Goal	Status
🏆 Finished game	✅
💯 Completionist	✅
📋 High Score	N/A
📺 Video	❌

Review

It's rare that a huge mainstream phenomenon in video games connects so strongly with me. What a brilliant cultural moment for music and video games. It's hard to quantify my own experience with the series. I've played through the career modes of several games, both solo and with a full band. I've played every instrument (except the keyboard), and while I don't mind the guitar, my preference is for drums and vocals. I never rose to the level of "expert" in any of them, but I didn't feel the need to—Completing a song like Sonic Youth's Kool Thing on the drums on hard or Phish's Chalkdust Torture on guitar on hard is more than enough feeling of accomplishment for me. Even being able to play songs like these in a rhythm game feels like it shouldn't have been possible; most rhythm games with licensed music tend to keep the track list as broad and pop-adjacent as possible to appeal to the widest base, but Rock Band's DLC allowed us to play some incredible deep cuts. The pop end of the spectrum was pretty well-curated too, for the most part: The Beatles Rock Band alone was an incredible experience, and helped me appreciate the band's music more deeply. Playing the medley at the end of Abbey Road was a particularly magical moment.

I think of Rock Band as more of a platform than a series of individual games, and by the end, I believe we were playing a modified version of Rock Band 3 for the Wii with all of the DLC and tracks from previous games (and I think even some tracks that were converted from Guitar Hero games?) on an external hard drive. One might expect playing a rhythm game on a big rear-projection TV with a bunch of wireless controllers is a recipe for disaster, but Rock Band has a brilliant calibration mode that made it easy to ensure the audio and video are in sync with the controller latency. Once everything is set up, it just works, and the team at Harmonix were wizards for making everything work together so seamlessly.

One day, just as suddenly as the genre took off, everyone decided they were done with plastic instrument games. I think everyone played every song they wanted to play. I think people were sick of replacing worn-out controllers, and retailers were sick of stocking them. I suppose it makes sense that this couldn't last forever, but I still miss it and hope it comes back someday.

Score

💖💖💖💖💖️

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