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

What challenges do you face when creating a music game?

The biggest challenge isn't really a developmental one; it's a marketing challenge. As I said, although music games have been enormously successful in Japan, and while we and our publishers believe that eventually music games will also explode in the U.S., it hasn't happened yet. It's sort of a chicken and egg problem. It's very hard to make games successful without a marketing budget. On the other hand, without a proven successful existing category, it's very hard to get that marketing budget. We're trying to break the music gaming category in the U.S., but Frequency and Amplitude never had any substantial marketing support.

The real challenge we're facing is, "what is the right way to break the music gaming category to make it successful enough that we can make the games without such budget constraints?" That's part of what led us to Karaoke Revolution. We took a step back and said, "Well, what kind of game can we create that has incredibly broad, mainstream appeal to even people who don't consider themselves 'gamers' would be willing to pick up this game and give it a try? How can we turn the tide and help expand people's understanding of what music gaming is, and put it on the map as a mainstream category?" That was a big part of the conception of Karaoke Revolution.

Yes, I was curious about that. How did that partnership with Konami come to be?

We had been loosely in touch with Konami for years, simply because they're one of the one or two companies that were really on the forefront of the music gaming explosion in Japan. Because we were a company that was really trying to develop music games and make them happen in the U.S., we were just kind of in touch with them, letting them know what we were trying to accomplish. They had been thinking about this karaoke project for a while. When it occurred to them that it was actually something they wanted to pursue, we were the development company that they called, simply because that's our speciality. So we got together and designed the game.

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

Konami's BEMANI (i.e., Beatmania, Dance Dance Revolution) titles tend to use a lot of peripherals and specialized controllers for pretty much each individual game. Do you guys plan on using any kind of peripherals like that?

Well, it's hard to say. We don't have any specific plans to do so at the moment. The challenge is that, with the Japanese games, Konami's games, they all started in the arcade. When you're dealing with arcades and you're selling a $5000 box, putting on a guitar controller is easy to make work in the business model. They were products that people were already playing to death in the arcades. When they released them onto the Playstation, they knew it was going to sell half a million units of the home version, so it was very low risk to manufacture half a million custom controllers. They know that the huge fans of the game are not just going to spend the fifty bucks on the game—they'll spend the extra fifty bucks on the controller just for that one game.

If you're just building a game from scratch and you're just launching it for the first time in the home market, there is no such level of confidence, especially in the U.S. There is no similar level of confidence that that is a capital investment worth making. It's very risky to spend that money because you're asking the consumer not just to buy a new game for fifty bucks, but to buy a custom controller that will work for just that one game when they probably don't even know what that game is yet.