MacTribe recently had the opportunity to sit down with Harmonix Creative Director Josh Randall, project leader of The Beatles: Rock Band. The game is being released on 09/09/2009 by the Cambridge video game development company, famous for great successes like Rock Band and Guitar Hero. We couldn’t be more excited to pick his brain and find out how the project got started (and just how much the remaining Beatles and their wives were involved!). Read on to hear what our local video game heroes did to make this game a reality.

MacTribe: Did you guys remaster all of the tracks from the original recordings or did you use the existing digital masters?

Randall: We actually worked with Giles Martin [son of legendary producer George Martin] to go back to the original multi-track tapes that have all the separated parts. And basically he and his team, with some of our audio folks, went through all 45 songs in the game and separated out all the tracks to allow them to be playable in Rock Band. Some of the earlier recordings were just recorded to two tracks and we couldn’t use them. We had to use some pretty advanced audio filtering techniques to surgically remove whole instruments from the mix and extract them to a separate track. Like, the songs they play in the Cavern Club were recorded on 2 tracks. They recorded in different formats though, so when we got closer to Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road we had eight tracks.

MT: How closely did you work with Paul McCartney and the rest of the surviving Beatles and their representatives?

JR: We worked really closely with the guys at Apple Corps and Giles Martin, and from there what we would do is basically set up monthly meetings with the shareholders—that’s Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison—and we would basically have these milestones where we’d work with Apple Corps and come up with the next plan, like having the characters animated, make some new venues, and present them to the shareholders and kind of get their opinions. Then we’d take that feedback and get it back to the studio here and rework the stuff and meet with them again in three to four weeks time. It was amazing to interact with these guys on a creative level and once they saw some of the game in motion they got pretty excited: McCartney was showing footage of the game on his tour. It was a blast working with them. They all were amazing at giving us feedback when we needed it. Olivia saw an early version of George that she had some comments about and she basically said “Why don’t you guys visit my home, where George lived” and just pulled down book after book of photos. We sat there for hours, had tea, and found the parts that were missing, the parts we’d sort of gotten wrong and we sat there together and were like “ok, his hair is slightly different.” And then with Yoko it was awesome because at the time we having a hard time nailing our John avatar…he looked okay but we were having a hard time figuring it out. She was able to really quickly pinpoint the stuff that wasn’t the real John. I showed her our version of 3D John performing at Shea stadium and he was looking down at his feet a bunch, was kind of hunched over a bit, and then I got some footage of the real Shea stadium concert and John was standing in front of 50,000 people just totally rocking their faces off. He was super confident and really proud and he was like a hero.

MT: Did Harmonix get George Martin involved at all?

JR: Every once in a while we’d ask him about certain aspects of what Abbey Road studios 2 looked like. Giles had shown George the game along the way but we weren’t really working with him. We were working on all the stuff he’d done already, so it might have been a little redundant for him to be there.

MT: We understand you guys aren’t doing the entire catalogue, just the greatest hits?

JR: What we wanted to do was kind of give people a journey through all the different eras of the Beatle’s career and what we focused on were the most iconic moments that were good for the game. So to choose the songs plus the albums you can download after, we tried to pick songs that were fun to play in the game and as well as iconic songs from certain eras of their career.

MT: How do the vocal harmonies work?

JR: As we got into really listening to the music we were trying to find features of the game that would be particularly Beatles-ish. One of the standout features is their three part vocal harmony, but how do we do it? A team met every single morning to figure out how we could get people to sing harmony together. Similar to the previous rock bands there’s a vocal line with lyrics and the notes you have to hit, and if you want you can kind of stick to one color, the lead vocal line. But there are two other tinted lines that are the harmony lines. If you want, you can plug in up to three mics and all sing the lead line, you won’t lose points…we’ve made harmony an added bonus. If you’re playing vocals, you get rated from “good” to “great” to “awesome”, but that didn’t do anything for the Beatles theme so we changed it to “fab”. People basically try to get triple fab’s which means you sang in perfect three part harmony, and you’ll see oh, you got 5 out of 10 triple fabs. If you have a hard time figuring out the harmony we have a practice mode where you can pick any part of a song and hold down a button to hear a guide pitch to show you how the harmonies go. It’s been a really cool feature, and we’ve seen so far that people really love it and pick up on it really quickly. Being in a room with a bunch of people singing in harmony can be really beautiful and moving (if they have good voices!) and I think that encouraging people to sing together in harmony is part of our jobs here.

