Rock Band Rigopulos: We Dismissed Wii Mote Drums

Alex Rigopulos, CEO of Rock Band developer, Harmonix, has dished up his views on the drum feature in Wii Music. In a nutshell, he's not sold on it.

Speaking in an interview, Rigopulos said, "I have not heard enough about it to have an informed opinion. However, I will say in the early days of the Wii when it was first announced, we contemplated using the Wiimote for a drumming interface.

"We backed away from it because we found that the tactile element of actually hitting a surface when you're drumming is a fairly critical part to the visceral feel of actually playing drums. So when you're air drumming, it was a critical element you're missing in the experience. So that's one of the reasons we backed away from it and decided to build a custom drum peripheral."

As a weak critique of a rival game this one just about takes the biscuit though. If Alex is going take his logic to its conclusion then the entire rhythm game genre would fall to bits at the seams based on the fact that if you really want "the visceral feel of actually playing drums", go and use a real drum kit. If the idea is for the critical experience of 'air drumming' then, surely, using the Wiimote to drum in the air is about as genuine as it gets?

Be prepared for more inter-rhythm game sniping in forthcoming weeks.

Rigopulos also hinted that a music store that enables songs in Rock Band to be transferred to non-console media may be in the works. When he was asked if such as a platform is being considered, he said, "Certainly these sorts of things are obviously on our mind, looking at how music and interactive music can be delivered together to consumers, and there are a lot of options that we're contemplating but nothing we're ready to talk about specifically at this point."

Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick, recently suggested that such a service might be spawned from the Guitar Hero franchise.

^{Source: GameDaily.biz}