Rock Band Could Take the Stage for an Encore
But are we ready to rock?
You know, we’re not so far removed from an era in gaming dominated by plastic baby guitars and drunken crooning to old Pearl Jam jems. We want to act like we didn’t buy into the hype. We want to pretend we didn’t spend a godfucking fortune on DLC that cost a sight more than simply buying the tracks on iTunes.
Like some of the long dead rockstars it cashed in on, music gaming crashed and burned hard, but while they were on top, it was a friggin’ blast.
That’s probably why Harmonix, the pioneers behind last generation’s music game boom, wants to get the band back together. Bloomberg Business reports a source in on the matter says Harmonix is concocting a new Rock Band – the first rhythm game to allow a guitarist, bassist, singer, and drummer play simultaneously (I wonder how many months it took ‘em to peg down a name for that one) – for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
IGN tapped the developer to see what all this noise was about and, surprisingly, didn’t get an immediate “no comment.” Harmonix is still jived people haven’t written off their franchise, happy to see people actually download the new DLC songs recently released for Rock Band 3 (yeah, they’re still dropping content).
“This passion our fans have shown for Rock Band over the years suggests that rock truly hasn’t died, and we’ve always been clear that we’d love to return to the franchise when the time is right,” said the Massachusetts based house of rock.
As an avid enthusiast of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band who climbed from the lowly annals of Medium all the way to Expert guitar infamy, I’m damned curious to see how Harmonix could bring back a genre nearly snuffed out from over-saturation. (How heavy of a whiskey fog do you have to be in before you realize a Lego Rock Band is rock bottom?)
Say that you are able to dupe the masses into purchasing plastic baby instruments once more. Does the pay-per-song format really make sense in the modern streaming world? I know the tracks are closer to chunks of gameplay than simple mp3’s, that’s understandable, but would it be such a bad notion to offer a subscription service so players can experience new songs, free of the concern that their wallets will starve and harddrives become too bloated?
Lots of variables here; not least of which is whether or not hardcore and casual gamers buy into the music game scene again. Personally… I miss slapping $50 bucks worth of guitar-shaped plastic, man. Those were the days.