MT: Aside from the harmonies, the Dreamscapes are the leading special feature of the game, right?

JR: The game starts at The Cavern Club then goes to the Ed Sullivan Show, then Shea, then Budokan, then the Beatles stopped touring and that kind of presented a challenge to us. So we came up with Dreamscapes. The walls of Studio 2 melt away and the Beatles get transported to these locations. I think that the Dreamscapes were the most fun for me, since they challenged us to come up with over twenty interactive music videos, which was a daunting task. People have had a particular idea of the imagery of this music for their whole lives. We had to meet or exceed the expectations of what people have had in their heads all these years. Our other games are focused on bands performing in a rock club or venue, so here was a place where our artists could stretch their wings and go into these really psychedelic, trippy landscapes inspired by Beatles music but their minds too, and that was really exciting for us. Some of the other stuff we got to do was cutting to the teenagers totally freaking out and losing their minds in the audience. We came up with the idea to do high resolution 3D screaming teenagers that we hadn’t done before and were a lot of fun to watch in the game. We also spent a lot of time trying to give our avatars life and personality and charm. The original Beatles were so charming it was hard to make their personalities come through in computer animation. We had to write new technology to make them seem more alive, more engaging to the camera and the player. You really feel like those guys are there, looking back at you, which is great.

MT: That leads us to the next question: how did you actually develop this?

JR: Computers (laughter). Well, we studied tons of footage, video and still, from Apple Corps’s massive archive and we started to sculpt the Beatles in 3D to create their avatars. That took the longest. We worked on that for almost the entire project, refining them and making their faces better and better. We had to really go in and identify each guy and figure out what their unique moves were, how their face changed as they sang different vowels, and study stuff as much as we could to make it as accurate as possible. We did the same with the venues. We actually met with Paul and Ringo to talk about The Cavern Club and its environment because you sort of hear stories but you can’t really know. They wanted to play a gig like that again because it was really fun, you know? A lot of studying and iterating, basically.

MT: Aside from the subject matter, is there any huge format difference between this and Rock Band 2?

JR: Yes, it plays similar to Rock Band 2 but all the art is redone from the ground up. It feels similar but there’s enough new stuff that it feels like a totally new game.

MT: How did you start developing this, and what were the steps of development?

JR: George Harrison's son, Dhani Harrison, had met the head of MTV and they got talking…Dhani was a fan of our games and he was like “you should make a game where a full band can play.” At the time we were developing Rock Band, so a meeting was set up between Dhani and the Harmonix guys where they said “oh, we should make a music game, that’d be cool, hahaha.” Then the more they thought about it they were like, “wait, that would be cool.” From there, we started talking to Apple Corp and it got the ball rolling. We just went for it and here we are today.

MT: How are your presales doing?

JR: What I’ve seen on the web is that people are genuinely excited about this game. It’s really resonating with Beatles fans, you know, seeing the guys depicted in this way, people seem really psyched.

MT: Both MacTribe and Harmonix are based out of Cambridge; what’s your background?

JR: Harmonix was founded by two guys [Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy ] from the MIT music lab and they created this company to let people enjoy the thrill of making music without actually knowing how to play an instrument. We made The Axe, a PC software music improviser, and then we made Frequency, Amplitude, Karaoke Revolution, EyeToy, then the Guitar Heroes and Rock Bands. It’s been a fun ride. I’ve been here for about 10 years.

MT: What’s your favorite Beatles album?

JR: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.