Rock Band

Rock Band is a series of music video games developed by Harmonix and MTV Games, and distributed by Electronic Arts for the Nintendo DS, iOS, Playstation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, Xbox One and Xbox 360 game systems. The concept for Rock Band was formed while Harmonix was working on the Guitar Hero series, with the idea to expand the note-matching gameplay into multiple instruments. Further, Harmonix provided 275 consecutive weeks of regular downloadable content, in the form of additional downloadable songs; with the release of Rock Band 4, Harmonix has restarted these regular content releases. Born out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, the first product made by Harmonix was The Axe: Titans of Classic Rock for DOS-based computers, challenging the player to use four keys on the keyboard to match notes in several songs. Looking to find a place for this type of game, Harmonix' founders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy looked to Japan where music games like PaRappa the Rapper were becoming popular. Harmonix used their previous experience in note-matching techniques from Frequency and Amplitude, as well as the lessons learned in developed Karaoke Revolution to create the Guitar Hero software. According to Harmonix Vice President of Product Development, Greg LoPiccolo, the Harmonix team had already envisioned the possibility of different instruments before they were completed with the Guitar Hero series; Rigopulos noted that the Guitar Hero work was only a partial approach to this, limited to what they could do on a "shoe-string budget". Harmonix also embraced the idea of Rock Band as a platform rather than a software title, and took steps to incorporate downloadable content to extend players' music libraries without having them need to buy a new software disk.