What has Kasson Crooker not done? The audio director-turned-project-lead plays daily in Harmonix’s paradise of plastic instruments, working tirelessly on all the things that make Rock Band the awesome experience it is. But the day job doesn’t keep Kasson away from the other electro-love of his life, Freezepop. He’s a founding member of the electro-synthpop band – tweaking buttons as the self-titled Duke of Pannekoeken, Candied Apples, and Belgian Waffles. His influence has placed Freezepop in nearly every rhythm game you’ve ever tapped a body part to, and put the band itself amongst the Jonathan Coultons, Black Mages, and Minibosses of the emerging geek-game musical front.

We can’t understand where Kasson finds the time for his endeavors, let alone interviews. We apologize in advance if our persistence at finding out all there is to know about Freezepop, Harmonix, and the Rock Band songs even Kasson can’t play somehow delays any future, future Freezepop downloadable packs. Less talk more rock indeed.

OXM: People might say that you have the coolest job in the world: you’re in Freezepop, and you work at Harmonix.

KASSON CROOKER: I really can’t disagree with you. Originally when I started at Harmonix I was doing a lot of audio-type stuff writing songs, and so at that point there was a perfect synergy between being in a band like Freezepop and writing electronic music. Then also having my day job — I got to write more electronic music and also had the fortune of being able to include a Freezepop track in all of the Harmonix games that came out. Which was kind of an interesting challenge because our early games were very electronic in nature, but then as our games kind of evolved into this more kind of like, rock, guitar, drums thing. It’s been kind of interesting to see how we can continue to fuse the kind of like, blippy electronic Freezepop sound into Harmonix’s rock approach.

But it’s a pretty amazing job. It’s definitely gotten a lot more challenging as I’ve taken on more responsibility at Harmonix, which has somewhat interfered with the band. In fact, a lot of times my bandmates will go out on tour and go play shows and I can’t go with them because I’m here trying to make awesome games.

OXM: So what’s the chicken, what’s the egg? Did you start out as a musician or a game developer? What started you down the road?

KC: Actually, I’m not really that big of a gamer. When I was a kid I was totally into the Atari 2600 and Intellivision and so I was really into early 8-bit games. And then there was this period when I really got focused on bands and audio production — I went to college for it, and I pretty much stopped playing games almost altogether. I was also a Mac person, so I wasn’t playing PC games. So that just kind of fell by the wayside.

And then, quite randomly, I was looking around for jobs, and I got a job at a company called Papyrus, which was making NASCAR racing games, and they needed somebody to come in and make sound effects and write some music. It was only a very short stint there, but that got my foot in the door in the games industry. And right around that time a friend was like, hey, there’s this company called Harmonix, and they’re making this kind of techno-electronic video game, and you write techno, so you should go and check it out. And fortunately they had a job opening, and all the pieces fell together.

So I kind of fell into the gaming industry kind of by random, but Harmonix is so in-tune with music that it kind of bridges that gap for me, where if I tried to work at another game company on a first-person shooter or an RPG or something, it would probably not be quite as good a fit.

OXM: What was the process of building up Freezepop? It seems like a lot of people in the synth-electronica scene will tend to stick solo: sit at home, tweak some buttons, and release an album.

KC: I think it’s because I started doing electronic music before there were a lot of people doing solo kinds of things. It’s really predominant now because the technology is so cheap that any kid can get a PC and Fruity Loops or any kind of audio software program and instantaneously, without finding other people, they’ve got a band. They can make music and they can use the Internet to distribute it. I think I come from a little bit more of an old-school concept — the whole going out and playing live shows is a really important element of it. And I think one of the reasons that Freezepop has done so well is that we’re actually able to go out and play shows and put on a really fun concert for people. There are not a lot of electronic bands that really do that because they don’t have a live show, or other band members. So I think the live aspect has really kind of helped set us apart. And all along, it’s about the collaboration. I knew I never really wanted to just kind of do this myself, I definitely wanted to find a female singer. There were so many electronic bands that were just kind of like Depeche Mode wannabes at that point – kind of dark and serious with male vocals. I really wanted to do something that was kind of like, cute and lighthearted and quirky and strange, so I just kind of like sought out some other people to put the band together.

