GameDaily BIZ: Was Rock Band the game you always wanted to make even before Guitar Hero or is it something that started percolating in you minds after Guitar Hero's release?

Greg LoPiccolo: We've been thinking about a Rock Band style game for many years but all the pieces were not in place for us to attempt something like that, either in terms of our own experience, skills and knowledge to build it, or having the industry buy into it so we could attempt such a thing. If you would look at that kind of initiative in 2002, people would think we were insane to build this huge networked game with three custom peripherals; it was simply out of the question.

BIZ: I can imagine, especially since peripherals have historically not sold well, that having a massive bundle of peripherals is a bit intimidating sales-wise, having to deal with retail and that huge box... how did you guys deal with all that?

GL: What really turned the corner for people is we showed up at all the retailers with a working version of the game and all the peripherals and said, "This is the experience we want to sell." In every case, they said, "Wow, how many can you get to us?" It was really that. It was actually a lot simpler than we might have anticipated; because we were terrified thinking, "Is retail going to go for this?" and so forth. But no, we basically showed them the experience we wanted to give to people and they got it, which was fun! [laughs]

BIZ: Considering the incredible sales of the Wii I'm curious why Rock Band wasn't launched simultaneously on that platform along with the others because it seemed like a no brainier to have that right away from the start.

GL: It was twofold. One, when we made the initial decisions about where to place our resources, [the success of the Wii] wasn't as clear as it became in retrospect and really for us, it was simply a matter of resources. We're not a very big company, and Rock Band was certainly by far the largest thing we'd ever attempted. We weren't comfortable handing much of the core off to others because we wanted to make sure that it was everything we wanted it to be. We just simply didn't have the bandwidth to do it in the same timeframe, but certainly we're very enthusiastic about the Wii and we're very excited about what we might be able to accomplish on that platform long term.

BIZ: With all due respect to the DDR guys, between Guitar Hero and Rock Band, you guys have really elevated the music genre. It's really entered popular culture at this point. Can you talk about the impact of the music genre in video games and where you think that genre might be headed?

GL: [Long pause] Certainly, I think we're in a space where there's a general acceptance that music games as a genre have arrived in the North American and European market. I think one of the biggest revelations for us is that it's a way into video game experiences for people who are not traditional gamers; I think that's been the most gratifying aspect of putting these games out is the fact that we've heard lots and lots of stories of people who don't play games and don't really want to play games and they sit down with the drums or they pick up the mic or the plastic guitar and the experience they have is one that they really value and that's their way in. So I think that the whole music game genre is growing the market in a nice way.

BIZ: Where do you think the market could go? What's the potential for it ultimately?

GL: There's a couple broad themes that we'd like to explore. We don't have any specific product announcements. These are pretty vague things that we think could take a long time to realize, but we would like to push things in the direction of allowing our players a lot higher degree of creative expression within the experience, because now it's like I think Rock Band specifically does a very good job of making you feel like you're playing music and bonding you to other people that are playing music, which was a really important initial goal for us. What it doesn't do as well is give you creative freedom. There's little bits and pieces; there's drum fills, there's the whammy bar, there's the big rock endings, there's a few initial stabs to try and bring those creative aspects into world of that kind of game, but there's a lot more to do, and we're very excited about moving in that direction. We've done a bunch of prototyping and the initial R&D; it's a really hard problem, so my guess is we'll be working on it for a number of years before we get it right.

BIZ: I don't know if it was you, Alex [Rigopulos] or somebody else at MTV, but there was an interview that I had read a couple months ago, talking about the possibility of basically a song creator. If there are gamers out there that are musically inclined and actually can create their own songs and share them with other gamers – and the big buzz word nowadays is user generated content with XNA Community on Xbox and Sony's games like LittleBigPlanet – it would seem like almost the perfect situation for a song creator and user generated songs. Is that where you think you're headed?

GL: Absolutely. There's a couple of different threads that seem like they might be very exciting. One is if Rock Band is a platform that new acts can use to debut their material and put it in front of other people. I think we look forward to a reality where people are actually writing to the platform, and we've seen that already because there's some internal Harmonix bands that release songs in the game and so forth and we've started to see a little bit of this trend where people, as they compose, think "How would this play in the game?" and having that help guide them compositionally, but having Rock Band as a platform for new artists to present their material is very exciting to us. We'd love to see that happen.

BIZ: Yeah, it's been incredible that it's had such an effect on people and on music culture that I think a lot of these new bands are actually looking more towards the video games, whether Guitar Hero or Rock Band than they are to traditional iTunes distribution or something like that.

GL: It's got a couple of advantages. It's more direct. There's not much infrastructure there yet, and that's something we're working on with Sony and Microsoft and we and others are looking into this so my guess is you'll see a lot of developments in this area over the next year or two, but presuming it works out, I think it's a much more direct way for people to experience the kind of music they want to. I was in a band for years, I was on a major label, and it was pretty soul destroying. Some of the music industry aspects of it were not fun and they're still not fun, and giving people ways to get around all of that I think is exciting for us and will be exciting for a lot of the acts that might be able to take advantage of it.

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