Sometimes in the course of writing a story, we wind up with a boatload more information than we can ever hope to fit into the magazine. Our conversation with Alex Rigopulos during the creation of our Holiday 2007 issue’s Rock Band feature was one of those interviews. We only ran a fraction of Alex’s comments in the magazine feature, so we’re very happy to be able to offer the rest here online. (All we needed was a website – ha.) Alex talks about what he hopes people will get out of Rock Band and what drives Harmonix as a company, but he also discusses some wishes and loose plans for the future of Rock Band that, well, kinda blew our minds. Two words: Action figures!

OXM: A lot of gaming companies say “we want to offer the most intense, technological experience.” The Harmonix mission statement is much more artistic. You want people to feel something. So how do you strike a balance between Rock Band being musically satisfying and being a game?

ALEX RIGOPULOS: Well, so the driving mandate in all design decisions is we’re trying to summon the sensation of playing music as genuinely as possible. Of course, putting a game framework around that gives structure, gives goals to drive towards. But a key thing for us is that we never want to have gameplay intrude upon the music-making experience. In fact, there were lots of prototype game mechanics in Guitar Hero that we thought would be good for gameplay, and when we tried them out, we realized that they actually got the player thinking about game optimization and not thinking about the active music making. So for us it’s really about having a central design mandate that we always come back to when we come to key design decisions, “what’s more important here?” Well, for us it’s authenticity and genuine summoning of the music-making act.

OXM: We got a really interesting reader letter that said “You know, the problem with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that it gives you a shortcut to that joy of playing music, and now people aren’t going to pick up a real guitar because, well, why would they if they can just get the rewards?” Do you think there’s any validity to that fear?

AR: I’d actually like to answer the question differently for the different instruments, first of all with respect to the guitar controller. The guitar controller is very abstracted from a real guitar (unlike the drums or the microphone which I’ll get back to later). But even in the case of the guitar controller there are some foundation skills that you learn. Rhythmic impulse with your right hand and independent pitch control with your left hand — those are foundation dexterity skills that if you build them up playing the game, they will translate to being able to lock in and play in rhythm. Even a lot of amateur musicians are poor at that. If you watch people as they start to play Rock Band there’s a tendency to rush — all people have a tendency to rush because they get excited and they start going too fast. By playing the game it forces them to settle down, relax, listen to the beat, internalize it and start playing with their ears and not just their eyes. And that process is also a foundation step to developing musicianship. So there actually are real musical skills that you get from playing the game that translate into those first base skills in playing guitar or any instrument, really.

The other thing that it provides is — well, one way to look at it is a shortcut — but a kind of a window into the payoff. If you just start playing an instrument and all you get is the frustration of “this isn’t fun” why continue? But when you’ve been given a window into the experience and you realize how good it feels in the simulated version, that gives you the motivation to butt your head up against that wall and keep working, and start building up the calluses on your fingers when you’re learning your first barre chords.

It’s not going to work for everybody; it’s not like anybody who plays Guitar Hero is going to go on and be a guitarist. But it will teach some foundation skills and it will motivate some people who otherwise wouldn’t have, to actually go on and do it. That’s not just theoretical on my part, a message that we get again and again is “Oh my god, I got so excited about guitar and rock and roll music in general from guitar hero that I’ve not started studying guitar.” That’s a message we hear all the time. We even hear from guitar instructors that their business has been booming in the past couple of years because of new interest in rock music and guitar that’s come out of Guitar Hero. The empirical evidence dictates otherwise with respect to stimulus to musicianship, just on the guitar.

