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As Rock Band 4 releases, Harmonix's Rigopulos remembers the plastic instrument war

"It was just this epic slug-fest between MTV and Activision. ... That led to an oversupply situation that was kind of a financial nightmare at the end of the day for both parties. Thinking about that, I still have PTSD from that."
"It was just this epic slug-fest between MTV and Activision. ... That led to an oversupply situation that was kind of a financial nightmare at the end of the day for both parties. Thinking about that, I still have PTSD from that."

- Harmonix creative director Alex Rigopulos

A new interview with Harmonix creative director Alex Rigopulos over at GamesIndustry.biz sheds some light on Harmonix's plans for Rock Band 4 -- five years on from Rock Band 3 and, coincidentally, released against the reawakening of the Guitar Hero franchise, too.

It's the reawakening of a slumbering beast of a genre, but one that shouldn't lead to the same knock-down, drag-out fight that we saw before.

"There's not ambition or expectation that we will outsell Guitar Hero, that we're going up against Activision. But we don't need to. We can actually have a very healthy business serving a much more modest core, a small fraction of the people who played the game previously, and I think we're perfectly content to do that, which frees us from the need to manufacture seven million units of peripherals."

There's more in the full GamesIndustry.biz article. Rock Band 4 releases today. For its part, Harmonix recently picked up a $15 million investment. If you're curious about what to expect from the return of the plastic instrument genre, Gamasutra took an in-depth look at both Rock Band 4 and Guitar Hero Live.

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