OXM: Freezepop is a synthy kind of band – you’ve got the keytars. How did you manage to swing that into a game like Rock Band? You know — drums, guitar, bass…

KC: It’s been a little weird. One of the things is that very early on we kind of had this kind of tongue-in-cheek approach to rock music. One of the first songs on our first album was a song called “Get Ready 2 Rokk” and it was basically us kind of saying that, at that point, we were just a cheesy synthpop band, but we’re kind of here to rock you.

That was the song that we had put into the first Guitar Hero, and we added a guitar part to the song which you get to play, and people actually really liked it. It was funny afterwards — if you go and read the forums, passionate hardcore gamers are all over the map. Some people are like, “Oh, I can’t believe this synth band is in this game,” and other people are like, “No! No! No! It’s super fun!”

We’re kind of like a weird, refreshing change of pace in the game because we’re usually the only band that comes from a completely non-rock approach. We’ve kind of skirted this little, delicate line of being able to be included in these games. After playing metal for the last 60 songs, it’s actually kind of fun to play something that’s a little bit more cheeky and quirky, and a little bit more blippy, I guess.

OXM: Looking at the songs you’ve had in these rhythm games, how do you come up with the perfect note pattern? Is there ever a thought like, “Have I made this too difficult? Have I made this too easy?”

KC: That’s actually really difficult. I mean, when we’re selecting songs for Rock Band there’s a lot of evaluation of the song: what’s the instrumentation, how many guitar parts are there, are there long sections of the song where one or more of the instruments or vocals aren’t doing anything. And so we definitely try to find songs that we think will play really fun in the game.

When it comes to actually writing a song, a lot of times I get a sense, “Oh, this might actually work in a game at some point.” And so, during the creative process of composing this, I will actually think about what would actually be fun to play. So there actually is a little bit of creative angle in terms of, “It would be really cool to have this kind of like, super-complicated part in this section, and then bring it back and make it really easy in this section.” Just so that when you have to play it in the game, it has a dynamic quality to it.

OXM: Along the same vein, when do you get a sense during the composition process that certain Freezepop songs might be worth more heavy promotion — as singles — than others?

KC: I don’t know if we do that explicitly. It definitely happens organically. When I want to make an album full of music, I want to make sure that there’s a wide variety of emotions, sonic textures, and approaches. Because if I bought an album and every song was basically the same song, I would get really bored and I would never go back to that album. And some of my favorite albums have that kind of variety on them.

So I think it really just kind of like organically emerges as we’re working on the album — this song is kind of mellow and serious and oh, this one is kind of like quirky and fun. Usually during that time there’s like a couple of songs that really emerge, ones we think will appeal to a lot of people, and that’s the song ends up being the single. Fortunately, with our album, the song that we promoted the most was also the song that was in the game.

So “Less Talk More Rokk” was in Guitar Hero II, “Brainpower” is in Rock Band, and “Pop Music is Not a Crime” is in Phase, and so it’s really exciting for people to try those different songs out with the different games. because in each of those games, you get a different experience.

OXM: So in a sense, this is your distribution model? A way to get the songs out without explicitly saying, “Hey, go buy our CD” or “Buy this song on iTunes”?

KC: I actually am a little bit old-school in that I still firmly believe in the album. I think there’s something about sitting down and listening to an entire compilation of sings in a specific order that when you’re done through with that listening process, you actually get more out of that than just listening to each individual song randomly or one at a time. I don’t think we’ll ever abandon the concept of the album per se, but whether or not it’s on a CD or a record or you download it digitally, I just want people to have the ability to experience the songs in some kind of larger sense.