Now that’s in the case of the guitar, where I said the guitar is abstracted from the real instrument. The singing game, first of all is actually singing, there’s no abstraction whatsoever. Second of all the game actually makes you a better singer, it made me a better singer. Just getting the feedback when you’re singing as to whether or not you’re singing sharp for flat in real time. People start paying attention and they start refining their pitch to score better in the game. But what happens is that people start singing better, in key, by playing the game. The drums are actually the most incredible of all because unlike the guitar controller, the drums aren’t very far abstracted from a real electronic drum set. When you start playing the game, you don’t have any real skill or talent as a drummer — the patterns are very simplified, we only use a couple of the pads, and the note density is really thinned out so that it’s accessible to someone that has no experience. But as you work your way up to the higher difficulty songs and difficulty settings within the game, by the time you’ve been playing the game for a few weeks or a few months on the advanced setting the note patterns you’re playing are the real note for note drum patterns for the original music — which we’ve trained you to play!

You can take a person that’s playing on the expert levels in Rock Band on the drums and put them on a real drum set, and they can play the drums. And I watched this happen with a Q&A staff of 25-30 people. Maybe 2 or 3 of those had experience of being drummers, but they’ve been playing the game for months now, and what we’ve got is 30 drummers in the Q&A department who are pounding away in the Hard and Expert settings. These people have learned the fundamentals of drums, and this isn’t abstracting fundamentals — you can put these people on a drum set and they have some basic skills now. As a payoff for playing a video game, that’s incredible! Rock Band is going to be out there training this wave of new young drummers, and that’s a really exciting aspect of the project for us.

OXM:  Will we see a wireless cowbell?

AR: Uh, I’ll have to get back to you on that. We have some top secret nuclear scientists working on wireless percussion peripherals that may or may not exist at this moment in time.

OXM: Somewhere along the line I heard someone from Harmonix say that “Rock Band is going to be seen more as a platform.” People see an Xbox 360 as a platform; do you see it along those lines, where it’s own independent thing, and people will say they’re going to go play Rock Band the same way that they’d say “I’m going to go play Xbox”?

AR: Absolutely. You make an investment in a hardware console and thereafter you can buy a never-ending stream of games to play on that console. Or in the music universe you invest in a CD player and a stereo system as a platform and you can then go on and buy CDs or buy iTunes downloads for your iPod. The point is, when someone makes the investment in the Rock Band hardware and the basic software application, that’s a platform that they will be able to experience in a new way for years to come. And the idea is that, looking at it long term is where we see this category headed. In 3 to 5 years people are going to expect to be able to play with music as the normal way that they experience music that they love. If you have a favorite band that releases a new album, sure you’ll buy the CD but you’ll also want to go onto the Rock Band server the game levels based on those 15 new songs to experience them as an active participant in the music-making. But this is how people are going to come to expect to experience the music that they love. So for us the Rock Band hardware and software application are a music entertainment platform. Once you’ve bought it and trained yourself on it, it’s the environment you’ll expect to go to absorb all the music that you love and experience it in that way for years to come.

OXM: It may seem obvious, but I’m assuming that the relationship with MTV has given you licenses to more music, and you seem to have pretty optimistic goals for the amount of music you’ll be able to license. Can you give us a sense for why you’re thinking that? Is something like the entire iTunes catalog possible?

AR: The entire iTunes catalog - unlikely. This is sort of off in a boring business direction, but there are different kids of licenses. In the case of iTunes there’s no visual synchronization involved. You don’t need each individual artist’s approval for every song. Apple can do a deal with Universal Music Group who can decide if the terms are right to license their entire catalog on that platform because it’s just distribution of their recording. As soon as you start synchronizing the music with any kind of visual components, like a video game or a movie, major artists all have approvals over use of that content for synchronization with visuals. That’s really to protect the artist and the creators from someone using their song in the soundtrack to a porn movie or a violent movie that they wouldn’t approve of. So the point is, that kind of bulk license where you suddenly take 10,000 songs and put them on iTunes is just not possible from a legal and logistics standpoint.

