Why Didn't Muse Make It Into Rock Band?

“You look increasingly uncomfortable,” Harmonix’s John Drake says. His boss, Chris Rigopulos, who’s been listening to a very candid and still lighthearted Drake discuss the nightmarish challenges of Rock Band music licensing, is clearly discomforted.

He responds with a deadpan “I am.”

On April 2, Harmonix will have released 4,254 songs across 281 consecutive weeks. The last Rock Band DLC song? Super appropriate. In celebration of its accomplishment, and to inform fans in attendance at PAX East 2013, the Rock Band developer detailed the exhaustive process of how those add-on tracks come to be.

It was a very blunt explanation.

Chris Rigopulos keeps it tame to start. “It all starts with a song,” he says, which is typically credited to numerous individuals rather than their singular band entity. They get a manager, the manager cuts a deal with a publisher, and then the record label creates an album. That’s the Neverminds and the Who’s Nexts of the world – the things you buy, listen to, and love. After a record’s out, and you want it in Rock Band, Harmonix starts trying to acquire the rights. This is where it gets messy.

Sometimes those rights are split between band members with bad blood, who don’t agree with the idea of a music video game, or vary by country. Sometimes band members go off the grid or get their own manager. Sometimes those artists retain fractions of the song’s rights, and unless they all agree to the licensing process, it doesn’t make it into Rock Band.

A helpful diagram with fun pictures and scary lines!

“We did like 4,000 of these things, Drake says. “It’s terrible.” The crowd laughs, but it starts to understand.

The sad truth, Rigopulos admits, is that “not everyone wants to be in Rock Band.” Even if they do, and everyone agrees, there’s another painful step: Where are the master recordings? If Harmonix can’t find those, it can’t create individual tracks for players to rock to – and that just doesn’t make Rock Band work.

Drake, Rigopulos, and the rest of the Harmonix panelists lamented the numerous announcements that never came to be. Nevermind and Who’s Next, for instance. Those entire albums were planned to release on Rock Band, as were numerous Metallica songs.

Sometimes, a lot of the stuff above gets in the way.

“

Nobody is really at fault that we never got Muse (and [your favorite band here] in Rock Band.

Harmonix is very open about the fact it shouldn’t have made announcements when it did. “We made mistakes, we did our best to deliver on what we stupidly promised,” Drake says. Rock Band: Japan and Pearl Jam: Rock Band were full-blown titles in deep development before they were canceled. Japan had unique characters, venues, animations, and more, but “small living spaces plus big hardware” doesn’t fly in relatively small Japanese homes. Pearl Jam, which based itself on various live shows, and features flashy imagery based on the band’s album covers, was supposed to release in 2010.

Those problems mentioned earlier are tough to overcome sometimes.

Guns N’ Roses didn’t work out, either. Neither did Muse, despite fans’ 616,738 requests via RockBand.com’s request submission form. Pink Floyd couldn’t come together for Rock Band songs, either, and the Led Zeppelin Rock Band that never was featured ridiculous imagery, like warriors and horses, in a super-stylized cartoonish look. Harmonix got as far as creating a convincing intro cinematic, but no further.

With panelists mentioning labels like Interscope and publishers such as MTV by name, it’s no wonder Rigopulos was a tad uncomfortable during his own panel. But the intent wasn’t to burn bridges and talk trash – Harmonix simply wanted you to know exactly why your requested songs never made it into Rock Band. The developer takes the blame for early announcements and undelivered promises, but much of the time, frustrating though it might be, nobody is really at fault that we never got Muse (and [your favorite band here] in Rock Band.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.

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