Book Excerpt: 'Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming's Greatest Hits of All Time'

Sept. 26, 2011 — -- Scott Steinberg, the CEO of TechSavvyGlobal, is out today with a new book about music video games. "Music Games Rock: Rhythm Gaming's Greatest Hits of All Time" (2011, Power Play Publishing) is free to download at www.MusicGamesRock.com, and is also available on iBooks, Kindle ($2.99) and in paperback ($24.99) editions. Here is a sampling:

Behind the Music: The Making of Guitar Hero

Thanks to an abundance of groove-inducing titles like Mad Maestro and the Dance Dance Revolution games, the PlayStation 2 was the hottest place to watch sound and vision collide for a very long time.

But it wasn't until publisher RedOctane shipped Guitar Hero in 2005 that aspiring rock stars with an axe to grind really got… well, an axe to grind. "It was the first game to actually make players feel like a famous musician," says Greg LoPiccolo, SVP of Product Development for series creator Harmonix. "You can party hard, even if you don't know how to carry a simple tune."

Thank the impressive plastic guitar controller the package shipped with, through which participants could jam along simultaneously with on-screen indicators. Sporting a whammy bar, strum bar, five fret buttons and a built-in tilt sensor, the home console device – the first of its kind in America – wasn't just a marvel of engineering. It was also the realization of a dream initially envisioned over a decade ago…

Founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, two students who met while working at MIT's Media Lab, Harmonix wasn't created to be just a typical production house – it was a company with a mission. "The goal was to leverage technology to provide non-musicians with the opportunity to experience what it was like making music," explains LoPiccolo, "and to essentially remove the drudgery of learning insanely complex motor skills and let people jump right into expressing themselves."

Unfortunately, early experiments inventing tech toys like The Axe – PC software that turned joysticks and mice into musical instruments – and creating attractions for Disney's Epcot Center proved strangely unfulfilling. It wasn't until 1999, following an influx of manpower from now-defunct game developer Looking Glass Studios, that things really clicked and the seeds for Guitar Hero's genesis were first sown.

"There was this huge infusion of talent from the gaming biz into the company," LoPiccolo says. "Furthermore, Japanese titles like PaRappa The Rapper were just starting to catch on domestically and within six months, we knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was where the future of the firm lay."

Harmonix's first effort for home consoles, futuristic rhythm-based action outing FreQuency (2001), merely affirmed how sound a decision it was. Industry heavyweights knew a good thing when they saw it, says LoPiccolo – Sony snatched up rights to the critically-acclaimed smash within 15 minutes of the title's presentation. Its equally impressive successor, Amplitude, also proved to be yet another feather in the company's cap when it arrived to rave reviews two years later.