And the other thing is, when you put a song on iTunes, you’re just taking their song and throwing it on the iTunes server. In the case of a game, you know we talk about downloading songs into Rock Band, you’re not really downloading songs you’re downloading game levels. We get the multitrack master recordings, and there’s an enormous amount of production work that goes into turning those multitrack master recordings into a game level. You need to author all the pitch and lyric parts for the singing, all of the rhythm parts at multiple difficult levels for the guitar, bass and drums, lip sync animation for the singers, lighting cues on stage, crowd cues…there’s a lot of game level design and production work that goes into each song. So the idea of going to 20,000 songs like you would by just dumping audio onto an iTunes server is a very different set of economics.

That said, we have insanely ambitious plans in this area and we do plan to get literally hundreds of songs in the first year alone, expanding to what I hope is thousands of songs in the years that follow. And we do view it very much like iTunes, in the sense that it is a platform, and we want people to think of Rock Band as the venue in which they play the music that they love, and that’s both on a catalog basis going back to the past four or five decades of rock n’ roll to build out a back catalog of music for people to play, but also frontline artists so when major new bands release new albums, day and date with new album releases those 15 new songs are going to be released to the Rock Band servers as well.

And going back to your question about MTV, they’ve been huge in this area. And the fact that we’ve been able to get almost entirely original masters in the game, the caliber of artists we’ve been getting in the game and the strides we’ve made in downloadable content has really flowed out of the relationship that MTV has with the labels, the music publishers and a lot of the recording artists directly as well.

OXM: So what should be expected in years to come? You’ve got the middle of the strata, the bands that you have now and the ones that you’re getting, and then there’s the upper level ones like Led Zeppelin and The Beatles that you may never get, and then there’s the garage band, the guy down the street who doesn’t have enough to make it worthwhile. So how deep down do you think you guys are you going to go, and how high up?

AR: Well, with respect to your first question I don’t really think any artist is off the table. We’ve made huge strides just in the last year in getting certain artists that were previously inaccessible in video games, like Metallica. And I think that’s just the beginning. A lot of these artists, particularly the older huge artists, didn’t grow up with video games. They view it as this side thing, they don’t take it seriously — it’s sort of a weird ancillary opportunity. It’s not an artistic medium for them and they just sort of see it as this side thing that they don’t really get. But given what’s happened in the last couple of years and given where Rock Band is headed, now we’ve seen a lot of major artists — particularly more classic artists who were writing off video games as something that they wouldn’t want to participate in — all of a sudden they see Rock Band as a legitimate artistic medium to which their fans can connect with their music on a deeper level. And that changes their perspective. Already we’ve seen major artists who have said no to us for years and years all of a sudden have finally said yes. And I would say that looking ahead in the next couple of years, really, everybody is on the table.

Now, to answer your second question about smaller artists, this is a major priority for us, particularly when you move into downloadable content. That’s an area where you can do two things. First of all, you can pick particular artists, major artists like Metallica or our recent announcement of The Grateful Dead as a couple examples where you can go incredibly deep. You can pretty much offer an entire catalog by a major artist. Another thing you can do is go incredibly diverse. You can go after niche artists that have an intensely passionate niche audience that aren’t big enough artists to justify a presence on a retail disc soundtrack but there’s definitely a passionate audience for and the economics work out that you can support those artists on the downloadable content medium. So one thing we can do is go varied and diverse on that downloadable content. Another thing we can do is use the platform to promote up and coming artists that people have never heard of. In the same way that MTV has promoted artists through the video medium on their channels, we actually see Rock Band as a way to break and promote new artists to the audience of people that are playing the game. So that’s definitely something that’s part of our plans.

OXM: Sounds incredibly ambitious as far as the manpower involved.

AR: Yep!

OXM: How many thousands of people are we talking about? It’s very ambitious — that’s a lot of people right?

AR: Well, you’ve heard Will Wright talk about this. I think that one direction that the video game industry is headed in general is actually putting the power into the hands of the masses and letting the audience author the music. One possibility that we’re actually considering is releasing our own authoring tools out freely into the world, such that if you’re a band and you and your three friends are in your bedroom or garage making music, and no major label will even give you the time of day but you believe in your music, you can actually produce a game level yourself and send it to us for publishing on the game servers or distributing to your friends. So that’s a possibility, user generated game content, this could explode the productive capacity of content for the platform.

