BIZ: What were some of the most challenging aspects and major hurdles while developing Rock Band?

GL: We had to learn a lot about how to develop hardware and how to get a manufacturer in China and how to get it on the boats and how to get it tested. That's an entire world that we were not very knowledgeable about going in that we had to learn quickly; and that was a big challenge, but I'm very proud of what we accomplished. That was a big one, and I think the other one was coming up with gameplay that balanced everybody's roles, where everybody had a focus role of their own and have them all blend together into an ensemble experience. That was not easy, that took a long time to figure out how to get right.

BIZ: I'm curious; were there any disagreements among the team about certain aspects of the development of the game? Is there something one person wanted to create one way and maybe you or someone else said it needed to be done a different way? Was their anything like that during the development process?

GL: Not really; maybe little things, but nothing in terms of deep philosophical issues. I think we had a pretty clear vision pretty early on of it being about bands and the emotional process of gluing bands together and banding together to get through songs and then trying to expand that out into the other narrative aspects of being in a band, about fans and money and going on tour and so forth. I think the biggest constraint was that there was a lot more we would have liked to do that we just didn't have the resources and the time to do. It was pretty ambitious as it was, but that's always true in game development.

BIZ: There were some reports initially about some people having problems with the Rock Band guitars and having to get those replaced. Can you share an estimate of how much that cost the company to have to replace all of those guitars?

GL: No.

BIZ: Didn't think so. [laughs] I had to try. So, I'm sure you've played Gutiar Hero III and I'm curious what your thoughts are on how Neversoft has handled what was your "baby" essentially?

GL: I think we give them credit for picking up the franchise and continuing on with it. It's obviously had a lot of market success, but quite candidly we haven't been that focused on it because we're busy with the thing that we do. So we have a lot of affection for that franchise and we loved working on it, but we've moved on.

BIZ: One thing I'm curious about, and I'm sure a number of gamers have mentioned this to you guys, but it would make sense to be able to stream a music or video clip as a preview before downloading content on Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. Is that something that you guys are going to implement, a preview function so that you'll be able to check out something before downloading it?

GL: In the next few weeks we'll be putting out a significant patch to Rock Band, the biggest feature of which is a fully featured in-game store. So now up on the main screen is a button "Music Store" and you hit that and it's fully integrated into the Rock Band game where you can sort by genre or difficulty or decade or alphabetically or whatever. It has previews and album art, so it's a much more polished experience, so yes, in two or three weeks, we'll have all that.

One of the things we knew we were up against with both the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace is that it's been great to have those opportunities to sell DLC and it's been very successful, but we put out songs every week and thinking ahead, in a year that interface is not going to be sufficient. We can't have a linear list of 200 songs; that's not the right way to do it, so we knew at the outset that we were going to have to design a more sophisticated interface and build it for the game just to support the amount of content that we're going to make available. There's also this annoying feature right now with the DLC where if you buy it, it sits there loading. That will go away as part of this patch. All of that stuff will be cached with your profile.