Video game news giants IGN have posted an interview with Harmonix’s Audio Director, Eric Brosious, in regards to Rock Band 2.
Some notable parts of the interview:
IGN: How did Harmonix come about this specific list of songs for the Rock Band 2 disc?
Eric Brosious: We maintain an ongoing wish list of songs, plus we gather suggestions from within Harmonix and team at MTV (lots of strong and passionate opinions here) and we scour our newsgroups and forums, our own record collections, etc. We listen through and come up with a list of artists and songs we’d like either for RB2 or for DLC (online). As we get approvals we start to build the RB2 set list trying to put together a good balance of genres, decades, big hits vs. indies, difficulty vs. just plain fun, etc. As the list grows we swap songs around depending on what’s needed. The good thing is that we know we’ll release a song as DLC if we can’t find a slot for it on the disc.
IGN: With the success of the first Rock Band, did you find artists were more open to having their songs in RB2?
Brosious: Yes. We find that it’s sometimes hard to explain what the game is enough to get people interested. But once they see it, they get it. In general, artists were pretty excited about being in the game and about digging up their masters for us. We ended up with more great stuff than we could fit on the disc, but again, we have DLC so, yay!
IGN: How did debuting a new GnR song come about? And how was “Shackler’s Revenge” chosen as the song for RB2?
Brosious: Well of course we really wanted to have GnR included in RB2 and Paul DeGooyer, our music guru and all-around good guy at MTV, worked directly with the GnR folks to make it happen. Everyone involved decided that it’d be ultra fab to have something from the mysterious “Chinese Democracy.” And Axl himself took an interest and chose “Shackler’s Revenge.” Very cool.
Read the full interview here.
You can once again parade around your house looking like a fool and rocking out with a plastic guitar this September when Rock Band 2 hits stores. Just make sure you close the curtains.