OXM: Wow, it’s insane to think of the possibilities.

AR: Yeah, we’re going to be busy for the next few years!

OXM: Where does the game’s website fit into your plans?

AR: With rockband.com, we’re really planning to do some things that just have not been done in the world of video games before. Particularly, we’re trying to bridge the gap between the insular world of console game servers and the PC based world outside that. What we’re intending to do is essentially have a huge community site as part of rockband.com that’s directly linked into what’s going on with the game servers.

So if you create characters in a band in the Rock Band universe, you can actually create a band page in the PC-based universe of rockband.com that tracks all of your progress, your world tour and your game achievements. So for example, the game has a really deep sophisticated character creation system for your Rock Band avatars. You can really go crazy with hair-dos and outfits and also we have this 2D tattoo editing system, a paint system that you can use not just for tattoos but for clothing patches and things like that. You can really paint anything and turn it into a tattoo or patches on clothing — it’s a really fun system, and I think people are going to like it a lot. There’s also a band logo creator, so when you name your band, you can create your band logo and edit the graphical style. So all of that stuff, we’re going to be able to export to your web pages, and from there you’ll be able to take your band avatars, pose them, create album covers with your band logo and different scenes with your avatars. And then you’ll be able to turn that into real world stuff. For example, figurines based upon your Rock Band avatars, t-shirts with your fake band’s album art and your tour dates on the back from your accomplishments within the game, bumper stickers, old records, things like that. Really cool real-world merchandise based on this fictitious band that you’ve created in the game. And of course, all the normal community stuff like rankings, Achievements, and whatnot. But we really want to move on with expanding the fiction of these fake bands that people create out into the universe. I think there’s a lot of fun that people are going to have with that.

OXM: One really big thing that we haven’t touched on yet is the Rock Band Council. Could you define it and give an overview of what you hope to achieve with it?

AR: Sure! Harmonix has been making music games for many years and normally the music selection process is all about the core sound track that goes on the disc. There’s this long set of criteria that come into play when choosing, out of the entire universe of possible songs, what core 40 or 50 songs are going to be in that soundtrack. The music team here is very well equipped to deal with that particular process, but once you move beyond that to downloadable content, the entire universe is open to you. And we really felt that it was critical for us to get to new perspectives. We really wanted to get some people from the music business, for example recording artists, instrumentalists on different instruments, recording artists from different genres, record executives, A&R executives who have been out there for years observing trends and know the back stories of some of these bands. These people bring a whole set of perspectives to the process of selecting music that we don’t have, and we thought it was important to try to break new ground in determining what this platform is and what it can be.

The Grateful Dead is a perfect example. For core gamers buying console games today, The Grateful Dead isn’t on their radar, but there’s a giant, intensely passionate audience for that band that is going to be able to experience that music in an entirely new way. Yeah, a lot of people are not going to be into the Dead, don’t care about them, pr don’t like them if they do know about them — but that’s the beauty of DLC as opposed to a core soundtrack. With a core soundtrack, you need to get this critical mass of music that’s going to work for this critical mass of people, but with DLC you don’t have those constraints. You can go out there and start assembling this universe of music where it’s understood that 90% of the people out there might hate this particular band. Those 90% of the people don’t have to pay for that music and experience it — and that’s true across the spectrum. The beauty of DLC is that you can actually tailor your play experience to the music that you personally, as an individual, care most about.

OXM:  I guess in the same way that people don’t need to buy every single CD that comes out in the record store every single week, it’s okay to just buy the CD’s that you’re interested in hearing.

AR: Exactly!

