Kevin McSherry: The DJs help us with that side of things. With 16 in our studio, and we’ve got renowned talents on board like DJ Shadow and Z-Trip – all of these guys work together and look back through crates and crates of records to pick the tracks that we want to play with. So DJ Shadow really wanted the David Bowie track ‘Let’s Dance’, which is an old favourite of mine, and he wanted to breathe new life into it. It’s been away for 20 years, we wanted to dust it off, give it a new sheen and present it in a new mix for us.
So really, they’re the guys who help drive us, collect the music for Activision and put it into the game.
SPOnG: Mashups have always been a minefield for DJs in terms of publishing, because you’ve got two tracks that you’ve got to license, which halves your profit margin. Is that a challenge for you guys, and will that affect things like DLC for the game?
Kevin McSherry: You’re right, it’s very difficult to commercialise mashups. But we’ve been inspired by that fact, because there’s a fantastic underground community where people are taking familiar music and blending it together, and we really wanted to tap into that. There is a licensing hurdle to get over, but thankfully we work with the best licensing guys in the industry. These are the guys who licensed all the great music for Guitar Hero, (who have) taken artists that are probably no longer on the road and put their albums back onto the charts.
I think because of the success of Guitar Hero in that respect, I think the music industry is much more receptive to dealing with video games. It was only 45 years ago that people actually started playing records for people to dance to. And musicians were terrified that they no longer had a live gig. So I think through time musicians have always been a little bit unreceptive to new forms of media initially, but then they find their feet with it. I believe the music industry’s starting to recognise that the games industry is a very credible media partner, and offers them an opportunity to take their music to big new audiences that you can’t quite touch through radio or record sales or MTV.
Kevin McSherry: I’ve been working in video games a long time so any music games that have been around I’ve played and loved. But in terms of DJ Hero, this product was more inspired by the revolution that Guitar Hero has started. People interacting with music in a new way – real music that you would want to play, and in a form that is familiar. I think that has been our biggest influence on the game.
SPOnG: Could you explain a little more on the guitar-compatible element of the game?
Kevin McSherry: There will be 10 tracks that you can play on a DJ deck with an additional guitar playing alongside you. And these are tracks that you would expect to find a guitar in, and just a great complement to the mixing side as well. For example we have Nirvana’s All Apologies, which is a wonderful guitar track, and you can play it in its entirety with the full Guitar Hero experience with the fret boards and keys exactly where you’d expect them to be. But with that we’ve mixed in something you wouldn’t expect – we’ve taken some hip-hop tracks and blended them into guitar tracks.
Kevin McSherry: Yeah, you can plug in a microphone and have someone else be an MC who freestyles over the top of the track. It’s not a score-based thing; we just wanted to keep it nice and simple. You know, when you think about that it reflects on how we think about the game. We want this to be a social, easy-to-pick up and play experience.