How did [the Guitar Hero] project concept emerge?
Rob Kay: RedOctane had been talking to Harmonix for a while. It was a rental company and then they made dance mats for DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]. It ended up selling a bundle of these dance mats and wanted to progress that side of its business. The company was interested in making a guitar game as they’d seen Guitar Freaks, which Konami had done. So they came to Harmonix with the request, “will you make us a great guitar game for our new piece of guitar hardware?” The peripheral led the project? Yes. At that time, Konami hadn’t released Guitar Freaks in the US, and I don’t think RedOctane had any particularly grand ambitions other than needing a game. Relatively speaking, it was a pretty low-budget game — about a million dollars, which is pretty tiny as a game budget. We had a team that had just been freed up, as we’d just finished AntiGrav. This seemed like an awesome project. Everyone here was really psyched to work on a rock guitar game; it really fitted in with people’s interes
