While My (Plastic) Guitar Gently Weeps
Everyone loves The Beatles. They’ve been a fixture—no, the fixture—in rock and roll lore for nearly two generations now, and many of us grew up with their music just as our parents did. The Fab Four are easily the most prolific band of all time, as evidenced by their lasting influence upon not only popular music but also society, culture, art, philosophy, and politics.
Which is why we here at Break Out The Oreos were shocked to discover that Harmonix Music Systems, creators of the Rock Band video game franchise (you know, the version of Guitar Hero that doesn’t suck), have been developing a game called The Beatles: Rock Band, a virtual, first-person, 45-song tour of the entirety of The Beatles’ career. Apparently we missed the first announcement back in March, but there was no way that we were going to not notice once the trailers started coming out, and with good reason; check out what’s being called the game’s “cinematic trailer” below:
Devon analyzes the trailers, gets his music nerd on, muses on both best- and worst-case scenarios, and makes fun of both hipsters and children, all after the jump:
Stunning? Yeah. Not only does the trailer follow The Beatles’ rise to stardom and venture into their psychadelic—it also does a remarkable job of referencing the iconic moments of their immortal legacy, from their early publicity in Liverpool to their historic greeting at JFK Airport to their breakthrough on the Ed Sullivan Show to their unprecedentedly massive performance at Shea Stadium. The artists and company that created this trailer creatively displayed their understanding of and appreciation for the details of The Beatles experience, the happenings and machinations behind the songs. It looks promising, doesn’t it?
But wait, wait, wait—this doesn’t prove anything other than the fact that somebody working for Harmonix can create a really cool animation. What’s the actual game look like?
Ah. Now we can get into it, but only after smirking at the “T for Teen” rating for “mild lyrics” and “tobacco reference.” First of all, the gameplay actually looks pretty cool. It’s immediately identifiable as a Rock Band game (of course), and the cinematics that accompany the music seem to capture the historical settings pretty well, from the wardrobes to the locations to the actual likenesses of the musicians. Of course, once you reach the Sgt. Pepper stage of their discography things become trickier, since The Beatles had stopped touring and performing live at this point. The game’s designers seem to work around this shift so that the second half of the game takes place between recording studios and metaphorical hallucinations rather than in front of shrieking, adoring crowds. Which is (probably) fine; what else were they supposed to do?
What’s really cool is the trailer’s last scene, a recreation of the famous performance of “Get Back” on the roof of Apple Studios—the last time The Beatles would ever play together publicly. This, more than anything else, should put those concerned at ease.
But, just for fun, let’s remain concerned, for whatever reason we like; perhaps we’re worried about the effect this game will have on the legacy of The Beatles, or maybe we’re Harmonix fanboys who view this as the studio’s biggest project to date, or perhaps we’re grumpy, aging Baby Boomers who don’t want to see the soundtrack to their childhood co-opted by these goshdarned video gizmos. Let’s take a look at what could possibly go wrong with The Beatles: Rock Band:
The End-of-the-World, Nightmare Scenario
The game sucks. There are bugs, the graphics are mediocre, the band members look like animated robots, and the only reason anybody would want to replay the game would be if they were twelve and wanted to beat the game’s hardest song on “Expert” difficulty and put it on YouTube. Every party you go to will feature five people drunkenly butchering “Octopus’s Garden” at least seven times each evening. Your nine-year-old cousins will hear you listening to “Back in the U.S.S.R.” on your iPod and will exclaim, “Hey, that’s the song from Rock Band!” There will be a The Beatles: Lego Rock Band spinoff. Nobody will ever be able to have a conversation about The Beatles without at least thinking about what a horrid, massive fuck-up this game was, and how the best feeling they ever experienced was when they joined three thousand other angry former customers in burning their copy of the game in front of Harmonix headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
It will be ugly. You will cry. We will all of us cry.
Depressed? Yeah. Let’s go the other way now, just to cheer us up. What if everything to do with this game goes right?
The Bunnies, Rainbows, and Unicorns Scenario
The game is awesome. It’s fun to play, and allows people to enjoy the music of The Beatles in a way they never have before. It garners extravagant praise from both the gaming and music spheres, and is deemed a groundbreaking achievement in digital art. Nobody has ever made a video game like this before. It is understanding, respectful, and appreciative of its subject matter, and is a triumphantly innovative celebration of The Beatles and their legacy. Its “career” mode enjoyably and accurately portrays the band’s rise to fame and musical experimentation, so much so that many consider it to be the Beatles docudrama that’s never been made. It reinvigorates America’s interest in The Beatles, so much so that you will finally be able to discuss the compositional details of The White Album with your friends, relatives, and potential life partners for hours and hours on end. Women (or men) will swoon over your authentically well-endowed knowledge of the Fab Four, and between adjusting your hipster jeans and smoking aloofly you will nonchalantly and unironically remark that you were listening to The Beatles “before they got all popular.”
It will be beautiful. You will cry. We will all of us cry. But happily.
The Serious-as-Swine-Flu, Real-World Conclusion
As with all things, The Beatles: Rock Band will probably fall somewhere between these two extremes. It’s the opinion of this humble writer that it’ll lean substantially to the “unicorn” side of the spectrum; if the two trailers above are any indication of what the game will be like, it seems like Harmonix is going about making this game in the right way. It will probably spark renewed interest in The Beatles, hopefully especially among those people who rarely or never listen to them. Your nine-year-old cousins will probably still identify “Back in the U.S.S.R” with Rock Band; it’ll be your responsibility to educate them. Twelve-year-olds will probably still record themselves “perfecting” Harrison’s guitar solos and put themselves on YouTube; it’ll be your responsibility to give these videos a “one-star” rating. There very well may be a The Beatles: Lego Rock Band spinoff; it will be your responsibility to aggressively ridicule this and all other Lego video games, because they’re fucking stupid—whatever happened to actually physically playing with Lego products?
But at the end of the day, it’ll probably all be okay. At least people are listening to the music, right?
So if you are leery about how The Beatles: Rock Band will turn out (as we are), take solace in this fact: Harmonix is full of smart people who are taking their time to make this game the right way, and they have the endorsement of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison. Screwing this up would not only betray The Beatles and the fans, but would also piss off some high-profile people, and would bring a backlash upon Harmonix as quick and devastating as Maxwell’s silver hammer. It’s safe to say that they have a few incentives to do a good job.
Don’t just take our word for it! Check out The Beatles: Rock Band at its website, on Wikipedia, and in the news.
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Devon Grandy is a writer, blogger, humorist, filmmaker, and musician. The creator and Editor-in-Chief of Break Out The Oreos, Devon is chiefly responsible for the alternatingly mind-numbing and glee-inspiring process of transforming his brainchild into a "for real" web magazine. Read more.
