Paul and Ringo Debut Beatles Video Game

When Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr made a surprise appearance at June’s E3
video-game conference to celebrate the new Beatles: Rock Band game, the pair seemed slightly out of place: -“Whoever thought we’d end up as androids?” McCartney mused from the stage. But even if they haven’t mastered gamer terminology, the two Beatles ”“ along with Yoko Ono and Olivia and Dhani Harrison ”“ were deeply involved in the creation of the game, which lets players sing and play along on plastic-guitar and drum controllers. The game features 45 songs, from ”˜I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to ”˜Get Back’ ”“ as well as never-before-released studio banter. Ono visited developer Harmonix’s headquarters, offering detailed critiques of the game’s animated John Lennon. “She held our feet to the fire,” says Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix. “She had very detailed feedback on animation and facial expression.”

The new Rock Band, which marks a departure from the Beatles’ usual reluctance to license their music, will be released September 9 ”“ the same day as the long-awaited CD remasters of the band’s entire catalogue. The Beatles game follows Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and AC/DC’s Rock Band ”“ games that helped the classic bands reach younger fans while also bringing in significant revenue in their own right.

The game’s story line follows the Beatles from their Cavern Club days to the Let It Be rooftop concert, with the look of its onscreen characters matching the band’s evolution (they grow beards and move from matching suits to flowing hippie garb). During the Beatles’ studio years, the game switches to psychedelic cartoon imagery ”“ as in an ”˜I Am the Walrus’ sequence that draws from the Magical Mystery Tour movie. McCartney, an animation fan, suggested obscure French cartoons for the designers to check out.

To create the animated Beatles, programmers digitised the stage moves of several Beatles tribute bands ”“ and they brought in Dhani, whose performance style eerily approximates his father’s. Dhani was a driving force behind The Beatles: Rock Band ”“ he discussed the idea with Harmonix’s parent company, MTV Networks, and helped convince the Beatles and their families that the game was worth doing.

The gameplay will be similar to other Rock Band (and Guitar Hero) titles, with a few variations ”“ when you nail a part, the word “fab” appears instead of “awesome.” And developers promise some as-yet-unspecified innovations with the drums, which Starr closely supervised. “He really is very interested in this game teaching people to play drums like he does,” says Paul DeGooyer, an MTV senior VP and one of the game’s executive producers.

Giles Martin ”“ son of Beatles producer George Martin ”“ was in charge of the game’s audio, which proved to be a major challenge. Games like Rock Band require guitar, drums, bass and vocals to be separated ”“ if a player misses a beat, that part drops out of the mix. Since the Beatles recorded with as few as two tracks, the instruments often ended up pre-mixed together. Martin used Pro Tools plug-ins and painstaking effort to separate the instruments onto individual tracks for the first time. “It’s an enormous pain in the ass,” Martin says. But it was worth it: After disassembling and reassembling the tracks, he played them for his father. “He was deeply shocked and impressed that I took it apart and it sounded fine,” he says.

The game will be released in the face of both a global recession and in what some analysts see as a declining market for music games. Revenue for the category was down substantially for the first quarter of 2009 ”“ a decline Rigopulos blames partially on fans already owning the fairly expensive guitar and drum controllers the games require. “I can’t think of a time when the world was hungrier for a joyful experience than they are now,” says Rigopulos. “This music is incredibly rich and incredibly joyful ”“ and I think we’ve tried to amplify that through the gameplay.”