I approve of this development. Newsarama has posted a nice, long interview with MTV Games senior VP Paul DeGooyer, and it includes some interesting new details about Green Day: Rock Band and the future of the Rock Band franchise.

The thing that most excites me about Green Day is this bit:

Nrama: Are we looking at any new features, similar to harmony being added in The Beatles?

DeGooyer: There’s a couple little things, I don’t know what we’ve announced yet. Harmony is going to be in it…

The band has always been heavily reliant on lovely pop harmonies, so it’s nice to have confirmation the game will exploit that. The interview doesn’t include a whole lot more details, but it does take a pretty serious look at why Green Day was chosen to follow up the Beatles in the next band-specific Rock Band release. And here DeGooyer shows what I think is a solid understanding of the band, saying, “The albums take this amazing trajectory that preserves their initial punk [ethic] but then expands into topics well beyond that. So from a creative standpoint it suited, we thought, a stand-alone game.”

DeGooyer also talks a great deal about other future projects — most significantly, that Green Day is  “of course not going to be our only game this year.” He also hints at new instruments, referencing “other types of experience with music.”  “There’s other ways to engage with music other than playing guitar or drums,” he says.

One other interesting bit centers around physical versus digital delivery for future projects. DeGooyer talks about how physical releases are good ways of adding new functionality, but then hints that future band-specific releases could be delivered via download only.

Really, the whole interview is an interesting read, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to basically quote the whole damn thing here, so hit the Read link for the rest of the story.

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