Rocked On

This week I read an article saying Harmonix, the folks who made Rock Band and the original Guitar Hero, would stop putting out new material for Rock Band 4 next week. My first response was surprise that there were still new songs being put out for a Rock Band. My second response was, wow, I really miss playing Rock Band.

If you somehow missed the era when the games’ plastic peripherals briefly dominated living rooms, here’s the rundown: where Guitar Hero let you hit buttons and strum a plastic guitar to a song, Rock Band took that one step further and gave you a drum, a bass guitar, and a mic. So you and three friends got to be a rock band as you played songs by everyone from Bon Jovi to the Beastie Boys It’s a remarkably simple concept: hit the right buttons on instrument-shaped controllers (or hit the right notes on the mic), live the fantasy of being a rock star.

And man, it was fun. 

Rock Band and its cousin Guitar Hero: World Tour (I played both)were excellent party games. You could pick a song most of the group knew and try and play along. You didn’t really need to have any actual skill (I can hardly carry a tune and my tenuous grasp of rhythm was tested on my usual station of the drums), but that wasn’t all that important. Even if you weren’t actually playing music, you were having a lot of fun.

The games faded from popular consciousness over time. The market got oversaturated and people realized that those drum and guitar peripherals take up a lot of space. But it’s been over ten years and I still have such fond memories of the game. I remember staying up late playing “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and “What I’ve Done” until I had blisters on my fingers, I remember giving my Mom the mic as we made our way through The Beatles’ catalogue, I remember a living room full of people singing along to “Hungry Like The Wolf” even though technically only four people were actually playing. And there are still a few songs in my music library that I found through the games.

Memories like these are hardly unique (the comments section of the Polygon article about this is filled with sweet anecdotes) and I think it’s because those games tapped into something video games do so well. Rock Band, like all video games, sees you interacting with a virtual world. But even though the world is virtual, the memories you make are real. It’s you managing to nail the opening to “That’s What You Get” on the drums. I’ll never be a stage musician (see prior lack of musical talent), but I definitely got to be a rock star with some friends on a night in the summer of 2009.