Harmonix co-founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos. All photos by Scott M. Lacey. 

In a sports Pub somewhere in Boston, the bartender decides to make conversation. I tell him I’m here visiting Harmonix, a developer of music videogames.

“I thought they closed,” he says.

The bartender might be forgiven for assuming so. In the past couple of years, the originator of both the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises popularized a new genre of music games even beyond the plenitude the industry expected.

Then, a maelstrom of factors hit: market saturation, over-annualization, and a shift away from high-value hardware bundles toward digital revenue from songs led to a massive market contraction. Smarting from ongoing staff reductions, the studio that had once been entrusted with capturing the legacy of The Beatles in a videogame was sold early this year to private investors for $50 — less than the price of a single new copy of Rock Band 3.

Harmonix’s Cambridge, Mass., headquarters can be found behind an unassuming, narrow glass door bearing its logo, along a busy street of many similar offices. For a studio known for music titles, Harmonix is almost silent inside. In the waiting area, there’s a wall of shelves, and on it the array of awards Harmonix has earned just in the past several years: the color-splotched Spike VGA figurines are displayed next to brass-colored BAFTAs and glass Game Developer’s Choice award plaques. The dates are 2006, 2007, for the most part. Some are a little dusty.

But that Boston bartender couldn’t have been more wrong — there’s nothing remotely bleak about Harmonix’s interior. People are quiet because they’re working on multiple unannounced projects, says John Drake, the company’s communications director and my guide (shown above). He’s remarkably unguarded for a PR man, eschewing the usual verbal barricades for a resilient frankness.

The distinct impression is that in here, there are no ghosts to hide. People are moving along.

Getting down in Dance Central 2. Read our review here!

LOOKS THAT KILL

Soon, almost everyone we see is dancing — working on the sequel to Dance Central, of course, one of the leading Kinect launch titles. Art director Ryan Lesser (shown at right) and his colleague, art lead David “Sasso” Battilana (nobody will explain where the nickname comes from), have both been with Harmonix since 1999.

Dance Central 2, with its distinct stylizations, is something of an artist’s dream, and its poppy, exciting feel seems to invigorate everyone involved with it. That actual choreographers work full-time inside the studio on dance planning and motion capturing — bringing with them their performers’ energy — helps keep spirits high.

And Harmonix benefits from a culture of quick thinkers and self-starters. From its early, experimental days, when Lesser played key roles in designing Frequency and Amplitude for PlayStation 2, Harmonix has maintained a collaborative culture, where ideas are welcomed from all levels and disciplines.

“We’re hundreds of people, and have departments, and people have specialties, but there’s still an open-door policy for going into someone’s room and kind of shooting the sh*t with them about art and design, even coming up with interesting new ideas for games,” Lesser says. “We’re really open about that.”

Disinterested in photorealism, the team has intentionally pushed to be as inventive as possible about Dance Central’s look and style, parsing out the elements of dance and music culture that are essential — self-expression, celebration, empowerment — and abstracting them with attention to details like the hairstyle, clothing, and personalities of the game’s characters.

In fact, Harmonix’s visual approach is considered and distinctive, adding an interesting angle to the arms race that took place between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, after their former franchise went to Activision with Red Octane. The close stylistic comparisons were frequent, and helped fuel the games’ mounting market challenges. Asked if it bothers them, the artists are briefly silent. “For me as a gamer, having them be stylistically so similar is kind of disappointing,” says Sasso. “For the genre, the wider the visual realizations of what music gaming can look like, [the more] everybody benefits. There’s a lot of missed opportunity for great ideas to flourish.”

Lesser says his art team had never considered the business ramifications on the stylistic relationships between Guitar Hero and Rock Band. “Maybe because we’re in Boston and not in California or something, but we are not surrounded by tons of videogame culture, or peer pressure or whatever you want to call it. We focus on what we make; we look forward and we just do what we think is going to be best for our games.”