The Beatles: Rock Band (Xbox 360)
Beatles Lite versus Beatles Right
9/8/2009 2:07 PM | 5 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: Excellent slate of songs; Graphics nearly perfect; Later songs a true challenge
What's Not: It's very Beatles Lite; Needs more history; Some too-difficult Achievements
"Shoot me. Shoot me. Shoot me."
-- "Come Together," The Beatles; John Lennon, vocals
Number 9. Number 9. Number 9. I get it. Release day, 9/9/09, is a reference to "Revolution 9," the noisy, avant-garde, chaos-filled Beatles song on "The White Album." At eight minutes, it's the longest John, Paul, George and Ringo song ever published (the longest unreleased song is "Carnival of Light"). You have to be a fan to know that.
In life, you're either a Rolling Stones person or a Beatles person. I'm proudly the latter, a semi-complete fan of the Beatles from way back; jealous when I heard my music editor saw them in Toronto as a kid, sometimes dreaming of them after I'd read the latest biography in the cottage industry that is Fab Four tomes. I'm one of the minions who was utterly devastated when sports analyst Howard Cosell, on ABC's "Monday Night Football," announced that John Lennon was shot. That next morning, I sat at my grandmother's old player piano and plinked out "Let It Be," just like my mom taught me to.
Under the sea in an octopus' garden.
So I wasn't sure the Beatles were the best fit for a music game. Would
The Beatles: Rock Band sully the name of the most iconic of rock groups? How on Earth could Harmonix do it right? Is it sacrilege that the
Beatles: Rock Band commercial is everywhere -- that Viacom channels, from MTV to Comedy Central to Country Music Television, are scheduled to show it simultaneously? Beatles music has been heard in commercials since the first 1985 ad, a Ford commercial, but it used to be that their music would never promote other businesses.
And who will buy it? A recent Pew Research poll found that older people, those over 50, choose the Beatles as their favorite music act. Sure, younger people put the band in their top 10. But who knows if they'll really buy the game, let alone the game with the expensive plastic band appliances, for $250? We're still mired in a recession, right?
As of the end of August,
The Beatles: Rock Band wasn't in the top 20 preorders at Amazon.com (whereas the new
Halo 3: ODST had been in the top 10 for months and is now No. 1; has been for a week). As of today, the Wii version of the game is No. 5. That doesn't indicate a super-hit in the making. On a more optimistic note, people paid hundreds per head to see Paul McCartney's latest tour, and there were tons of kids in the crowd when he played Coachella. And at all of these shows, there were not-so-subtle clips of the game behind him on the LCD screen onstage.
Double your pleasure with two fret boards on Paul's Hofner bass.
Yet I don't think the majority of gamers or Beatles fans really care about the marketing of the game, or how it was made. Dan Radosh, the journalist-turned-"Daily Show" writer who penned the thoughtful, 8,000-word
New York Times Magazine story, was disappointed when most of the Web comments were about the song list in the game and not about the issues, both philosophical and procedural, that he brought up in the piece. The majority of gamers simply want to play. Whether they make
Beatles: Rock Band a huge bestseller is another Glass Onion entirely.
