Game reviews: The Beatles Rockband – Review – 79

Platform: PS3 – Xbox 360 – Wii
Players: 1-6
Rating: PG
Genre: Music

They form a Kiwi supergroup of sorts, the various members of Opshop, Autozamm and Shotgun Alley, all roped in to launch The Beatles: Rock Band in New Zealand.

Yet peering into their faintly embarrassed eyes, it’s hard not to speculate that they’re wondering how it came to this. They’re playing a computer game. In a church. Using plastic imitations of musical instruments. The music is 40 years old. Rock ‘n’ roll!

Or perhaps they’re not embarrassed at all. Perhaps they realise that some things transcend shame, and that The Beatles are among those things.

Still, it must strike them as odd. It certainly strikes Tone as odd that The Beatles have become a video game, and that we’re standing shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of others at St-Matthew-in-the-City to celebrate it. Perhaps oddest of all, given the fervour surrounding the release, is that the game itself is probably the least interesting thing about The Beatles: Rock Band.

More interesting is how the phenomenon of The Beatles reinvigorates itself every 15 years or so. The last time The Beatles drew such attention was in 1995 with the Anthology documentary and accompanying outtake CDs. Before that it was 1980, prompted by the murder of John Lennon.

Fortunately, in 2009, no one has had to die (touch wood), and we not only get the game but the old albums, which have been spruced up and reissued, too. Oh, and Yoko’s putting out a new solo LP, which we’re sure is pure coincidence.

The release of The Beatles: Rock Band is 
therefore less an event in its own right than part of a wider revival. It may be that the least important aspect of the latest Beatle resurgence will turn out to be a video game.

If it can be called a game at all. There doesn’t seem to be much to strive for, a central component of most games. In the original Rock Band, for example, the idea is to become a superstar – to be as big as The Beatles. If, however, you start off as The Beatles, some other criteria has to apply; there has to be another reason for playing.

We’re not entirely convinced that The Beatles: Rock Band does give you another reason for playing, despite a career mode that takes you from cheerful moptop to moody longhair. There’s the music, of course, but you can get that from the CDs. However there’s no real competition. Unusually for a game, you don’t get to beat anything or lose to it; the only rewards for complete mastery are some unlocked images and clips. It’s oddly reminiscent of 1960s hippy ideals of egalitarianism embodied in, for example, The Beatles’ Apple Corps record label.

None of which makes it bad, of course, and although it struck us as a game in search of a raison d’àªtre, it seemed enjoyable enough, all carried along by the unassailable quality of the music.

This article is from Tone issue 79.

Yet there’s something niggling in the back of the mind. It’s had fantastic reviews, but is this really the best music game ever or just the best music ever to appear in a game? With all the hype, it’s genuinely hard to judge. And isn’t The Beatles: Rock Band merely a simulacrum of a real experience? Don’t spend years honing your art, spend 20 minutes learning how to approximate someone else’s.

Whatever your view, we can all agree that The Beatles: Rock Band is an impressive technological feat. You and a few mates play along to Beatles songs using controllers shaped like a guitar, drums and bass (a recreation of McCartney’s Hofner violin bass, in fact); and in the first game of its kind that lets singers harmonise, a couple of extra vocalists can join in. Moreover, Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer George, has done some very clever stuff with the audio, such as splicing the end of a song recorded during a live performance on to the same song as recorded in the studio, just for that authentic concert vibe. The music sounds fantastic, too, far better than the 1980s CD releases. And the animations are very cool – those who know their Fabs history will recognise specific concerts and TV appearances.
Will that be enough to make the cash registers ring? Probably. Rock Band is big business – even before the new game, the franchise had retail sales totalling more than US$1 billion (NZ$1.453 billion) in North America alone; and pretty much anything to do with The Beatles is guaranteed success.

Even so, it’ll be fascinating to see how this one goes, if only because it’s hard to work out who it’s aimed at. Beatles trainspotters – heaven knows there are plenty of them – will naturally be interested. But what about baby boomers who grew up with the music? As a group they’re hardly noted console jockeys. However, the Beatles, thanks to their cycle of rebirth and rejuvenation, aren’t solely the preserve of people who were alive when the band was active. Developer Harmonix is surely hoping this is a way to tap into a new market while mining an existing one. Is this, then, the first genuinely pan-generational console game? As well as boomers, perhaps The Beatles: Rock Band’s target audience comprises not only gamers who weren’t born when The Beatles split, but gamers whose parents may not have been born when the Beatles split in 1970. Pretty much everyone, in other words.

And there, in a nutshell, is the power of The Beatles, and why a video game featuring them is being released 40 years after they were last together in a recording studio. Everybody, it seems, believes in yesterday.

Words: Richard Betts