Ladies and gentlemen: Music games haven’t had a single damned thing in common with electronic memory game Simon — OK, except for colored buttons — since the PaRappa series, which actually was memory-based. (You’d be shown a sequence of button-taps, and your job was to repeat it.)

Modern music games, on the other hand, aren’t at all about memory, at least not that kind of rote-recitation memory.

So, to recap: When you compare music games to Simon, you sound like an idiot. Especially if you then archly refer to the genre as “sort-of-music-y games.”

Though I suppose if you’re trying to memorize entire songs and then repeat them back, that could explain why you’re missing the point so comically.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. Thank you for your attention.

I’ll admit it: I’m nervous.

It’s Monday morning as I write this, and I’m just tying up some loose ends in preparation for the official launch of Plastic Axe. Tomorrow. I’m compulsively proofreading posts, checking and re-checking my plugins, trying to fake out The Vault’s search function, hemming and hawing and going back and forth about exactly how many posts I want per page. (Seven, in case you wondered. For now, at least.) You know, pre-launch stuff.

Ninety-nine percent of you won’t read this until after launch, of course, which gives this post something of an odd status. It exists in a kind of closed-off time loop; it’s today where I am, but tomorrow — or later — where you are. It’s a unique opportunity to look around and take a breath and organize some thoughts before I initiate the Full Contact Media Blitz tomorrow morning. So let me tell you what I’m hoping to accomplish here. Continue reading →

If you’ve been playing a lot of music games, you may be getting to the point where you’ve started thinking to yourself, “Hey, maybe I could actually do this for real!”

Don’t laugh: Countless musicians (including yours truly) have gotten their start in a similar way, moving from tennis rackets to hand-me-down acoustic guitars, or chopsticks to drum sticks. I’m not saying everyone can do it — some people simply aren’t musical, not in that way — but here’s a secret a lot of musicians would rather you not know: It’s really not that hard. Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, games industry website Gamasutra posted a fairly detailed story about a decline in retail sales for the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. “U.S. Guitar Hero/Rock Band revenues are down 49% year on year,” Gamasutra wrote, “as discounted hardware and over 20 SKUs flood the market.”

And so, the news sites and the blogs dutifully reported the imminent demise of the music game, concluding that a glut of games had oversaturated the market. Reporters crowed about bubbles bursting and people “getting tired of rhythm games,”

Trouble is, that’s not remotely what the article said. Continue reading →

It happens every time. Someone will post something about Guitar Hero or Rock Band, some innocuous comment, often in an unrelated context, and somewhere in the comments or forum thread, someone else will chime in with something like: “Why don’t you learn to play a real instrument?” or “These games are ruining music” or “All that time wasted playing a game when you could just go buy a guitar for less money,” and so on, et cetera. You even occasionally hear similar gems from people who should know better…like, say, Jimmy Page and Jack White.

So, okay. Hyperbole aside, let’s talk about what effect these games actually are having on music, the music industry, and the appreciation of music.  Is it keeping kids from learning to play instruments for real? This guitar teacher doesn’t think so; he’s seen a jump in students of about 35 percent since music games became popular. This event organizer doesn’t seem to think so either.

And the folks who make instruments seem to have similar opinions; the president and CEO of industry association NAMM specifically cites music games’ popularity as encouraging people to take up music in real life.

Well, what about the music industry itself? Continue reading →

I love music games.

If you know me, this is probably no surprise to you at all. I like videogames. I like music. I play several instruments, write songs, and sing with moderate competence. Q.E.D., you know? These games are pretty much made for (and, most likely, by)  people exactly like me.

I remember back in April or May of 2005, while working at OPM, I was sent down to RedOctane to get an exclusive look at new game the company was working on. Up until this point, RedOctane was known primarily for creating high-end peripherals for dance games like Dance Dance Revolution. But they had decided to branch out into a slightly different genre.

The game was called Guitar Hero. And after fumbling through a version of “Smoke on the Water,” I got pretty excited about it. I wish I could tell you that I knew right from the first time I saw it how big Guitar Hero would be, and what a huge gaming and social phenomenon it would kick off.

But to tell you the truth, I had no idea. The game seemed to have a lot going against it. It was expensive. It required a special peripheral, something which gamers were notoriously stingy about buying. It was only coming out on one system (though to be fair, the PS2 was the most popular console at the time). And while similar games had been big in Japan for years, the U.S. market seemed to show no inclination of being interested.

So no, I had no idea. I know I loved it, and I certainly hoped it would do well. I just didn’t know how many other people would dig it as deeply as I did.

Turns out, quite a few did. And still do. Now, four years and literally billions of dollars later, the music genre is just dominating the industry. The Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises have together become an entirely new — and entirely legitimate — way to experience music, from classic favorites to brand-new artists.

I think that’s pretty friggin’ cool.

So after years of covering the genre, and getting excited about each new release, from new games to new downloadable content, I realized that I needed to find a way to share my love of this stuff with the world. Because clearly, there are a heck of a lot of you out there who love these games as much as I do.

So welcome to Plastic Axe. This is where I’ll be sharing news about all those games with all those plastic instruments, posting updates to everyone’s catalogs of downloadable content, and maintaining an ever-growing database of every damn song available for every damn music game¹ on the market²: The Vault. (More on that later.)

I don’t expect this to be a simple task. But what can I say? I love this stuff.