When we left them, Keith, Alex and Ike were talking about improvements that had been made in the second iteration of Rock Band….

What like?

IA: It’s… very hard to say specifically…

AN: It’s hardcore sort of stuff!

IA: Here’s an example – a lot of people complained you could only play one song at a time, and now we’ve implemented a feature in Rock band 2 where you can make a set list, then play through all of the ten songs… well, you can actually play 80 in a row if you want! We really listen to the people on the forums who say, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’ Alex collects a list, gives it to the design team and says ‘hey, this is what the people want!’ And the designers look at that and try to put it into the design docs.

With forums, though, isn’t there a danger that the people who post aren’t necessarily representative of the majority of players. How do you differentiate between nutty hardcore requests and genuine design insights that could improve the game for everyone?

AN: I know what you mean as I used to be an online writer and got plenty of vitriol directed at me rather than at the product I was covering. But yeah, it’s all about developing a filter for that, it’s about asking, what are multiple people requesting? What are different sectors of the audience constantly mentioning, constantly complaining about? What is a real issue as opposed to one person’s crazy minor issue that they’re blowing up into a big deal? The way we looked at it was, we want to find new improvements for both segments of the audience – the hardcore who play all the time and the casual players playing at parties. So we had the ‘Battle of the Bands’ mode for the hardcore, which is content that we update everyday with battles that are centred on the tracklist you have in your game. Then we added something like ‘No Fail’ mode, for the casual audience – you know, if you’re drunk at a party and don’t want to have to worry about failing out of song, you just turn that on…

IA: Or if you want to play with grandma and grandpa!

So do you see Rock Band as undergoing a long-term evolution?

IA: Yeah, there are plenty of ideas – none that we can mention. But there’s a whole playground of innovation – we can evolve the idea of Rock Band and of playing music together.

How democratic is Harmonix? Can everyone on the team make suggestions about where to take the game?

IA: Very much so. We have private forums at work, and one part of that is an ideas forum. You go on, post your ideas, someone else comes along and comments on it, or sometimes, what happens is someone has a little part of a good idea and they post it – it’s like ‘oh, I had this dream last night…’ and someone else will write ‘that’s a great idea, and we can also do this…’ It kind of snowballs. So including stuff from the community and our own internal suggestions, there’s this whole library of ideas – and then it’s up to the designers. We have great designers and I think that’s key. Alex was talking about the ideas filter, and they’re excellent at that – taking the good ideas…

AN: …and working out how it all fits in to the puzzle that is Rock Band!

Do you see Rock Band DLC evolving beyond the concentration on downloadable tracks?

AN: DLC is always going to be a huge part of our business model. I mean obviously album downloads have become a much bigger thing for us – we’ve done the Chili Peppers’ Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic, we’ve done Rush and Megadeth – all in the last month and a half. For us, the song downloads are always going to be a huge part of our game. As for different types of DLC, there’s any number of things we could feasibly do – nothing we’ve announced or set in stone at this time. We want to keep supporting the game for as long as we possibly can.

And how about expanding the types of music on offer?

AN: We’re not closing ourselves off to any particular genres - as long as it fits within the model of the instrument game that we have. The thing is, at Harmonix, it’s not just a bunch of rock heads – there are people who love Hip-Hop, there are people who love country, people who love pop…

Keep watching this space to find about about Harmonix and The Beatles…