RedOctane continued to publish the Guitar Hero series, bringing Neversoft on board for development duties. Harmonix would continue to partner with RedOctane in the development of Guitar Hero II.Īs the success of the Guitar Hero series grew, Harmonix and RedOctane were purchased by MTV Games and Activision respectively, in 2006 MTV paid $175 million to acquire Harmonix. Guitar Hero proved to be a surprise success, and led to the development of multiple, full sequels and an expansion title. It was approached by RedOctane to help develop Guitar Hero, a music video game similar to GuitarFreaks by Konami in that a special guitar-shaped controller was used to mimic lead guitar playing to several rock tracks. Harmonix Music Systems previously developed several music-based games, including Frequency, Amplitude and the Karaoke Revolution series. Over 3,000 songs representing more than 1,200 different artists are available in the franchise library, and over 100 million downloadable song purchases have been made.
To date, over 13 million copies of Rock Band titles have been sold netting more than $1 billion in total sales. The company has also designed the Rock Band Network to allow bands and labels to publish their songs as Rock Band tracks that can be purchased by players.
Harmonix has also created standalone Track Packs that contain either a selection of downloadable content, or a selection of band-specific songs.
Harmonix has also regularly provided downloadable content, in the form of additional downloadable songs on a weekly basis through the game consoles' network services. The first game in the series, Rock Band, was released in 2007 shortly after Harmonix was acquired by MTV Games, and its sequel Rock Band 2 was released in 2008. Players are scored on their ability to match scrolling musical notes while playing instruments, and by their ability to match the singer's pitch on vocals. Players can play the lead guitar, bass guitar, keyboard, and drums parts to songs, as well as sing into a USB microphone. The series, inspired by Harmonix's previous efforts on the Guitar Hero series, allows up to four players to simulate the performance of popular rock music songs by playing with controllers modeled after musical instruments. Rock Band is a series of music video games developed by Harmonix Music Systems and MTV Games, and distributed by Electronic Arts for the Nintendo DS, iOS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, and Xbox 360 game systems. For the type of musical group, see Rock band. For the first video game of the series, see Rock Band (video game). This article is about the video game series.
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