Harmonix Music Systems, Inc.
Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. is a company that makes video games
Harmonix Music Systems are the creative developers behind many music / rhythm games, including early titles such as Amplitude and FreQuency to their newly released title, The Beatles: Rock Band. They were founded on March 1, 1995 in Cambridge Massachusetts by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy.
Creators Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy
FreQuency
FreQuency was released on November 20th, 2001 and was Harmonix's first game on the Playstation 2 console. The gameplay of FreQuency revolved around the player guiding a virtual avatar known as FreQ down a note highway in the shape of an octagonal tunnel. There would be musical tracks lining the walls of this tunnel. On these tracks were notes that if the player hit the corresponding key of on their Playstation 2 controller would emit a sound. This was how the songs were formed. If the player managed to correctly do this for up to two bars of the track, the game would tell the player the track had been captured. The game featured 27 tracks from various artists including some from in-house musician and musical director Kasson Crooker and his band Freezepop who have gone on to be featured in other Harmonix games. The game gave Harmonix critical acclaim and sold enough copies to warrant a sequel. The sequel, Amplitude, was released on March 24th, 2003.
Amplitude
Released on the back of FreQuency's success, Amplitude was released exclusively to the Playstation 2 in March 2003 a year and a half after FreQuency. Using FreQuency's successful formula it added new features and better graphics to make what many believe to be a legitmate update from FreQuency. It contained 26 songs which was actually 1 less than its predecessor. A rare occurrence in the music game genre nowadays as every game tries to add more songs than the one before. It included a remix mode in a similar style to the one featured in FreQuency giving the player the ability to customize songs to their own liking. The game was also well received by the gaming press getting high scores on websites such as Gamespot and IGN. The sucess of both Amplitude and FreQuency gave Harmonix the chance to team up with publisher Red Octane to create the Guitar Hero series.Guitar Hero (series)
The Guitar Hero franchise first appeared on store shelves in 2005 with the release of the first game in the series, Guitar Hero for the Playstation 2. Guitar Hero took the ideas showed in FreQuency and Amplitude of a note highway, but reduced the number of tracks to just one and added the use of a guitar shaped controller that came bundled with the game. This controller had 5 colored buttons on the guitar in place of frets which acted like the buttons on a Playstation 2 controller and a strum bar which was used like strings and that had to be strummed every time a note was played. Guitar Hero featured 47 songs on the disc. Most of which were cover versions of rock songs. Guitar Hero sold well. Eventually selling 1.53 million copies and making $45 million dollars. Its sucess led to the cultural phenomenon that Guitar Hero is today, as well as spawning many sequels. Sequels like Guitar Hero 3, which made $1 billion dollars being the first video game to ever do so. When their contract with Red Octane ended in 2006 they were purchased by Viacom, the parent company of MTV Games, as well as the MTV network channels, who would go on to publish Harmonix's future titles under their own MTV Games label with distribution & marketing being handled by EA. Red Octane was purchased by Activision at about the same time that Harmonix was sold to Viacom thereby severing all ties between the two companies. The Guitar Hero series was handed off to Activision subsidiary studio Neversoft for future development. Harmonix would go on to start an all new franchise that has arguably surpassed anything that has come before it in the music / rhythm category, Rock Band.Rock Band
Upon being aquired by MTV games they began work on a new muic game title known as Rock Band, which would take the primary gameplay from Guitar Hero and add two extra instruments to the game, a 4 pad drum kit and a microphone to give the full band feel. Released on November 20th, 2007 (the same day 6 years earlier that FreQuency was released) it was like its now rival creation Guitar Hero and had commericial and critical success selling over 4 million units and creating $600 milion dollars in revenue. One of the key aspects of its sucess was its Music Store which was a feature on the menu of the game that took you to an iTunes like interface where you could purchase additional songs in either single form, a track pack or a whole album. This enabled some people to instead of having a setlist of 58 songs to grow their library into the hundreds. To this date over 30 million songs have been sold on the Rock Band store and new ones are added every week. Like the previous Harmonix games, Rock Band spawned a sequel. Rock Band 2 was released on September 14th 2008. The game would go on to sell more than 1.7 million copies before the end of 2008. On November 25th, 2009 Harmonix announced that there were now 1000 songs available for download in the Rock Band Store. Guitar Hero announced it had a little more than 800 available for download with it's games. These milestones showed that Harmonix was right in it's idea that making music games that were accessible to the masses was sure to be successful. It was the dedication and care Harmonix showed to the licenses it used in its games that prompted Apple Corps, the label behind the British band The Beatles, to choose Harmonix to devolped a Beatles themed game which became The Beatles: Rock Band.
The Beatles: Rock Band
The Beatles: Rock Band was announced on October 20th, 2008 and the first gameplay footage was released on April 18th, 2009. Harmonix had stated that they wanted the game to offer an experience of The Beatles and their lives rather then just being Rock Band with a setlist full of Beatles songs. With the help of Apple Corps, Harmonix were able to use photos of the Beatles to craft a stylized art direction which they feel is key to the game. Furthermore the animation of the Beatles members on stage during the game was motion captured by tribute bands. Harmonix even took the time to craft some new instrument controllers that were themed like the famous instruments that the Fab Four played. When combined with the songs on the disc as well as future downloadable Beatles music this would be the complete band themed package. The Beatles:Rock Band was released on September 9th, 2009 which was the same day the remasterd CD versions of classic beatles albums were released at retail and for the first time ever, digitally on iTunes. In it's first month on the retail shelves The Beatles: Rock Band sold just over 600k units across all platforms. The first downloadable songs from the seminal Beatles album Abbey Road is set to be released soon. Also in the coming months Sgt. Pepper's full album will be available for download to the Beatles: Rock Band.
Green Day: Rock Band
At the VGA Awards on 12.12.09, Harmonix announced that they were continuing the band themed music games with Green Day: Rock Band. It will contain the band's "songs, favorite venues, and imagery" according to the teaser trailer. The band also stated the game is slated to be released next year.
General Information
Edit
| Company Name | Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. |
| Street Address | 625 Massachusetts Ave |
| City | Cambridge |
| State | Massachusetts |
| Country | USA |
| Website | http://www.harmonixmusic.com/ |
| Contact Email | |
| Phone Number | 617-491-6144 |
| Date Founded | March 1, 1995 |
| Count of Games Published | 0 |
| Count of Games Developed | 29 |
| Aliases |
Recurring Appearances
| Johnny Napalm first in Guitar Hero | 5 |
| Pandora first in Guitar Hero | 5 |
| Grim Ripper first in Guitar Hero | 5 |
| Axel Steel first in Guitar Hero | 5 |
| Judy Nails first in Guitar Hero | 5 |
| Izzy Sparks first in Guitar Hero | 5 |
| Xavier Stone first in Guitar Hero | 4 |
| Pandora first in Guitar Hero | 4 |
| Clive Winston first in Guitar Hero | 4 |
| Lars Ümlaüt first in Guitar Hero II | 3 |
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