OXM: Are there plans to make Freezepop one of the bands that gets the full-album treatment in Rock Band?

KC: Yeah, that’s difficult. Rock Band has been huge in terms of downloadable content. We’re seeing huge sales now, which is really great and a little bit surprising. We’re super-excited because we’re able to take bands whose songs didn’t normally fit the exact mold of what we wanted the game to be and give them an opportunity to show up as downloadable content.

I would love to see it [for Freezepop], but I think it might be a little bit of a stretch given that half of our album probably wouldn’t be that fun to play in the game. So I think for the time being we’re still going to like look for games where we can supply one track at a time. I think the ultimate goal would be to just craft a Freezepop video game, and sort of wrap the whole game around the experience.

OXM: There’s a lot of story behind the development of Rock Band, but what’s something that people don’t generally know about the game’s development? Any Easter Eggs?

KC: I think one of the biggest unknowns when we started working on Rock Band were all the peripherals. Originally, we wanted to make a game that has guitar and bass and drums and vocals, and this is when we started working with MTV, and so we were like, how do we want to do this? We thought, “Let’s just do it ourselves” rather than go find another company to build them for us. And it’s crazy.

I remember seeing all these really crazy, interesting prototypes — especially the drums, because they were brand-new. How many pads are there going to be? And oh man, the kick pedal, it has to be a real kick pedal, it can’t feel flimsy. If a real drummer sat down at it, they wouldn’t be completely irritated by the fact that it was plastic.

And then there was the whole testing process to make sure that they don’t fail. There’s all this rigorous testing at the plant, and then I hear there’s a boat coming into Boston Harbor with tractor-trailerfuls of Rock Band peripherals. And it’s really surreal because two years ago we were just finishing up making a karaoke game. And Daniel Sussman, who was the producer on the Guitar Hero series, heads up our whole hardware team — he had these crazy stories of going to China, and working on these peripherals.

I think that’s been the most fascinating thing for me of all Rock Band, just taking on that whole piece. Some things worked really well, and some things we struggled – there were some early issues with strum bars and stuff, and those are all fixed. It’s kind of exciting to know that we’ve gotten over the hard part of that whole thing, and now we can really focus on just making them better and coming out with different varieties and stuff like that.

OXM: And stage packs, and whatnot?

KC: [laughs] And the Rock Band gong.

OXM: Since you’ve worked on previous Guitar Hero titles, did it instill in you a more competitive nature since, basically, GH3 is the main title you’re going up against?

KC: There’s always going to be competition when you are making a game in the same sphere, especially when it’s a game that you had created originally. For us, the thing that is most meaningful to Harmonix is focusing on the music, and really being true to that, and delivering an experience that really involves you in as realistically and challenging a way and in as fun a way as possible with the musical experience.

Our first games [Frequency and Amplitude – Ed.] were ones where you got to play the drums, and the bass, and the guitar, and the vocals, but you had to do it on a PS2 controller. And that experience just was a little lacking, and so Rock Band presented us with the ability to let the player interact with all the different instruments of a song and actually like, realize it for real with real peripherals, so that you felt far more connected to the music.

We had learned a lot in terms of technology upgrades and better ways of delivering the experience. Especially delivering the music to the player – it was kind of primitive in our early games, and in Rock Band I think we’ve gotten good at delivering all those multi-tracks, and effects, and that experience. So there’s always competition, but they’re focusing on exactly what that game is about, and for us it was about kind of expanding it to all the instruments.

The other new thing for Hamonix that I think has been really exciting is kind of the story behind the game. Most of Harmonix’s games never really had a narrative to them. It was just like, play a whole bunch of songs, and that was about it. In Rock Band, we really wanted to add a narrative theme to it where you form a band with your friends and then you get to go through that whole kind of rise-to-fame scenario.

So I think that whole narrative is really exciting because it lets you go on a journey. It’s cool to know that we can start to get a little bit away from just, “I’m playing through 60 songs and each song gets more difficult than the previous song,” because there’s not a whole lot to that experience.

