In an interview with the LA Times, the guitar burning rock idol’s stepsister Janie Hendrix said that not only will there be a new album released this year, named “Valleys of Neptune” (based on recordings made in the early months of 1969), but that much more of his back catalogue has been licensed to feature in the next version of the game Rock Band. For some this is enough to suggest a full out branding exercise after the manner in which the Beatles were splashed all over the previous edition.
The game’s creators, Harmonix, were more reserved in their statement to Joystiq;
“While we have not made any official announcements regarding Jimi Hendrix and Rock Band, we are excited to say that we are in discussions to bring more of his music to our platform,”
Harmonix who are the makers of The Beatles: Rock Band and of course the original Rock Band are soon be releasing the new Rock Band 3. So far there has been a lot of talk that users are slowly getting a little bit bored of the games, because they cant see how Harmonix can beat The Beatles Rock Band game.
Dhani Harrison, son of Beatles‘ George Harrison has let a little secret slip out as most musicians do during interviews, whether it’s on purpose or not.
According to an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Harrison (who also helped develop The Beatles: Rock Band) shared the fact that Rock Band 3 may be more than just a game to scratch the surface of the brain. Rock Band 3 may actually teach non-musicians how to play real instruments!
We’ve all played Guitar Hero before. They’re just a bunch of buttons you have to click in synchronization with what you see on the screen. Rock Band 3 will somehow go beyond that since Harrison states:
“I’m workin on [...] making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game. [...] Give me a couple years, it’s going to happen.”
This may also explain why Scott Guthrie told IGN that the Rock Band empire was in for some drastic changes:
“We aren’t standing still – we will keep moving into new areas and look at new technologies that our platform holder partners are also developing, such as Project Natal from Microsoft.”
Don’t expect a new tracklist to be your final news for Rock Band 3. If they actually pull this off, it might take a lot longer and be a lot harder.
In its very first month on the market, The Beatles: Rock Band has jumped to the top music video game charts. According to the NPD Group, The Beatles: Rock Band out sold Guitar Hero 5. The Rock Band spin off sold more than 464,000 copies for the Wii and Xbox 360 alone, meaning that the title brought in at least $27.8 million in sales. The revenue amount still doesnt include PS3 sales or associated accessories, which Im sure would push sale through the roof.
The research firm says the success of the title helped drive a 72 percent year-over-year increase in dollar sales of music and dance games. That was a stark contrast to overall video game sales, which posted a paltry one percent year-over-year sales increase. Overall, the title was the third top game in terms of units sold, with only Halo 3: ODST and Madden NFL 10 selling more copies.
Both Guitar Hero and Rock Band series are made by the same gaming studio, MTV’s Harmonix.
Tapulous has had the music rhythm game scene to itself on the iPod for a long time, but now Harmonix and EA have ported their phenomenally successful Rock Band game to Apple’s iPhone, meaning that you can embarrass yourself pretending to be a Rock star on the train now.
The iPhone game will feature the same 4 instruments (guitar, bass, drums, vocals) as the console version, so if you’ve got 3 friends with the game you can nerd out in the doctor’s waiting room, or on the schoolbus. Rock Band costs $9.99 in the US app store and features the following songs:
Ace of Spades ‘08 – Motorhead
All The Small Things – Blink-182
Attack-30 Seconds To Mars
Bad Reputation – Joan Jett
Bad to The Bone – George Thorogood & the Destroyers
Cherub Rock – Smashing Pumpkins
Debaser – Pixies
Everlong – Foo Fighters
Girls Not Grey – AFI
Give It All – Rise Against
Hanging on the Telephone – Blondie
Hymn 43 – Jethro Tull
Ladybug – Presidents of The United States of America
Lazy Eye – Silversun Pick Ups
Learn To Fly – Foo Fighters
Move Along – All American Rejects
Sabotage – Beastie Boys
Simple Man – Lynard Skynard
Take The Money and Run – Steve Miller Band
We Got The Beat – The Go Go’s
If you don’t have any mates with iPhones, or your mum drives you to school, Tapulous have released the 3rd version of their Tap Tap Revenge Game, which looks equally shiny, flashy and comprehensible only to Japanese people and those under the age of 20. Tapulous’ offering costs a tenth of EA’s game (99c), and has 100 free songs, as well as ‘premium‘ tracks from bands like Blink 182, Fall Out Boy, Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, No Doubt, Tiesto, The KillersKorn, Megadeth, QOTSA, Weezer, AAR, AFI, Keith Urban, Crystal Method, and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
