Music is a huge part of my life; as a drummer and a DJ there is rarely a moment in which I don’t have something on my iPod that I am listening to. With such a diverse taste in music I find myself wanting music to go beyond it’s normal role in video games as either background noise, or the implicit interaction of the game ala Rock Band or Guitar Hero. I am not saying that the way music is used in games today has no place in the industry, actually quite the contrary.

When the original Guitar Hero for PS2 came out in late 2005, during my senior year of high school, one of my good friends purchased it on a whim after playing it at a game store and brought it over to my house. Lets just say that somehow I got him to leave it at my house where I spent the next month with his copy. Other then playing Guitar Hero, I spent the rest of the time either avoiding him, or making up excuses so that I would be able to keep it for longer. Eventually I had to give it back and purchase my own, and at the time 90 dollars for a game was unheard of, but the experience it provided was at the time well beyond anything I had ever played.

The direction that both Harmonix, and Activision have taken their respective franchises is the inevitable end point of that style of game-play. I am not sure how much longer the market strategy of releasing full band sets of plastic instruments is going to last. With the newly announced ability to make the 300 dollar premium Rock Band Ion kit into a somewhat gimped digital drum kit with the purchase of a sequencer has given me a glimpse into the true future of what at least Harmonix has in store. Games like Guitar Rising are promising the ability to teach how to play guitar, and electric pianos that have had a “Teach you how to play Piano” feature have been around forever, but I am quite interested to actually see what Activision and Harmonix can do with this idea.

When I first started playing Rock Band, specifically the drums, I found that I couldn’t do well playing it like I was playing a Guitar Hero game; I instead had to listen to the beat of the song and just feel my way through it like I was actually playing a beat on a drum kit, and that’s when the game really opened up for me. With the cost of electronic drum kits starting at around 500 dollars it isn’t totally out of the realm of possibility to see the music game industry turn into the music industry.

A bargain basement Digital Kit will run you around 500 dollars, and if mass produced that cost could come down even more.

With the music industry fighting a loosing battle to piracy, music games foster everything that the industry should be striving towards. As a DJ I know that spinning records and listening to an LP on vinyl is more then listening, it is an experience. Rock Band and Guitar Hero offer the chance to discover different kinds of music by becoming invested in a part of the music.

Music games have already begun to effect digital sales as EA CEO Bobby Kotick pointed out in reference to Warner-Brothers Music wanting a bigger cut from the downloads, saying that “[WB Music was not] respectful of how much we’ve done to bring new audiences into the market.” With these games the music industry is in a unique position to both make money through downloadable content, increase band and label recognition, and perhaps in the future utilize the music creation tools to foster the music and creativity of new and upcoming bands. Bands like the Ramones, and the Talking Heads were discovered in the famed New York club CBGB, and with the internet age well upon us, Rock Band and Guitar Hero have the ability to discover a new generation of Rockers.

-Eric Wall

Tags: Cross Platform, DLC, Game Design, Game Industry, Guitar Hero, music, Predictions, Rock Band

Subscribe to the Check Your HUD RSS Feed