With innovative six-person gameplay and an impeccable musical pedigree, The Beatles: Rock Band just might bridge a generation gap some 40 years wide. All you have to do is want to play it.

Ask a fan, “What’s so great about The Beatles?” and they might have trouble putting it into words. Hell, I tried to explain it to friends while working on this story and could offer only sweeping, grandiose hyperbole at best: They wrote some of the most expertly crafted songs of all time. They embodied the creative and cultural renaissance of the Sixties. They performed the first stadium rock concert; they created the concept album; they pioneered sampling. They’re the reason rock music is seen as artistically valid today. Culturally, historically, musically…look, they just are.

Maybe Harmonix can explain it best by using no words at all. After exposing new generations of gamers to the power of rock music through Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the Cambridge-based developer set its sights on music’s most prized license, and this September, MTV Games will publish The Beatles: Rock Band, which puts the music, culture, and history of the Fab Four into the hands and minds of gamers like absolutely nothing else before it.

Your Mother Should Know

But if you don’t already care about The Beatles, why would you want to spend $60 — let alone $250 for the drums-and-bass bundle — to learn? Harmonix is betting that your appreciation simply lies dormant, and they’re aware that “kids today” might see The Beatles as ancient history. “This is the game your parents are going to want to play with you…which is not, like, the coolest tagline,” admits Harmonix creative director Josh Randall with a laugh. “But all of our games are about bringing people together. So here’s the biggest band in the world. You know all the songs, you know all the lyrics. I kind of dare people to play one or two songs in this game and not wind up with a smile on their face.”

“I think it’s very popular to not like The Beatles in that ‘Oh yeah, that’s my dad’s band’ way,” adds Chris Foster, the game’s lead designer. “But on the other hand, I’ve been amazed by how many 8-, 11-, 13-year-olds get it. This music is like the air people breathe. It’s surrounded them, it’s part of everything.”

If that sounds a bit cosmic, consider the magnitude of this undertaking. The Beatles have never thrown themselves at technology to make a buck; you can’t even buy their recordings as digital downloads. For the band to hand over its master recordings to a videogame developer (of all people!), well, it’s not only the ultimate vote of confidence for the musicians at Harmonix, but it’s a brilliant way for a 40-year-old band to take new, culturally relevant creative risks.

And Your Bird Can Sing

The Beatles: Rock Band delivers, at its core, what you would expect: the chance to play along with songs like “Day Tripper” and “I Am The Walrus” on new plastic guitars and drum controllers (see sidebar). From jangly guitar parts to melodic basslines to solid drum beats, you get to play the original tracks from the group’s remarkable 12-album career. Expert players will notice a few small tweaks to the mechanics, such as the removal of optional drum fills and the fact that the whammy bar builds Overdrive but no longer changes the note’s pitch. This is The Beatles, after all; you don’t wiggle perfection out of tune.

But to simply deliver the “play along with the mop-tops” experience would be glorified DLC, and Harmonix never set its sights that low. “Meeting with Apple Corps [the company that handles The Beatles’ music library], they were just like, ‘You guys need to do something new,’” says Randall. “That was the mandate: Do new stuff. We didn’t want to make it a history lesson, but I think we did a good job of giving you splashes of history. For story mode, we came up with this idea of a photo gallery. If you’re able to get a high enough score, you unlock a piece of memorabilia with a tidbit of info. We hung out in Apple’s archive department for three days and pored over stacks of books and photos that we’d never seen before. So as you’re playing, you’ll get a little more in-depth history that way. But we don’t force it on people. If you want, you can go [to that part of the game] and hang out; if not, you can just rock out.”

But Harmonix also wanted to push the music genre forward, to make Rock Band even more inclusive than it already was. “Early on, we decided we wanted to have this game give everybody in the room something to do,” explains Randall. “And the more we got into The Beatles’ music, the more we realized that the thing that was really unique was the harmonies.” The answer: Three microphones for three vocal parts. Whereas regular Rock Band offers a single vocal line to follow, most songs in Beatles will show harmony lines as well, each in a different color. And if you can’t find your part, that’s okay, too. “Three people with microphones can sing whatever they hear,” says Foster. “They could all sing the same line and it would be okay, as long as someone’s singing. But they can maximize their points by singing the harmony parts.”

Of course, identifying a harmony is hard enough, let alone singing it — which is why the vocal trainer was created. Like the drum trainer before it, this interactive tutorial lets you swap between all three vocal lines at will using the left and right triggers; since the backing vocals overlap on the original four-track recordings, they couldn’t be isolated, so the trainer plays notes at the right pitches so you know what to follow. “So if someone wants to be really good, they can sit with practice mode and learn their part,” Foster tells us. It works amazingly well; I’d heard “Here Comes The Sun” literally hundreds of times, but never deconstructed the harmonies correctly. One pass through with the trainer, and I’d nailed it. “We spent months and months on that,” says Foster.

