D.I.C.E: Harmonix Co-Founder Rigopulos On 'Living The Dream'

Author: by Frank Cifaldi, Brandon Boyer

As the first lecture of the second day of the D.I.C.E. 2007 summit, Harmonix co-founder Alex Rigopulos led the audience through a brief history of the company from The Axe to more recent axes, and previewed its future. Harmonix's first four or five years, described by Rigopulos as "not pretty at all," saw the release of the PC CD-ROM The Axe, which, he said "took all the hard aspects of creating music and buried them into AI,” exposing players only to the fun parts of playing music. Though innovative, and certainly prescient of the direction the company would soon be headed, the application "went on to sell was literally about the same as the amount of people in this room right now," [approximately 100] and, and the team "convinced ourselves that where this stuff really belonged was in karaoke boxes in Japan." "This was a profoundly wrong revelation," said Rigopulos, saying it wasn't until the birth of the rhythm game genre in Japan with Parappa and Beatmania changed everything for the company: "We said, ‘oh, games.’" The company's following years, from the company's first critically acclaimed rhythm game Frequency which won multiple awards, but, Rigopulos said, from a sales perspective, "made mouse nuts,” to its similarly acclaimed but poor performing sequel Amplitude and experimental EyeToy project AntiGrav, saw the company struggling through "the pits of despair" despite a more marketable partnership with Konami on Karaoke Revolution. It wasn't until Harmonix took a risk on a partnership with then fledgling company RedOctane with Guitar Hero that, Rigopulos says, "things got kind of interesting." On the future of the company, following Activision's acquisition of RedOctane and the more recent move of the Guitar Hero franchise to Neversoft and MTV's own acquisition of Harmonix, Rigopulos says that despite the 'visions of stardom' the phrase ‘living a dream’ brings, the CEO is "approximately as anxious and stressed out about my work as any four months during any game development." Though the company is still not prepared to talk specifically on forthcoming projects, "There’s a new fear of high expecations for our next game, and a fear to not let down MTV," he said, adding that more importantly, "we have the resources and expertise to get our vision right, and along with that comes the stress with wanting to make absolutely certain we don’t screw it up. And in a lot of ways this stress is every bit as potent as it was before we made a hit game." "This ‘dream’ that Harmonix has started living is not a place that we’ve just arrived at," he said, "Success doesn’t come from just one achievement, but this ongoing sense of forward motion, of beating a level and opening a door to the next level." He added, "The key thing for us to constantly recognize, I think, is that all of this anxiousness and urgency and self-doubt and stress, which every game developer deals with, flows from something profoundly positive. We all genuinely care about the games we’re developing." "Laboring creatively in the service of something we love," Rigopulos concluded, "This is the dream that all game creators are living all the time." A full write-up of Harmonix's history of the company will appear on Gamasutra at a later date.