Radio is growing old. It can no longer go to the gym, cook for itself or even put out the washing. It sits grumpily in that disheveled armchair in the corner of the family room, unwilling to get up, reminiscing about its hey-day as the glue that held a nation together through political upheavals, economic depressions, war and peace.
Musicians are the first to agree that radio is on the way out. Take Ryan O’Keeffe, for instance, drummer in Aussie pub rock band Airbourne, who made this bold statement: “I think video games are the new radio.” Five years ago it would have been laughable to suggest that radio could be superseded by video games as the leading platform for musicians to promote themselves. But the rapid rise in popularity of music rhythm games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band has done just that. After a slow pick-up of rhythm games in the West, record companies and musicians are knocking down the doors of game publishers and developers like Red Octane and Harmonix, all vying to get their tracks heard by the millions of people around the world that are now fans.
The rewards for artists are many, from mass exposure to rising record sales. When the first Guitar Hero was being made, its publishers were able to license just one master track (i.e. original recording); the upcoming Guitar Hero World Tour is 100 per cent master tracks. The Rock Band music store has now had more than 25 million paid downloads in less than a year. To date, the Guitar Hero franchise has generated $1.6 billion (A$2.4 billion); Rock Band has global revenues of $600 million.
More artists are choosing to debut new music through Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and with so much driving the connection between music and video games, it’s time to ask: are video games the new radio?
Start Me Up
Rhythm games grew out of the video game arcades of Japan in the 1990s, where guitar, drum and keyboard simulators kept Japanese teenagers out until the break of dawn. One of the first rhythm games to be made was PaRappa the Rapper, a game about a rapping dog created for the PlayStation; it became a huge success and popularised rhythm games in Japan after its debut in 1996. Subsequent arcade and console rhythm games followed, with Benami, the music video game division of Japanese developer and publisher Konami, leading the pack with games like BeatMania, Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Freaks and DrumMania and KeyboardMania. While games like PaRappa the Rappa and Dance Dance Revolution were popular when brought to North America, it wasn’t until the first Guitar Hero that rhythm games found a sizeable home in the West.
Charles Huang, the VP of Business Development at Red Octane, publisher of the Guitar Hero franchise.
The publisher of the Guitar Hero franchise, Red Octane, was first on the scene. Charles Huang, the co-founder and VP of Business Development at Red Octane, started the company with his brother Kai in 1999. The company initially began as the world’s first online video game rental service, which Huang kept up until 2007. As Red Octane began its rental operations, Huang noticed a large demand for music rhythm games, which were, at that time, hitting their peak in Asia.
“The big game at that stage was Dance Dance Revolution,” Huang said. “But what we saw was that a lot of people weren’t happy with the dance pads in the game. We knew we could design them better, so we did.”
After investing some money in importing music titles from Japan, Huang and his brother realised there was money to be made in the Western market designing better hardware products than what the imports were offering. After a few years of this, Red Octane began publishing their own games. Their first title, In the Groove, became a moderately successful dance game. Their second was Guitar Hero.
“We were fortunate enough through our years of experience in the game rentals and hardware for music games to know what consumers were looking for, and we tweaked Guitar Hero to fit more of a Western audience,” Huang said.
The first Guitar Hero was, in Huang’s words, “out of the box” for its time. He and his team were told that while the game itself was good, Western game players just didn’t buy peripheral-based music games, especially one that was so expensive and came packaged in a huge box. But Huang and his brother plotted ahead until the money all but ran out.
“We had to go out and raise more money from investors to fund the launch of Guitar Hero, and we heard the same story from them, so we weren’t able to raise the money. So my brother and I had to take out second mortgages on our houses. We basically borrowed every bit of money we could. I remember telling my wife that we should take out a loan on the house to launch this game, and she asked me, ‘But where are the kids going to live if this game doesn’t sell?’”
Luckily for Huang--and his kids--the game did sell. In fact, it became the hardest game to find in the United States during the Christmas 2005 period because Red Octane had in fact underestimated its appeal and hadn’t built enough peripherals. The buzz at the game’s launch propelled sales into overdrive and, five months after its release, Guitar Hero cracked the top ten bestselling games list, a position it held up till the launch of Guitar Hero II. Huang attributes the popularity of the games to their ability to bring people together.
“There were two things very unique about Guitar Hero when it was first released: the first was its social aspect,” Huang said. “This was before the term ‘social gaming’ had even been floated around, so this was just a game that was a lot of fun. Companies told us that people were reserving meeting rooms just so they could play Guitar Hero the entire day, and friends were saying that they were getting together on Saturday nights to play it.
“Secondly, Guitar Hero, as a game, is so accessible. You could be either seven years old or 70, and still pick up the controller to play. When we launched the first game in 2005, video games weren’t something that 70-year-olds played.”
While Huang and his team had worked with music game developers Harmonix on the first two Guitar Hero games, Harmonix was acquired by MTV Networks in 2006, and subsequently went on to develop the competing Rock Band franchise. Red Octane was itself acquired the same year by publisher Activision Blizzard, allowing the company to make use of the Activision Blizzard-owned studio, Neversoft, to continue its franchise and develop Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. According to Huang, the release of the third installment in the Guitar Hero franchise saw a 250 per cent increase in download sales for every song in the game.
