Harmonix Music Systems is breaking new ground by putting a uniquely North American spin on the music game genre. Creators of Frequency, Amplitude, and Karaoke Revolution—which won Time Magazine's Game of the Year in 2003—you'll no doubt be hearing more from them soon. Alex Rigopulos is co-founder and CEO of Harmonix, and recently sat down with GameCritics.com to discuss the past, present, and future.

What is your personal involvement in music and gaming?

Alex Rigopulos, co-founder and CEO of Harmonix

I should start off telling you the history of Harmonix and how we got into music gaming. My background is actually computer science and music composition. I was at MIT for seven years studying both of those things and in a computer music group in a media lab. It was there that I and my co-founder of Harmonix, Eran Egozy, who was my officemate there. We were both conducting our research on it [music gaming], and were both very motivated in [what] we perceived to be an important problem in the world.

Playing music is, I think, one of the most fundamentally joyful experiences that life has to offer. Just about everyone tries at some point in their life to learn to play music: piano lessons as a kid, guitar lessons as a teenager, or whatever. The overwhelming majority of people give it up after six months or a year in frustration, just because it's too difficult to learn to play music the old-fashioned way. Of course, some people go on to become skilled musicians, [but] that's really a tiny minority of those who try. Consequently, this profound joy that comes from making music is only accessible to this tiny percentage of the people of the world. We created this company to try to invent new ways to give music-loving non-musicians—the millions of passionate air-guitarists in the world—[a chance] to play music.

When we started back in 1995, we weren't really thinking about video games. We were making interactive music-making, free-form creative experiences. We had an early PC CD-ROM product call The Axe, which allowed people to improvise instrumental solos using a PC joystick. We also did some location-based entertainment stuff for Disneyworld, things of that sort. It wasn't gaming; it was just real-time improvisatory music-making using simple interfaces and gestural controls

Kakaroke Revolution (PS2)

Something very significant happened around 1997. Music gaming, which previously didn't exist, came out of nowhere and exploded in Japan, starting with Parappa the Rapper, created by Matsura and published by Sony for the Playstation One. It was followed shortly after by Konami's Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution games. The category went from not existing to something gigantic and mass-market in Japan almost overnight, and has sustained itself for more than five years as a major entertainment category over there. When we saw that happen, it really struck us that videogaming was the mass-market interactive medium, and it was the medium through which we wanted to achieve our mission of bringing the music-making experience to people who are non-musicians.

When we set about the process of designing Frequency, our goal was to create an experience that looked like a videogame visually, that we could present to gamers as a video game. But once they got inside it, using the skills that they already had as gamers, they

Frequency (PS2) (top), Amplitude (PS2) (bottom)

would realize that what they're really doing is making music, and what they were having is a music-making experience. Gamers have an incredibly deep and dedicated skill set that nobody gives them any credit for, which they've developed through gaming. Playing games is not easy, which you notice immediately if you put a sophisticated video game in the hands of a 45-year old who didn't grow up on video games and watch them fail to be able to deal with it. Gamers have all these video game-specific skills: responding to the symbolic and iconographic visual information with very rapid manual response. We decided to take those skills and build a video game that utilized them rather than try to teach gamers a whole new set of skills. People didn't want to learn a bunch of new skills, so we decided to use [the gaming skills] that people already had and repurpose them onto the task of making music. That's what Frequency was all about, and that's what we did again with Amplitude.