Influences
It wasn’t the dominant Japanese rhythm gaming culture that inspired the genre’s western pioneers at Harmonix to move from ‘interactive music creativity applications’ into videogame design.
“It began with Parappa the Rapper,” says Harmonix’s founder and CEO, Alex Rigopulos.
“There were already some rhythm-action games around at that point, like Virtual Music’s Quest For Fame, but we didn’t find them particularly compelling."
"When we played Parappa for the first time, though, we were struck by how fun it was, and at that point we started thinking seriously about new ways to merge music and gameplay."
"The release of Parappa was a life-changing event for me – it wasn’t the first rhythm game, but it was the first great one, and it altered Harmonix’s trajectory.”
Inspiration
Indeed, Harmonix was inspired more by mainstream Japanese-developed music games’ limitations than their commercial success.
“On the one hand, it was inspirational to see music performance simulation games become successful in Japan in the late ‘90s – they helped us to further appreciate the potential for videogames as a vehicle to bring music-making to non-musicians,” Rigopulos explains.
“On the other hand, we found the Bemani family of games in particular to be sorely deficient in a number of key respects:
-"the gameplay was shallow"
-"the visual design was uninspired"
-"the music selection was poor"
-"the sound quality was poor"
"We saw this as an opportunity to take music games to the next level.”
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