“The turning point for us was when we realised, by analysing sales of song downloads online, that download sales of songs featured in the Guitar Hero games increased after the game’s release,” Huang said.
“I think that made a lot of artists realise that there are a lot of other benefits for them in working with us besides just licensing their music to the game. These days the radio plays a lot of pop and hip hop, and not classic rock. A lot of older classic artists are thus realising that perhaps Guitar Hero is the best way to reach a whole new generation of fans.
“The game franchise has a critical mass worldwide now, and that audience and reach really answer the question of what other vehicles are available, now, globally, for artists to reach that many people at once. In Guitar Hero your song is one of just 85 songs that are getting exposure and being heard by tens of millions of people.”
Artists are now petitioning Red Octane to be part of the game: Aerosmith has already actually worked with Red Octane to put the whole history of the band into Guitar Hero, whereas Metallica released their new album, Death Magnetic, as downloadable content on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and the upcoming Guitar Hero World Tour.
Huang has big plans for the game’s future. On top of the 86 master tracks featured in the upcoming Guitar Hero World Tour, the game also introduces a new venture for rhythm games: a studio mode that allows users to create their own songs and share them with other players. Huang says his original vision for Guitar Hero is slowly turning into reality.
“I always thought that some day a song introduced in Guitar Hero would make the Billboard top ten,” Huang said. “I hoped that artists could release new songs through the game and those songs would have commercial success. I see this happening. We have a lot of goals on the music side that we’d like to achieve.
“One other very exciting thing we’re going to explore more of in the future is this whole concept of GH Tunes, which lets users create music, upload it, and share it with people. We’re eager to see what kind of music comes through GH Tunes, because we think that once people start using it and once we see what the possibilities are we’re going to have a lot more ideas and we’re really going to want to build that out to bigger and better future versions.”
Band on the Run
When talking of artist promotion, video games are an entirely new avenue for musicians to take. To date, no medium has been able to compete with radio in providing such mass scale exposure. Dan Teasdale, lead designer on Rock Band 2 at Harmonix, draws parallels between radio and rhythm games in their ability to promote both independent and established acts.
“We want to get that same level of exposure out to every independent band,” Teasdale said. “Imagine triple j’s Unearthed competition, but with the potential to expose all over the world. We’ve been seeing pretty big jumps in fan bases and sales for all of our artists in Rock Band, and naturally all of our artists are pretty happy about that.”
Old rockers Guns N’ Roses certainly share this view. The band chose to premiere their first new song in 14 years on the Rock Band 2 game disc. Even the surviving Beatles couldn’t resist. Harmonix recently announced that they will be working together with MTV Games and Apple Corps to develop the world’s first Beatles rhythm game, based on the quartet’s entire catalog. Currently, the Beatles do not offer their music for sale digitally via any venue, including iTunes.
Harmonix cofounder Alex Rigopoulos, said: “It's a full, new music game built from the ground up.” Although Rigopoulos confirmed that the game would work with Rock Band instruments, no specific instruments were mentioned. The interactive music-making game will hit store shelves worldwide during the 2009 North American holiday season and will also incorporate elements of the Beatles’ career, as well as visual elements from the group’s album art and their films. Giles Martin, the musical director of the Beatles-based Cirque du Soleil show, Love, will collaborate on the project. The two surviving members of the band, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, were clear in their support for the new game. “The project is a fun idea which broadens the appeal of the Beatles and their music. I like people having the opportunity to get to know the music from the inside out,” McCartney said. “The Beatles continue to evolve with the passing of time and how wonderful that the Beatles’ legacy will find its natural progression into the 21st century through the computerised world we live in,” Starr added.
Developing Rock Band was a natural progression for Teasdale and the other employees of Harmonix, who are all musicians in real life. This vital link formed the basis of Harmonix as a company when it was first started by CEO Alex Rigopulos and CTO Eran Egozy in the mid-1990s. Their goal was simple: to find a way for non-musicians to experience and create music.
Rigopulos and Egozy began with musical installations and a PC music program called The Axe, but it wasn’t until they saw PaRappa the Rappa that the pair realised video games were a perfect way to bridge the gap. Since then, Harmonix has served as developer on titles such as Frequency, Amplitude, Karaoke Revolution, Guitar Hero I and Guitar Hero II and, of course, the Rock Band series.
“The idea for Rock Band was a very natural one for us,” Teasdale said. “A big chunk of us perform in real-life rock bands, and we wanted to get that experience of performing on stage and playing together out to people who don’t play musical instruments.
“Rock Band provides an authentic band experience. It’s one thing to play an instrument by yourself, but to be playing guitar with a singer, a drummer and bassist by your side is an amazing feeling. It’s all about replicating the authentic feeling of playing a real instrument live on stage. Everything we do is designed to replicate that feeling.”
According to Teasdale, rhythm games function the same way MTV did in the 1980s, providing a new way of experiencing music and creating a social phenomenon around it.
“We weren’t expecting people to rearrange their social lives to play Rock Band. Since its release we’ve heard from thousands of people who can’t stop rocking out in their living room. What’s even cooler are the number of clubs and pubs that are running ‘Rock Band Tuesdays’ events for example, where hundreds of fans line up weekly to play on stage in full rock garb.”
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Air Play
Are video games the new radio? We chat to Red Octane, Harmonix, and rock stars around the world to find out.
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