Alex Rigopoulos is the co-founder of Harmonix, a game development studio that focuses on music. Though it scored minor hits with previous games such as Frequency and Amplitude, the response to its 2005 release of Guitar Hero was nothing short of overwhelming. After being acquired by MTV in 2006, the company began work on a new game, Rock Band, which adds drums and vocals to the formula, as well as a focus on downloadable content. We discussed the company's roots, the perils of success and Rigopoulos's secret plan to build a million-drummer army.

Playboy: Obviously when you play Guitar Hero or Rock Band, you aren't actually playing the guitar. Which aspects of playing music do these games recreate and which do they leave out?

Rigopoulos: Even if you master Guitar Hero, you'll still be stumped when faced with a real guitar. What's neat about the drums portion of Rock Band is if you work your way through to the most difficult level, you're really playing drums. Someone who has mastered the video game can sit down in front of real drums and actually play well. That's one of the most exciting aspects of the project for us, the idea that we're going to be training an army of a million drummers. Of course the most striking thing that these games all simulate is the experience of performing. It's about the energy it takes to perfectly nail a composition and render it in real time. We've even started to introduce some improvisational freestyle elements to the game in Rock Band. There's a certain amount of lift you get out of making music by yourself. But there's a whole other layer of chaos and payoff that comes when you start tapping in to the intensity that comes from a group of people making music together. We consider ourselves a music company first and a game company second. When we were founded 12 years ago we weren't thinking about games, we were thinking about music. And we labored at it for a good decade or so before we finally got it right with Guitar Hero.

Playboy: Was there a moment or a game that really opened your mind up to the wider possibilities of gaming?

Rigopoulos: The most influential game in terms of the trajectory of my own life, was probably PaRappa the Rapper. We had been making interactive music projects for four or five years before PaRappa came out and when we first saw it we said, "Oh, duh. Video game. That's the medium that can accomplish what we're trying to accomplish." None of the games that we made really resembled PaRappa, but that game did a pretty incredible thing in showing the world that interactive music and gaming can be integrated, and that it could be commercially successful.

Playboy: How did Harmonix start?

Rigopoulos: I co-founded the company with my partner Eran [Egozy] right after we finished grad school at the MIT Media Lab. A lot of the basic ideas we started with came out of things I had worked on in the Media Lab. Our original demo used a flight-simulator joystick, and by moving joysticks around you could create a melody. We basically did that just for fun but it proved to be really entertaining and we realized there was a huge amount of untapped potential there.

Playboy: Guitar Hero and Rock Band both let you make music on specialized controllers that mimic real-world instruments. Have you thought about a system where you'd create music using new kinds of instruments made just for video game music? Rigopoulos: Right now we're focusing on the fantasy element for the players and a big part of that fantasy element is the authenticity that comes from that game controller in your hand mimicking instruments you know from the real world. That's why we've stayed really focused on those instruments. Years ago we built a system for Disney's Epcot Center that used infrared sensors. Kids would walk up and sensors would track their hands in the air and create music from the movement patterns and speed of their hands. It was a lot of fun. So there are a lot of artistic possibilities that emerge when you start designing completely new interfaces.

Playboy: Any insight as to why a game like Electroplankton struggled to find an audience?

Rigopoulos: Electroplankton is the kind of game that if you actually get it into people's hands, they have a great time with it. But that kind of game is exceedingly difficult to market because there's no fantasy hook to it. There's nothing the player can latch onto.

Playboy: There's the commerce end of gaming and there's the art end of gaming. You seem to have been pretty successful at doing both. What happens when you come up with ideas that are less commercial?

Rigopoulos: There are lots of games, especially in the handheld domain, that I would love to do if commercial considerations were not an issue. I have lots of ideas for more art house kinds of games that would be a lot of fun to build. That said, I don't really feel any tension about it because Rock Band is exactly the kind of game that I've wanted to make for years. So I don't feel like I'm making any kind of artistic sacrifice right now. I'm very fortunate that I can work on a game that has commercial potential and is the exact game that I want to make. These games are really all about the music. We're trying to deepen players' connection to music they already love. And we also think of Rock Band not just as a game but as a platform. One of our goals for this platform is to use it as a way to introduce the world to music that we think more people should listen to. It's kind of like a new MTV. Once we have all these millions of people playing the game and we start offering downloadable content, it's going to be pretty exciting.

Playboy: If it's as successful as you hope, how do you stop it from being co-opted artistically as so many other music promotion platforms have been? Should you worry that this powerful tool could be used by the suits to sex up their latest brain-dead crud?

Rigopoulos: I'm optimistic in that regard. When Harmonix was first acquired by MTV, a lot of people thought, "Oh, it's MTV, they're just going to stick a bunch of Britney Spears in Harmonix games and it's going to be commercial and gross." Thus far, MTV has been fantastic about allowing us to remain completely independent and letting us build the game we want to build. They haven't tried to direct us at all. They've essentially said, "Build the game that you want to make. How can we help you?" They've been hugely supportive and very helpful in terms of our business relationships with all the major record companies.

Playboy: You mentioned that right now you don't have to be putting out an art house game to be artistically satisfied. Are we headed to an area any time soon where the market can support art house games?

Rigopoulos: I think we're on the front edge of a renaissance in game development, thanks to electronic software distribution. Retail distribution killed indie game development because the cost of distribution is too high. You can't have small-ticket items. But with electronic distribution, you can make an experimental two-hour art house game and sell it for five or 10 bucks. And your marketing problem goes away because you can put an odd or innovative game in the players' hands for 10 minutes to show them the basic concept. I think the combination of price flexibility and zero inventory risk is going to bring about a new wave of indie game development that's been in hiding since the late '80s when game budgets started to go up.

Playboy: Guitar Hero, even though it was a full-price console game, seemed to have a lot of that spunky low-fi spirit. As a music lover it's been very heartening to watch it be accepted by the market as completely as it has.

Rigopoulos: It snowballed into a phenomenon way beyond my expectations. On the one hand, as I said, we had been banging on the door with this for a decade before it happened, so when it did we were surprised. But the flip side of that was that the reason we were doing this in the first place was we had this conviction and faith that the appeal of music is universal, and that the urge to make music is innate in people. So in that respect it was the most natural thing in the world. We're tapping into something very deep. And we think it's about time that music gaming became a mainstream category.

Playboy: Games already act as a social catalyst, but this seems to increase the social factor even more.

Rigopoulos: Music's appeal is incredibly broad. Madden might have a big audience, but it's almost entirely guys. If you've got two 17-year-old guys sitting on the couch playing Madden, they're having a great time, but what are their girlfriends doing? With a game like Rock Band, this collaborative experience is accessible to everybody, and those two 17-year-old guys can play with their girlfriends and everyone has a great time. We get fan mail every day from 50-year-old moms who play Guitar Hero with their 17-year-old sons; a 45-year-old dad can have a great time playing with his 12-year-old daughter. That's the kind of cross-gender and cross-generational appeal that is the heart of this phenomenon.