The world favourite cheesy multi-player game Guitar Hero has created a franchise, that to start with, was original, fun, super user friendly and managed to spawn some reasonably good cousins too, Guitar Hero 80’s, World tour and others. DJ Hero is planned to be released in the US for October 27th. Developed by Harmonix Music Systems and published by Red Octain Guitar Hero is decided to be worth around the $275 million mark, while having made sure that they haven’t become too samey and boring. Fighting off the odd critic after the dirty mistake that was Kirt Cobain rising from the grave was a low point, but you have to expect the odd bit if controversy nowadays. If anything it makes their “I am a rock star” simulation game all the more real, ya’ know with court cases and overdoses and erm, zombies……
But DJ Hero, really! We think not. I’m not denying that the sort of songs likely to turn up in a DJ game wont be good,there are a tonne or super dance tunes that would make the idea fun, but it just doesn’t make as much sense as the Guitar Hero or Rock Band Games. How often do you (don’t lie, you know who you are) get caught doing your best “air dj” moves around the living room? Thought so. The game does boast a nice fun, versatile DJ Controller, three buttons (instead of five) sit in what represents your record/scratcher and a slider, for star power no bout. The playlist is quite handsome too with around 100 tunes or more with around 60 different artists.
The artist list is a bit sporadic though with some obvious acts right where you’d expect them, Daft Punk for example with others that make you think are just stoking fillers, like Rihanna and Gwen Stefani, who’s in there with the same song three times! The developers don’t seem to have enough good artists in the bag to make it interesting enough, as well as the original songs being recycled all through the game, the second artists, the ones providing the mash up extras are guilty of this too. A super idea that was rushed me thinks. They could have released it later on, early next year maybe, without the cheeky re-offenders having to beef up the playlists. We’re not yet convinced.
Harmonix has confirmed that its Beatles-themed music game will be released on 9 September this year, and will be called The Beatles: Rock Band. An official site has gone live today inviting gamers to sign up for alerts when pre-ordering begins.
It’s a big deal – the game will launch simultaneously in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, and will be available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.
The game will include support for guitar, bass, mic and drums, but will also offer “a limited number of new hardware offerings modeled after instruments used by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr throughout their career”.
The latest issue of Harmonix’ Rock Band Community Zine included some staggering statistics detailing the performance of the music platform’s downloadable content.
Most notable is the company’s claim of pushing over 28 million Rock Band track downloads to date. The Rock Band store now boasts 345 downloadable tracks by 239 artists, and has seen DLC added for 55 consecutive weeks.
Harmonix also reports that it has hit the 500 total song mark for the Rock Band platform, doing so with weeks to spare on its target of the end of 2008.
Only 6 million songs had been downloaded for Rock Band as of March 20, 2008. Harmonix released the in-game Rock Band music store on that date, and launched Rock Band 2 in September.
Acclaim has decided that they didnt want to battle Guitar Hero and Rock Band and instead have launched an online music game called Rockfree. Players can battle it out with up to seven other people over the internet, and it”ll feature licensed tracks including Iron Man, Fat Lip, and Woman. A closed beta kicked off this weekend, with a full launch scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
WMG, Sony and EMI are on board for licensing – which indicates that Acclaim is ponying up a decent amount of cash for song rights, since WMG is apparently playing hardball on this score with games publishers right now.
Currently, the game is free to play so it is going to be very interesting to see if Acclaim will make money from advertising, or even push though affiliate sales to iTunes and Amazon. All I know is that this is a very interesting idea and it is good to see that Acclaim is moving away from just being a console publisher and now turning into a real games publisher.
In an interview with the LA Times, the guitar burning rock idol’s stepsister Janie Hendrix said that not only will there be a new album released this year, named “Valleys of Neptune” (based on recordings made in the early months of 1969), but that much more of his back catalogue has been licensed to feature in the next version of the game Rock Band. For some this is enough to suggest a full out branding exercise after the manner in which the Beatles were splashed all over the previous edition.
The world favourite cheesy multi-player game 
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