Rock Band

The first time I saw Guitar Hero was at a friends house.  Her brother, who was away at college, bought Guitar Hero for her and mailed it to her house.  I heard about the game with the funky controllers, but hadn't seen it yet.  We plugged it in, started playing, and it was pretty cool.

I quickly recognized the game as DDR with your hands, and a lot of the same skills transferred.  It  was about following the beat, not looking at the line.  I knew you had to associate a color and a position with a muscle movement.  You can't spend time thinking that a green line means you have to use the top button with your pointer finger.  You start to know green and red at the same time as its own combination.  Then you stop seeing individual notes and instead see groups of notes, patterns.  Soon you're going through whole sections of the song on instict, not even sure yourself how you're hitting each note.

I stopped playing Guitar Hero when I went to college.  I eventually moved into a house with five other guys, one of which bought Rock Band.  It was the cool new toy to have, and the whole house started playing it.  I spend too many nights struggling to fall asleep while Jesse (poorly) wailed Maps into the microphone.  I had gotten to the point with Guitar Hero where the guitar was getting really hard, so I thought I'd try the drums in Rock Band.  Sure enough, it was just like DDR and the guitar.  Using the same techniques I quickly climed the difficulty tree of the drums.  I could do a lot of the songs on expert, though probably 30% of them were still too difficult.  There were concepts like drum rolls that eluded me.

Soon after we got Rock Band I secured a job working on a kids card game, Xeko.  It turns out my boss played Rock Band with his friends, and he invited me over to jam with them sometime.  They had a full band - guitar, bass, drums, and singer.  Fortunately for me, their drummer had a new baby on the way and was running out of time to devote to the band.  I slipped into his position and was drumming with those guys regularly.  It became a ritual of rock band, sandwiches, and watching bad TV ever other week or so.

We started to take our act on the road.  There was a bar they took me to on my 21st birthday that had a rock band stage set up.  We showed up and played a set.  Even though there weren't a lot of people there, we still had a great time, and we've been there a coup times since.  Child's Play had a Rock Band event at another bar, and we went to show off our act.  We didn't do very well, but again, we still had a good time.  We weren't a very skilled band, but we got to watch some real acts perform.  By that I mean they got a high score, but I'd like to think we were the better performance.  When Rock Band II came out we even played a challenge online.  A few weeks from now we'll be trying to find a place to play in Las Vegas.

It's amazing how these games can network people together.  The DDR type game has evolved, taking on a mainstream theme (of rock!) and really playing off of its IP.  It seems silly to get a lot of gamer nerds together to watch other gamer nerds play a game, much less get non-gamer nerds to watch, but Rock Band can do it.  A little IP can go a long way.