Newswise — Two former MIT graduate students, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, founded Harmonix with the intention of publishing computer games that make players feel like rock stars. Although their first release, called Frequency, failed to become a mainstream success after it came out in 2001, Harmonix has since hit home runs with Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
The latest in the Rock Band series features the Beatles, which was harder to do than you might expect. The problem was that all the instruments were mixed together on one track during the recording of early Beatles music. So Harmonix had to surmount various engineering hurdles to extract each note and assign it to one of the instruments being played. And to accommodate the Beatles' vocal harmonies, Harmonix also had to redesign the system it used to score players' singing. In the end, though, Harmonix has come up with what may prove its biggest hit yet.
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