The Beatles: Rock Band was the single greatest thing to come out of the games industry's plastic instrument craze, an absurdly lavish and beautifully judged tribute to the most important music band in history. It cost me an absolute tonne but I still have an old 360 in the garage somewhere with all the DLC, and outside of the actual music it's probably my favourite Beatles product.
From the game's opening seconds it's obvious this was a massive labour of love for Harmonix, the studio that had kicked-off the whole genre with the original Guitar Hero. Many of those involved in bringing the project to life have now given interviews for The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom, a newly released book by journalist Blake Hester, with an excerpt detailing some of those initial meetings published on Design Room.
The chapter begins with some of the initial enquiries and how the project got started, largely thanks to George Harrison's son Dhani already being a fan of Guitar Hero. Dhani Harrison made the key introduction to Apple Corps, the Beatles' company, and key figures including the surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono.
"With Paul, it was just trying to get him to understand what this experience would be like, you know?" says Harmonix co-founder and CTO Eran Egozy. "And there is this [concern like], 'Wait a minute. Are we going to let people sound bad with our music?' You know, there's concern about, like, how are you treating the music? So if people are playing it and they're screwing it up—is that bad? Like, are we giving people a chance to play Beatles music and make it sound bad? That was a concern."
The parties eventually rationalised that the project was a bit like a Beatles cover band: "You don't really have control over how they're going to sound," says Egozy. "And they're probably going to sound as best as they can, you know?" Happy that players would be doing "their best to sound good on the game", the Beatles' braintrust accepted "the music will sound great."
Then, as Harmonix project leader Greg LoPiccolo recalls, it was time to get started: "It was like a mission from God to do justice to that game."
But The Beatles would retain an element of creative oversight, which meant creative director Josh Randall constantly "flying back-and-forth to Abbey Road, sometimes like every two weeks, and meeting with Sir Paul and Ringo and Yoko and the Harrisons. And the pressure I put on myself in those meetings was a lot."
A key part of The Beatles Rock Band was the creation of new avatars of the group members alongside a whole new aesthetic style that, while obviously indebted to the band's own creations, had to fit alongside those while being its own thing. When Harmonix was ready to show off the work-in-progress, they had some pretty tough people to impress.
"So there's this one famous scene—and I wasn't in the office at this point—where Yoko Ono comes in to see how things are going with her entourage and all that," recalls Egozy. "She comes in and the animators show her some of the stuff they've been working on with John's models."
"I would have meetings where it's like, 'OK, Yoko, here is our depiction of your dead husband singing this super impassioned song... What do you think?'" says Randall.
"And she hates it," says Egozy. "She's like, 'That looks stupid. He doesn't act like that.'"
"The thing is, she was totally right," says Randall. "I don't know how this happened—I mean, I know how it happens, because videogames are hard. John was less developed by the time Yoko came to visit us, compared to some of the other band members. He looked like a mopey shoe-gazer guy. He was like this, looking down at the ground. We hadn't figured out how to depict his personality. And so in this meeting, she's like, 'No, he was a tough guy. He could be mean. Like, that's not him. Who is this guy?'"
Yoko is obviously a somewhat controversial figure in Beatles history and, though the unfair cliche of her being responsible for the band's breakup has receded, has been responsible for managing Lennon's legacy since his 1980 assassination. She's known for being fiercely protective of his likeness and music and, on occasion, litigious. You can view this in all sorts of ways: but it meant that Harmonix would need her to be happy with Lennon's avatar and presentation in the game.
"She was holding the development team to a very high standard with respect to how John was represented in the game—as she should have," says Harmonix co-founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos. "She was a tough customer—as she should have been. You know, this was an important project, and we actually were grateful for that level of scrutiny. I mean, she actually made the effort to come all the way up to Cambridge and spend a day in the studio, sitting with our artists focused on minute details of the face modeling and the animations and everything else.
"So, as you can imagine, the artists and animators are all, like, sweating bullets having to justify the work to Yoko. But she was right! Her criticisms were spot-on. And while it was stressful for us, we were really grateful to have her looking over our shoulder at the work, making sure we were doing it well."
Part of the solution was simply going back to the source, and the devs re-familiarising themselves with one of the most iconic early Beatles moments.
"I was like, 'Well, can we maybe just look at some footage together and talk about it?" says Randall. "And so I put on footage of Shea Stadium, and immediately there's John Lennon standing at the front of the stage looking down his nose at everyone, like balls out rock and roll god not giving a fuck. We saw that, and me and our animation director just had this mind meld. We looked at each other and Chris, the animation director, clicked on the back of John's spine [and lifted him up a bit]. And she's like, 'That's John. There he is.'"
The Harmonix devs go on to talk about the privilege of being able to use The Beatles' multitrack masters, hearing isolated vocal lines and then the band ribbing each other between takes for messing up a section, or suggesting a different approach for the next go. It's the same kind of archival material that makes Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back such an incredible watch for fans, but back then was just gold dust.
"They'll finish this incredible take of the song and then just start talking about something that has nothing to do with anything," says Rigopulos. "So just having that kind of audio peek behind the curtain [into] the inner lives of the musicians as they're working on this material was really stimulating."
"I mean, I'm so proud of it," says Randall. "And I think it does that thing. It"s like a vehicle for The Beatles' music to sink deeper into people's consciousness I feel like. It's like an alternate delivery system. I feel like we did the work to really take their spirit and their music and bring it to this other realm that still allowed the spark that made them magic, to have that spark reach people through a videogame. I think we were able to find that spark and pass it through this crazy system of technology and have it still present."
