When you announced that the original Rock Band content could be exported to Rock Band 2 you said it's "almost all" the songs. Why not all? Is it a licensing issue?
Alex Rigopulos: Yeah, it's purely a licensing issue. We licensed the original music on Rock Band for the Rock Band 1 disc. To be able to export that for use in another application we basically have to re-license all that music. Until we've completed the process, we don't know what percentage of that soundtrack will be available.
So you yourself don't actually know which songs won't make it?
That's correct. At this point we're still in the licensing process so we don't have a final list.
From a "battle of the bands" standpoint, obviously you're going up against your former creation, so how do you feel about how the Rock Band brand stacks up against Guitar Hero now?
We feel great about it. When we set off to build Rock Band we wanted to take the genre in a very different direction, focus on co-op play and authenticity, and focus to the greatest degree possible on the music itself, and I feel we've done that successfully, and I especially feel that's coming to fruition now in Rock Band 2 with our platform strategy. By holiday of this year we'll have 500 songs available for play on the platform—that's something we're really proud of.… For a music game to be as compelling as possible to the largest number of people possible, it's critical to have the largest and most diverse song library possible, which is why we made such an investment in interoperability of the content between different applications. I feel this is an area where we really distance ourselves from the competition.
Do you feel it's gotten easier to secure some of the songs or bands that you want now because of the massive popularity of this music game genre? It seems like the bands are seeking you out rather than you having to go after them…
Yeah, that's absolutely the case. It was hard to get record labels as recently as three years ago to even return our phone calls. At this point we have great rapport with the music publishers and record companies, and now recording artists are reaching out to us on a weekly basis to talk about ways they might get more involved in the game. Everything is changing around.
Behind the scenes is there a new IP or other projects that Harmonix has its sights set on or is it 100% Rock Band still?
For the short term, we're very much focused on Rock Band just because I feel we're at the very beginning of what the franchise can be. There is a great deal of dream that is still unexplored in terms of feature set and the amount of content for the platform. … Meanwhile, we have a skunkworks thinking about what's next behind the horizon.
Speaking of feature sets, some people have wondered if it's really necessary to launch a new Rock Band game so soon after the last one. With no music studio option in the new game, what qualifies it as Rock Band 2 as opposed to say Rock Band 1.5?
A few things. First of all, the soundtrack alone is an incredible value proposition—being able to get 100 playable songs for the price of $60. In the feature domain, there was so much innovation in designing the first Rock Band, so there wasn't a lot of time to refine those features. We wanted to get Rock Band 2 out for this holiday because this is the first complete manifestation of the original vision. Big ideas like playing the World Tour mode online, the complete career mode with your band online distributed around the world—that was something we wanted in the first one that we didn't have time to do. The Battle of the Bands tournament system is an incredibly fun new flagship feature… It takes the play experience to a whole new level.