Harmonix cops to iPod music game origins and talks about letting you use your own tunes in Rock Band 2.
by Levi Buchanan
February 22, 2008 - Harmonix, best known as the music game developer behind the Guitar Hero and Rock Band juggernauts, hosted a session at the Game Developer's Conference this week to discuss Phase, its iPod game. The session essentially went over the nuts and bolts of developing a music game for the iPod, but the most interesting factoid from the presentation was when Harmonix's Chris Foster revealed that Phase originally started on the PlayStation Portable. However, Harmonix was concerned about the hassle of moving music files to the PSP, so the project tilted toward the iPod, which had become the de facto music player.
In talking about the ability to use a personal library of music for Phase (called Procedural Generation), Foster did say that Harmonix is indeed looking into ways to allow players to port their own music into Rock Band. However, due to tech limitations (and also the apparent financial boon of selling song downloads), this feature would have to wait for Rock Band sequels.
In their slide show presentation, Harmonix showed a flash from the PSP game -- and it looked remarkably close to Frequency and Amplitude, which were the developer's criminally underplayed rhythm games for the PS2.