The Big Winner

May 31st, 2008 by admin

The Guitar Hero series includes some of the most successful games ever made. The story of Harmonix, the company behind the games, is even more impressive. The Harmonix story is one of true persistence. The company worked diligently for ten years and produced several acclaimed titles like Amplitude. Their major success came with Guitar Hero in 2005.

Here is the interview:
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200702/N07.0219.1006.10335.htm?Page=1

Some great quotes:
“It’s torture for the creative team that’s making the game, because when you make a game that the reviewers are loving and the playtesters love it and whatnot, you feel like just on a creative level that you’ve succeeded. But as I mentioned this morning, it’s only half the battle, because if you make an experience that can’t be effectively marketed, then you’re just dramatically capping the number of people who will ever have access to that experience. For us, it was really hard to go through that experience, but we came out of it having learned an important lesson, which is that we needed to think up how to sort of wrap up these experiences in a form that sort of made it easier to reach out to a wider audience of people.”

“One of the challenges with any game development is that you can only make great games when you have great people. If you try to grow too quickly just for the sake of growing, you’re going to end up hiring people who are not AAA people, and the quality of your games will suffer. We’ve tried to be pretty strict about controlling our growth rate to make sure the caliber of our people stays high.”