Harmonix talks competition, Wii Music

A portion of a GameDaily interview with Alex Rigopulos, CEO of Harmonix…

BIZ: 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?

AR: 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 interoperability of the content between different applications. I feel this is an area where we really distance ourselves from the competition.

BIZ: As someone who makes music games for a living, what are your thoughts on Nintendo’s new Wii Music, which has been a big focus for them at E3?

AR: I have not heard enough about it to have an informed opinion. However, I will say in the early days of the Wii when it was first announced, we contemplated using the Wiimote for a drumming interface. We backed away from it because we found that the tactile element of actually hitting a surface when you’re drumming is a fairly critical part to the visceral feel of actually playing drums. So when you’re air drumming, it was a critical element you’re missing in the experience. So that’s one of the reasons we backed away from it and decided to build a custom drum peripheral.

Full interview here