OXM: So where does the rhythm genre go now? How does one upgrade a game like Rock Band?

KC: In general, there are more instruments – there’s hip-hop, and there’s electronic music, and do those need different kinds of peripherals? Or are those even fun to play? I think a big thing that’s just going to be exciting in just rhythm games in general is collaboration and actual composition.

We had first kind of dabbled in that in Amplitude, where you could go online with four friends into our kind-of remix mode and create a song from scratch so like, one person would jump on the bass track and one person would jump on the drum track, and all four people could be there in real-time, crafting a piece of music. When they felt like that section was really good they could advance from the verse to the chorus, then save their song and turn that song into a game level. I think that’s really exciting because you basically provide this raw grouping of pieces and parts to people — let them be creative, and then turn that back into another game that they can play or share with their friends. It’s almost like a level builder process. I think collaboration is great because people out there have some really cool musical ideas.

OXM: How do you address the challenge of casual players versus the hardcore folk who are going out and making, for example, their little Flash Flash Revolution songs?

KC: I think that there’s an interesting concept that the hardcore people who are really into the game and then really get into the concept of authoring their own levels. I think it’s exciting because then when those then show back up on the Web, then the causal gamer can also use those. They may never go off and create their own. That’s the thing with FFR — their song base just expands all the time. There’s only a small group of people that actually need to go out and author all of those songs and put them up, but when the casual player goes out and wants to play, they’re like excited because there are thousands and thousands of songs.

OXM: Speaking of songs, what’s your favorite Rock Band song? And what gives you trouble?

KC: That’s kind of a tough question. I think because each instrument is harder for me. I can do really well on vocals, I can do really well on like, bass. Some of the guitar parts are a little bit difficult for me. I really like playing the drum part in "Orange Crush" by REM; I have a lot of trouble on "Run to the Hills." That may be my Achilles Heel in Rock Band.

OXM: What downloadable content are you looking forward to, or would bands would you love to have in the game?

KC: I’m hoping that at some point we can get some more obscure 80s Britpop bands, like maybe like Joy Division, or Bauhaus, or The Cure. The Smiths. I mean, Johnny Marr is one of the greatest guitar players of all time and he just has a completely different style. And I would really like to play "Boys Don’t Cry." Some really early Cure would make me really happy.

OXM: Is it weird to walk down Harmonix halls, or walk through a store, and see people rocking out to Freezepop songs? Does it feel weird to play your own songs in the game?

KC: Yeah, I actually never play our songs in the game. I mean, I usually try it once just to see how the authoring was done and see if I can add any insight into maybe making something a little bit more fun, or something that might be too challenging or something. But it’s always weird. I’ll go over to friends’ houses and they’re having a party, and they’re out in the backyard and somebody set up a projector, and there are people out there in the back yard like, playing Rock Band, and then I hear one of our songs… it’s definitely surreal.

But it’s cool, you know? It lets other people interact with our music and they’re having a good time. But I think it’s always going to be a little bit weird.

OXM: So where lies the future of Harmonix? What’s next?

KC: It’s difficult to say. Obviously the Rock Band experience for us is not a singular experience. I think there’s a lot more opportunity within that kind of realm to focus on more songs, other game modes that would be really fun to play — is there interaction, composition that we can do? I think that’s all on our minds. In terms of portable stuff, we’re sitting back and watching to see how Phase does, see if people really take to it, and see if we want to revisit that again. I think the technology behind that game is really, really fascinating because it lets you take any song in your music library and turn it into a game experience. It’s not as fully realized as it is in Rock Band, because all those songs are authored by hand. But I think that technology has a lot of potential and so I’m hoping to see that show up again.

And MTV brings us some very like, wacky, strange ideas every now and then. Obviously I can’t kind of go into anything specifically, but, you know, we’re all about music. Expect some more music-oriented stuff coming our way.