’m most stoked about is that fact that it wasn’t easy to have rhythm games even ten years ago. Rhythm games were not that prevalent, and were mostly niche. Even with us, when Harmonix started, it was never intended to be a video game company. The entire purpose of Harmonix was to find new way of letting people who wouldn’t otherwise experience what making music felt like, and the feeling you get when you make music. So, originally we did things for the Epcot Center [in Disneyworld] and stuff like that.

However, when Parappa the Rapper came out, we thought “Maybe we should make video games. That would be sweet.” That was kind of the tip-off. This genre hasn’t been around for an exceptionally long amount of time, and the amount of time that it’s actually been popular is really short. It was always a niche thing, but now I can’t go to Thanksgiving without bringing our game over to my grandparents’ house. So, to think that it went from being totally niche from the most hardcore of the hardcore to people who just don’t play video games, it’s just huge. There’s no roof to this thing.

If this genre sticks around, and I think it will because the core of it is so joyful and so awesome and in a lot of ways it’s so less competitive than any other game. Especially with Rock Band in particular, you’re not really competing with other people as much as cooperating with them, and I think that experience will translate really well to so many ideas. I can’t wait to see what’s after this.

It’s going to be a lot of work though. But I’d say the future is really wide open. And I hope that we’re the ones doing it.

Any chance of a sitar peripheral with, like, 80 buttons?

Sean: Oh yeah, we already have it.

You do?

Sean: Yeah, we’ve got, like, eight of ‘em [laughs]. We didn’t even make a game for it; we just chiseled them [laughs]. 

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