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.

"What we found was if material in Rock Band was actually easier compared to Guitar Hero, it's because the actual guitar parts are easier, whereas the design mandate for GH seems to be more focused on a gamer mentality in ratcheting up the difficulty."

BIZ: Are you at all annoyed by the new Guitar Hero set up? Do you feel like Activision and Neversoft is ripping Rock Band off with the drums and vocals in GH: World Tour?

AR: It's to be expected. Rock Band has seen so much success this year that it's a natural response on their part. I would say we don't spend a lot of time focusing on the competition; we really have our own agenda for where we want to take the franchise and the [music] category. We very much see it as our role to continue to raise the bar for the other parties.

BIZ: In terms of difficulty, and I'm sure you've heard this before, but the guitar parts in Rock Band seem to be generally easier than in Guitar Hero. Is Rock Band 2 going to adjust this difficulty?

AR: The guiding philosophy for us when authoring patterns is staying true to the music. What we found was if material in Rock Band was actually easier compared to Guitar Hero, it's because the actual guitar parts are easier, whereas the design mandate for GH seems to be more focused on a gamer mentality in ratcheting up the difficulty. What you see are these note charts that are very disconnected from what's actually happening in the real guitar parts in the music; they might be more crazy from a gameplay point of view, but they're also more disconnected from the music. So for us, that departs from our core design mandate. That said, we are bringing some music to the platform, which we're not ready to talk about yet, that the nature of the music itself is so insane, it will be the most challenging material imaginable to play in the Rock Band universe.

BIZ: With Activision hinting at a major iTunes-like platform for Guitar Hero with Vivendi's Universal Music Group, will MTV team with Harmonix to launch a competing digital distribution platform?

AR: Certainly these sorts of things are obviously on our mind, looking at how music and interactive music can be delivered together to consumers, and there are a lot of options that we're contemplating but nothing we're ready to talk about specifically at this point.