I've Just Seen A Face

Meanwhile, the art team spent the bulk of its energy on getting the musicians’ likenesses just right. “We knew we didn’t want to go too realistic and have it be weird-looking and scary, but we didn’t want them to be cartoony,” says Dare Matheson, lead artist. “With The Beatles, because they’re real people and they’re so iconic, we spent the whole time iterating on their faces and their heads. There’s a ton of emotion and personality that everybody recognizes when they look at those faces, so that was our main challenge: to bring those four very distinctive personalities to these digital puppets. It was very tricky and scary.”

It’s even scarier when you realize you’re creating a digital Ringo for Ringo himself to approve. “Josh and I went to Abbey Road with our first version of George’s head,” says art director Ryan Lesser. “We showed Apple and we were pretty psyched about it — we thought he looked really good and it was stylized the right way. And they just kicked the crap out of me. It was brutal, but it was really good — they got to see our process, we got to see where people’s cares lie. And from then on, it got a lot better.”

The result was subtle, true-to-life animations for all the characters in the game. You’ll see the band members interacting on stage, the crowds screaming and watching the show, and what Lesser calls “the joy filter. When you look at the footage of The Beatles playing, they were super-psyched all the time. It was complete chaos sometimes, but they definitely had an excitement on their face. And Dare and Josh noticed that that wasn’t in our game yet, so we built new systems to add that on top of what was going on. We have a totally different, weird set of criteria for our systems. Joy isn’t usually on the list of ingredients for most videogames!”

Here, There, And Everywhere

In addition to iconic celebrities, Harmonix had to re-create famous venues, including the Cavern Club, where The Beatles were discovered; The Ed Sullivan Theater, where they made their American television debut; America’s Shea Stadium and Japan’s famed Budokan martial-arts arena; and the rooftop of Apple Studios, where The Beatles played their impromptu final gig. What’s more, having access to Apple’s archives meant Harmonix was able to build these venues better than anyone even remembers them. “When we started working on the project, there was one photograph of the Sullivan set in color, which I had never seen before, and I’ve seen that footage a million times,” recalls Lesser. “It’s shockingly beautiful, with all these blues and yellows and soft ambient lighting. Back then, they tended to paint all kinds of things yellow because it read better on black-and-white TV. So that’s something I think will hit people. If I play this for my folks, who taught me about The Beatles in the first place, they’ll see that for the first time.”

Accurate venues are great for when The Beatles were, you know, playing live, but the band’s most celebrated work was recorded after they stopped touring in 1966. “Basically, The Beatles got so big, they said, ‘We’re done, we’re not going to tour anymore, it’s too crazy,’” says Randall. “So by the time they got into Abbey Road, we were greeted with this challenge — hey, they’re just going to be in the studio for a ton of songs. What are we going to do?”

The answer is what Harmonix calls (at least internally) “Dreamscapes” — fantasy journeys to the worlds suggested by the music itself. “As the band is playing in Abbey Road, the walls melt away and you get transported to a new place that’s based on the song,” explains Randall. “Those range from super-psychedelic to modern motion graphics to fantasy landscapes. So to someone who’s played music games before, this is something entirely new that we’ve never done in any of our games.”

“You never play a song in the game where as the lyrics go by, everything that you see in the Dreamscape is ‘Oh, there’s Eleanor Rigby, there’s the car!’” adds Lesser. “It’s not like you’re watching a cartoon or a video of that song; we’ve created abstract spaces that are more emotive.” For instance, “Octopus’s Garden” features fanciful underwater surroundings while animated lyrics pop up around the band, while “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is a playful take on the Cold War past, featuring a lot of Soviet imagery. During “I Am The Walrus,” the band slowly transforms into their animalistic alter egos from the cover of Magical Mystery Tour, surrounded by twisted scenes that draw on the song’s nonsensical lyrics and foreboding orchestration. It’s dark and unsettling.

I've Got A Feeling

In fact, if The Beatles: Rock Band has a secret weapon, it’s emotion — both in what the team has invested in the game and in what they feel gamers will get out of it, whether they expect to or not. Ryan Lesser cites being able “to hear and feel every track” and “the intimacy with the music” as big hooks for skeptical gamers. Chris Foster says his first Dreamscape experience “was moving — and that was not something I expected, and I’m one of the people that was helping design what we do. I think we’re creating the emotions of making the music; this is trying to put you there. The game feels mature; it feels grown-up. It’s not stodgy or boring, but it’s as close to an artistic statement as I think I’m ever going to get to work on.”

Clearly, there’s a lot invested in The Beatles: Rock Band, and again, it’s sometimes hard to put into words. “I think we’re all reflecting a brighter light,” says Foster. “This stuff’s bigger than us.” But the biggest risk of The Beatles: Rock Band is whether gamers who know and love the Rock Band franchise will try the game on faith, even if they don’t feel a cultural kinship with the band that is its focus. “I really want this game to feel like it was made by The Beatles,” describes Randall. “We’re trying to be as authentic as possible. We’re going to be reintroducing The Beatles to a whole new generation of people. And when they play this game,” he says, “I’m hoping they just get it.”