Seeing a Mass Effect: Andromeda recruit jamming on a bass guitar shaped like the Normandy, with a gas-masked Fallout 4 vault dweller on drums, is a time capsule from a very specific moment in video game history. As, indeed, is their stage of choice. Rock Band 4 is the last survivor from a bygone era of plastic-instrument games, their peripherals now mostly consigned to landfills and charity shops, and a gentle introduction to what would become standard live-service practices across the rest of the industry. But it's a time capsule you can still dig up and experience firsthand, Harmonix's coup de grâce still active and receiving support as it approaches the end of its first decade. Given how quickly the genre had moved – and moved on – in the years prior, that's nothing short of a miracle.
By now, it's surely safe to assume you know the drill, if not of this particular game then certainly one of its many predecessors. You pick an instrument, choose a song (one that, in the latter titles, you most likely bought as an add-on), and start playing along by hitting the plastic buttons in time with the onscreen prompt. It's a simple but marvellous concept that was expanded on enormously over a relatively short span. In the Guitar Hero series, the range of instruments quickly grew from just lead guitar to include bass and rhythm. Rock Band added drums and vocals when it launched in 2007, and then keyboard for its third iteration. Both series also spawned spinoffs, with Rock Band famously tying into The Beatles and even Lego, allowing for reinventions of its visual style along the way.
To fully understand how we got here, though, we must rewind further still, to the end of the 20th century. In 1999, Konami's GuitarFreaks and DrumMania went beyond 1997's Beatmania by asking players to perform songs on controllers shaped like musical instruments, tapping their buttons to match onscreen patterns. The games failed to earn mainstream notice outside of Japanese arcades, but it was in these places that Harmonix's founders first encountered the concept that would make their name.
Formed in Boston in 1995, the studio made its debut that same year with The Axe, a piece of software in which music could be played with a PC joystick. According to co-founder Alex Rigopulos, it sold all of 300 copies. After a few more lean years, the company's founders decided to try to break into the Japanese karaoke market. While that effort was a failure, visiting Japan introduced them to the local enthusiasm for rhythm games, yet to make a big dent in the US market. The discovery was funnelled into 2001's Frequency and its successor Amplitude, the studio's first actual games, which also established its licensed-music credentials, incorporating tracks by the likes of No Doubt, Orbital and Run-DMC. Neither game was a commercial hit, but – along with a deal with Konami to develop Karaoke Revolution – they were enough to catch the eye of RedOctane, a peripheral manufacturer that had recently decided it would make sense to make music games as well as the accessories for playing them.
From there, everything took off. Just ten years separate the release of the first Guitar Hero and Rock Band 4 – time enough for a dozen instalments of the former series and nine of the latter (not including portable and mobile spinoffs). At the same time, Harmonix and RedOctane went from collaborators to competitors, after buyouts from MTV and Activision respectively split up the partnership. (Given that, at their peak, individual titles in this lineage broke $1bn in sales, it's not difficult to see why they would have been acquisition targets.)
By 2015, though, the spark was dwindling. RedOctane had released its final game, Guitar Hero World Tour, in 2008, with development duties passing to internal Activision studios; two years later, the company was closed. Fellow series stewards Neversoft and FreeStyle Games were folded into the Call Of Duty machine, the former shutting down in 2014, the latter sold to Ubisoft to become one of its many support studios. Yet, as the 2010s welcomed a new console generation, there was one final attempt at continuing each series' legacy. Rock Band 4 hit the shelves in October 2015, and a few weeks later Activision followed suit with Guitar Hero Live.
While Live bet on an FMV-driven experience that would change depending on your performance, played via a new, more complex guitar peripheral, Rock Band 4 was firmly focused on fine-tuning and unifying what already existed. Even within the context of its own family tree, Rock Band 4's role might be that of the sensible older sibling. Its direct predecessor – the apex of the entire genre – was unafraid to reinvent without compromising its roots, adding to the selection of instruments a keyboard and Pro guitar controller that essentially mimicked its real-life counterpart. Neither is supported in the follow-up.
هەفتانە هەرسکردنەکان، چیرۆکەکانی ئەو کۆمەڵگایانەی کە خۆشت دەوێن و زۆر شتی تر
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/action/im-excited-for-stage-tour-but-rock-band-4-will-take-a-lot-to-beat/
