Rock Band house Harmonix is waiting to release a music creator feature to compete with Guitar Hero: World Tour‘s.
Earlier this week, MTV’s Stephen Totilo visited Harmonix to demo an updated Rock Band 2. He took the opportunity to ask public relations representative John Drake about the potential for a music mixer at some point in the series’ future, since rival Guitar Hero is touting it as a major selling point over Rock Band.
Drake reiterated the company’s heritage in music, “The music creator thing… we’re a company of musicians, right? I have a band and a song in the game. We have over 40 bands in the company, 85% of us play an instrument, we really get music. We’ve talked about doing a music creator. We’ve actually done them before in other games that we’ve done like in Amplitude and Frequency… We’ve done the whole MIDI creation thing.”
While the idea has been on Harmonix’s mind, the studio doesn’t want to release a half-hearted add-on just to compete with Activision, Guitar Hero‘s publisher. Future composers are forced to wait for either the next Rock Band or a downloadable song creation patch.
“We think we can do something really ambitious and really great that’s going to speak across all the users of the game, not just hardcore users – and that will result in some awesome stuff and not just Final Fantasy covers. I mean, I like them [FF covers] too,” stated Drake. “So Harmonix is going to do something great with it [music creation] down the road, we didn’t want to rush it out and do it half-assed. This is definitely a full-on project for us. You’ll hear more about it soon.”
For those just wanting to rock “Round and Round”, the September 30 launch of the Xbox 360 Rock Band can’t come soon enough.
