Rock Band studio Harmonix has been through some interesting times. The guitar music genre has been in steep decline, prompting Viacom/MTV to sell off the studio, but the dancing market has been taking off. Harmonix has certainly taken advantage of that and the motion field with Dance Central for Kinect, but what's next? We'll have to wait until E3 to find out.
Greg LoPiccolo, VP of Product Development at Harmonix, recently teased big news while speaking with IndustryGamers.
"We’ll have at least one bit of significant news at E3," he told us. We followed up by asking him if it's a brand-new IP or an extension of the Rock Band or Dance Central franchises. Naturally, he wouldn't divulge any further information. "It would be a small price to tell you what it might be, but I appreciate your efforts in that regard," he answered.
That said, Harmonix boss Alex Rigopulos has previously noted that his studio remains very interested in motion gaming. "...we're incredibly creatively motivated by motion gaming," he said in February, adding that Harmonix has "significant resources" devoted to new IPs.
LoPiccolo reiterated the studio's interest in motion gaming to us. "I guess one thing that a lot of people don’t remember is that we sort of did a little foray back in - I think - 2004 when we did Antigrav for EyeToy, which was really fun to develop and we were really happy with the outcome. We learned a lot about sort of the strengths and challenges of motion gaming even at that point, a lot of which we directly applied to the Dance Central development process," he said.
"I think that we see opportunities in motion gaming that we might be uniquely equipped to pursue and so I think we are broadening our scope a little bit in terms of the studio focus to not only encompass music gaming, but also motion gaming, and that may manifest in a lot of different ways. Right now, we actually we have a number of different teams hard at work on different concepts which has been super entertaining and just a lot of fun to work on brand new IP. At some point, some of that stuff will hopefully see the light of day," LoPiccolo continued.
LoPiccolo also didn't rule out supporting motion platforms other than Kinect. "We’re pretty impressed with Kinect as a platform and we’ve had good success out of the gate with it, but we’re certainly not blind to the opportunities that the Wii and the Move present," he stated.
We'll have more from our interview soon. Stay tuned.
