15 Years Ago, The Perfect Music Game Was Too Late To The Party

In the second half of the 2000s, music games had taken over like never before. Kicking off with Harmonix’s Guitar Hero on the PlayStation 2, games featuring plastic instruments were just as popular, and most importantly for publishers, profitable, as Call of Duty.

Following Harmonix’s split from Activision in 2006, the storied developer created Rock Band in partnership with MTV Games and Electronic Arts. It was an escalation of the Guitar Hero formula, adding drums and singing to the mix, earning the studio numerous accolades in the years to come. Activision, meanwhile, handed the reins of the Guitar Hero franchise to Tony Hawk developer Neversoft that same year, producing its fair share of fan-favorite games.

The two franchises battled for player mindshare and dollars on an annual basis, trading gameplay features and snagging the exclusive rights to feature specific bands in their games. The three-year-long feud culminated in one final showdown in 2010. While Guitar Hero delivered a story-based throwback to 2007’s Guitar Hero 3, Harmonix delivered something far more ambitious. Rock Band 3 is the grand finale of Harmonix’s crossover franchise and the best game in the genre, one that sought to be something more than a video game. Tragically, the developer’s magnum opus came just as audiences were ready to let the music fade out once and for all.

Rock Band 3 was a massive game out of the box. See, the Rock Band series’ defining feature was how it doubled as a legit music platform. Songs from all other Rock Band games (except Beatles: Rock Band) could be imported to the most recent game for a small fee. On top of that, the Rock Band Store, which updated weekly, featured thousands of tracks that could be added to your library permanently for $2 a pop.

For those who’d been keeping up with the series, popping in the Rock Band 3 disc on launch day pulled up literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of songs you already loved right from the jump, as well as 83 new ones on the disc. This was outrageously convenient for a party game, and surprisingly customer-friendly for the time.

Beyond the library, Harmonix looked to evolve the series further. Rock Band 3 added vocal harmonies, allowing three singers to sing together, and a keyboard to the mix. The former was a carryover from the excellent Beatles: Rock Band, but the latter was a different kind of innovation. Sure, players could use the new keyboard peripheral like any other five-fret instrument. But those looking for an extra challenge could escalate the difficulty to pro mode, which made players use all 25 keys.

This would be a massive undertaking for only the top-level players. But Harmonix encouraged players to learn by including an extensive and customizable tutorial mode that taught the basics.

This extended beyond the keys, as a pro mode was included for all other instruments as well. Rock Band 3 was compatible with specially designed real-life guitars and basses that doubled as controllers. Connecting these unlocked the Pro-modes that required varying degrees of mastery over the real thing. Purchasing cymbals for the drums meant having to hit the exact corresponding parts in a song when appropriate.

Rock Band 3 was the definitive answer to all the people who wondered, “Why wouldn’t you just play a real instrument?” Rock Band 3 wasn’t just a seven-player party game fun for the whole family (or drunken house parties with your friends). It was an affordable piece of software that could actually teach you how to play any instrument you choose. These music games had already inspired millions of kids to pick up an instrument, including myself, who started playing bass shortly after the first Rock Band. Adding this pro mode was a no-brainer next step for Harmonix, a developer that used gaming as a gateway to appreciate and teach music as early as 2001.

“Part one of the goal of Rock Band Pro is to start to cultivate real musicianship with the game itself,” said Alex Rigopulos in an interview at the time.

As well placed as its intentions were, Harmonix’s ambitions were met with reality fairly quickly. Rock Band 3 was the best music game ever made at that point in time (with an impressive Metacritic average of 93), but it was a little too late. By late 2010, the music game fad had begun to fade into obscurity. With Activision releasing a new “Hero” game every few months, the market had been completely saturated. In 2009, for example, it published six separate Hero games across all major platforms and handhelds. In order to ensure it could compete in retail stores, Harmonix released its fair share of spin-offs, further flooding store shelves.

Another factor was the fierce competition for non-traditional control methods. 2010 saw the release of the Xbox Kinect and the PlayStation Move, attempts to steal Nintendo’s thunderous success with the Wii. If you were going to buy some weirdo flashy controller that holiday season, buying a big ol’ box of plastic instruments seemed old hat three years into the craze. Rock Band 3 sold 1.2 million copies in five years, paling in comparison to its main predecessors that grossed well over $1 billion in sales alone.

As a series, Rock Band did everything right. But in an effort to keep up with the stiff competition, it helped blow up the very genre it belonged to. In 2015, Harmonix revived the franchise for an encore with Rock Band 4. The game was solid, but it cut all the ambition from the previous game. There was no pro modes or no keyboard support (three-person harmonies thankfully made the cut). It was a smart use of resources considering it no longer had the backing of EA or MTV. But it was clear that Rock Band 4 was more of an effort to renew the original trilogy’s music licenses and allow fans to play their old song libraries on the PS4 and Xbox One consoles.

After a few smaller releases over the next few years, Harmonix was purchased by Epic Games in 2021, a gift and a curse for those who followed the studio since its earliest days. On one hand, Harmonix is still chugging along, providing all of the popular music-based content drops for Fortnite. It’s a blessing at a time when studio closures are the norm.

However, seeing Harmonix trapped in the Fortnite content mines is pretty disappointing. Even more painful is seeing the old Rock Band formula converted into the exorbitantly expensive Fortnite Festival, whose DLC songs are released on a rotating basis for $4.50, more than double what it cost in the older, more focused game it's built upon.

Regardless of the current state of music games, it doesn’t change the fact that Harmonix made the definitive instrument-based rhythm game. And while fewer people than ever took notice of its ambition, those who did will never forget how feature-rich and how eager it was to change the landscape of its genre and the hobby of gaming as a whole. Rock Band 3 is Harmonix’s best game to date, one that perfectly captured the studio’s ethos and grand ambitions more than any other project it's ever released.