OXM: I think because it’s a different delivery method, gamers are all hoity-toity — they feel like they deserve content. But to a certain extent with DLC, they feel that “if you want me to buy it, you better make me want it.” And I think that this is where there is a main disconnect. I see it much more as à la carte.

AR: Absolutely, and I think that part of that just comes from the history of DLC in the video game universe. Usually it’s like you have a game like Battlefield and maybe there’s two or three or four expansion maps that are released through DLC for that and it’s expected that “If I’m a Battlefield player, I’m supposed to buy all of the DLC that’s made available for it.” When you’re talking about hundreds or eventually thousands of pieces of DLC, there’s no expectation that any one Rock Band player is going to buy all 300 game levels that are made available. It’s that he or she is going to choose the subset of that, that’s the music they feel the most passionately about and that’s the music he or she is going to buy for the game. It’s really a departure for the norms and expectations of DLC in the video game world because it’s really more like a music entertainment platform then a game platform.

OXM: On that level, it seems like really the only thing that restricts Rock Band is work “rock.” I’ve been a life long rock fan and I don’t feel that has to be apologized for, but if the goal is to bring music to the masses regardless of what the genre may be. All jokes about Polka Hero and Cowbell Hero aside — or even Sitar Hero for that matter — it seems like country is the next big, major American commercially successful music. It may be too early to talk about that stuff, but are you considering other genres beyond rock, because some people simply don’t connect with rock?

AR: Sure. Well, two part answer. First of all, rock is the unifying element so in a sense that is a limiting element. But rock is massively expansive, both in terms of time span and subgenres within it. And in the core soundtrack, we’re trying to cover as many bases as we can, from punk to metal to classic rock to southern rock, frontline stuff right now, progressive rock — there’s a lot of diversity in there. But of course there is the common unifying element in all of that, and that is the universe that we’re going after in Rock Band. I think there’s a huge amount of diversity that we can continue to explore for years and years within the domain of downloadable content just within the rock universe with Rock Band.

That said, Rock Band isn’t the end of what Harmonix has planned for the coming years. I really think that there’s a lot of unexplored territory in other genres of music that we very likely will pursue over the coming years as well. Country is an obvious one, hip-hop is another obvious one. So there are a lot of places that we haven’t even begun to even touch on yet that it’s very likely that we will over the coming years.

OXM: You’ve been a drummer your whole life, you’ve all been in bands, you’re all walking the walk. Are you ready to be a rock star in the context of being famous, for being recognized as the guy that made everyone else rock stars? Are you comfortable with potentially being a household name?

AR: We’re not comfortable with it, honestly. From my point of view Harmonix’s rule is there’s not a lot of interest here for celebrity. For us, it’s all about enabling. What we’re passionate about is just creating the environment that will go out into the world and let everyone else feel what we want them to feel. Feel this connection with the music. Being a household name is not a factor for us.

OXM: Rock Band seems to be the culmination of every core idea that Harmonix has been founded on — all the things that you’ve tried over the years put into one really solid package. The only criticism I’ve heard is “that’s a lot of money.” It’s to be expected, but if you think of it as a platform, then the price is fine. But when you look forward to what you hope and dream will be the mass cultural response to Rock Band, five years down the road, what do you see? What are you hoping people will get out of Rock Band when they play it?

AR: My biggest hope is that this game deepens people’s connection with the rock music that they love. Playing this game changes people’s understanding of music. Most people, they listen to rock, they don’t even separate the music into the different instrumental components. They don’t hear the drums and the bass and the guitar separately, it all sort of blends together into a mash for them. Playing this game changes that. Playing this game changes the way that people hear rhythms. It changes the way they hear the interrelation between different parts. The act of playing it just connects people in a very visceral, physical way with the music that they don’t otherwise experience. So really what it’s all about for us is just making peoples’ connection with the music that they love much more profound. I really do think that on a mass scale millions of people will understand and feel music in a different way because of this game.

Next up: Tune in tomorrow for the first of several videos from our visit to Harmonix...each more embarassing than the last!