Viacom is fighting an order to pay Rock Band makers Harmonix Music Systems $US383 million, or a bit more than half of the money sought by the former shareholders in a long-running legal dispute over unpaid bonuses.
Rock Band celebrated its fourth birthday last week and, to celebrate, Harmonix has released some videos that go into detail on the process of creating the game, and the struggles involved in actually shipping to retail. As a huge Rock Band fan with over 400 downloadable songs on my PS3 hard drive, I find this whole thing fascinating. Last week was the story of how Rock Band came to be, but this story is about how hardware issues almost doomed the franchise to catastrophic failure.
In October of 2007, Rock Band hit rock bottom, crashing its car into a tree in an alcohol-soaked haze. It was then it knew it had to turn things around. On November 20, 2007, Harmonix introduced it to the world and changed everything.
Honestly, this interview — by Alex Navarro, ex-Harmonix employee — is one of the best I’ve ever read and absolutely deserves to be read in full. In this wide ranging interview with his former employers they discuss the past and future of Harmonix and Rock Band, and broach the subject of the relationship with Activision and Bobby Kotick.
I’ve never totally gotten the appeal of Wii dancing games, though clearly there are a whole ton of Just Dance fans out there who disagree. This new ad for Harmonix’s just-released Dance Central 2 takes a humorous dig at Wii games and their obsolescence in the face of full motion-tracking.
Last year, Harmonix shareholders sued the Rock Band developer’s former owner Viacom for a ton of money. This week? Viacom sues them back. I am rubber, you are glue, etc, etc.
