In the final installment of the interview Alex and Ike fill us in on The Beatles game…

Can you tell us much about your Beatles game?

AN: Not very much!

IA: It’s going to be awesome!

AN: It is going to be awesome. It’s a full game centred on the Beatles universe – it’s not just a track pack. It’s actually not a Rock Band game, it’s very much its own standalone kind of thing – though it will use the instruments and be centred on the same kind of idea. Beyond that, we can’t really say much about it right now.

How did this come about?

AN: The history of how the project came together is actually something we’re going to be promoting a little further down the road. The one thing I will say is that the Beatles are one of the top tier acts that we’ve been going after forever, they’re a band we’ve always wanted to work with in some fashion and it’s really exciting to be able to do that.

This totally opens up the rock game genre in a way doesn’t it? I mean, these are some of the most important songs ever written.

AN: It’s completely flabbergasting. When I joined Harmonix, I knew what the project was and I was amazed by it. When they told me about it, I was like ‘Oh… Oh! Okay! That’s pretty awesome!’

And there’s an enormous amount of responsibility, surely?

AN: It’s a huge responsibility – and even just having to keep that project quiet for five months was hard.

Do you see more of these offshoots in the future of Harmonix?

AN: Potentially. At the same time, with Rock Band and the download store, we may not do genre-specific games, but we could potentially bring out all sorts of different music via the DLC for Rock Band. The model is the same, so why not make the songs available to the people who want them within the context of Rock Band?

Do you feel that Rock Band is now almost as important as a distribution system for music - especially new music - as it is as a game? And does that feel like a responsibility, too?

AN: I think there is a legitimate promotions angle around that. One of the things our management team has always said is, we want to help break these indie bands, to bring them more to the masses through Rock Band – that’s very much what the 20 free tracks are all about – taking these bands and putting them in the public spotlight. I’m not sure it feels like a responsibility, but it’s something we’d very much like to do – to help bands that we think are cool.

So as community manager you’re almost acting as an A&R man now?

AN: In some respects, yeah. And a lot of what we do is very PR-orientated so we go out to a lot of these events, we talk to bands, we talk to fans of the game and other developers… it’s a very communications-orientated position.

And do you see yourselves adding to the selection of instruments? I mean surely with the Beatles, you’ll need a sitar?

AN: Ah yes, the sitar controller. We can’t talk about that. You know, the only thing we can really say about instruments is that we’re always open to the idea of new stuff, and we’re constantly prototyping crazy things. But for the foreseeable future, this is kind of how the model of the game is going to be – we really like the core set of instruments that we have…