A long road to a simple fantasy
When Oculus fans unwrap their new motion controllers sometime later this year, they’ll find a strange little accessory alongside them: a chunk of black plastic with an oddly shaped hole in the middle. This is Oculus’ invitation to try out Rock Band VR, one of the biggest, most potentially crowd-pleasing Oculus Touch launch titles.
A game franchise that lets people play out their rock n roll fantasies sounds like such a natural fit for VR that the core game would barely need to change. As a launch trailer last year simply put it, “We wanted to make the Rock Band experience on Oculus so realistic that the player actually feels like they are a rock star.” But for all the video’s easy jokes about groupies, headbanging, and smashed guitars, the reality is far more complicated — and more interesting. As a company, Rock Band developer Harmonix Music Systems has always focused on building for odd new platforms. The company was founded in 1995 by a pair of MIT Media Lab students, Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos. Its early projects weren’t games so much as experimental electronic instruments, including projects like The Axe, which let players make music by moving a PC joystick, or an Epcot Center installation that produced a similar effect with infrared sensors. Besides Guitar Hero and Rock Band, with their custom plastic peripherals, Harmonix produced one of the first games for Sony’s EyeToy camera, as well as one of the most successful Xbox Kinect game franchises, Dance Central. In 2015, the studio announced a music visualizer called Harmonix Music VR for Sony’s virtual reality platform.
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