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More than 1,500 extra tunes available for download from the ever-growing, in-game Music Store.
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It didn’t matter that the glamour had gone from Rock Band parties round my house (something else that probably nixed the franchise): I was all about sticking on the headphones and trucking through my library of songs. The backwards compatibility with older songs just felt so generous (notching 2000 songs at launch), and the slickness of the new Rock Band Network store and integrating songs into playlists was disproportionally brilliant for how long it must have taken to pull off. I mean, can you beat having Du Hast, Bohemian Rhapsody, Whip It, Space Oddity, Smoke on the Water and Rock Lobster on the same playlist? With the introduction of the keyboard, it meant that the breadth was even more noticeable. I fell on the Rock Band side of the divide for that reason – I’m not only interested in classic rock and metal, and Rock Band gave that to me. The 83 songs felt more varied, and I always liked that about Rock Band.
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At least, the vast majority of people who bought the Rock Band big box, playing 20th Century Boy with mates while drunk, didn’t want that. This is where the journalists got it wrong, I think: it’s a noble message, and one that gets you high review scores, but people just don’t want to buy it. It’s the music game that’s going to actually give you real-world improvement. It said that ‘Rock Band 3 is for the musical enthusiast who wants to bring their skills to video gaming’. There’s a reason that Ride got greenlit, as Activision had seen so much success with the peripherals of their own Guitar Hero.īut the real kicker, I think, was that Rock Band 3’s central message was so nerdy, so niche. Peripherals were dropping in from so many other games, platforms and genres, too, as Guitar Hero had kickstarted something of a trend. I bought the keytar for reasons that I can’t fully explain other than novelty, but the drum-kit with extra cymbal, the two pro-controllers… I just couldn’t justify the house space, let alone the price. The accepted wisdom was that a mainline Rock Band and Guitar Hero would reinvigorate it all, but, well, the accepted wisdom was wrong.ĭuring a recession, there was also peripheral fatigue. Song packs were releasing on the Xbox Store by the week, and the saturation point had been reached. Over in Guitar Hero land, there was Band Hero, DJ Hero, World Tour and umpteen others. From Rock Band 2’s launch to Rock Band 3, we had – deep breath – The Beatles Rock Band (best rhythm action game of all time, so say I), Lego Rock Band, Rock Band Unplugged, Rock Band Mobile and Green Day Rock Band. It’s only in hindsight that we can see what went wrong. We were all doffing our caps to Harmonix for getting people to learn real instrumentation.
ROCK BAND 3 BAND IN A BOX PRO
The peripherals that came with the launch, including the MIDI adapter that allowed you to plug in your own instruments, the keytar and the pro guitars with 102 buttons, were all lauded as being a bridge to actual, real music playing. Virtually every news outlet and magazine was trumpeting it as the second (okay, third) coming. Yet, this was a game that scored a 93 on Metacritic. This wasn’t just a failure, it was a categorical disaster.
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Considering the game sold in such a miniscule amount, you can only imagine what the countless peripherals notched. For context, the first Rock Band sold 4 million units, and the first Guitar Hero sold 11.8 million. Only 7,400 units were sold across all platforms and SKUs, which is crazy, and it landed at 26th in the All Platforms chart. At the time of Rock Band 3’s launch, no one was predicting the size of the failure, and boy, it was a hell of a failure.