A recent entry on the NY Times blog, The Score, talks about the phenomenon video game franchises Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Author, Michael Gordon, asks what thousands of music students have been saying since the game’s inception 5 years ago: “So why not orchestra hero?” Who wouldn’t want to play the violin solo from Scheherazade, or the trumpet opening for Mahler’s Fifth Symphony?

Gordon goes on to discuss the foreseeable problems with such a manifestation of the popular franchise. For example, the basic Rock Band set (guitar, drums, microphone) carried a retail price of nearly $200 at launch. One can only imagine what a basic orchestra set would cost; undoubtedly out of the range of most of the target audience.

I have a question, how much would it cost to gain the rights to the works of Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky? Enough to further inflate the costs of the game to epic proportions? Probably.

Look at the recently released Beatles Rock Band, which carried a price of $249 for the game with instruments, and $59 for the game alone. Even die-hard Beatles fanatics like myself couldn’t let ourselves hand over the cash for the bundle, which came out less than 2 months ago and is already on sale for 20% off at Best Buy. The reason behind the high cost? According to executives, Yoko Ono (owner of the rights to a large chunk of Beatles songs), gave developers “hell”, and forced redesign after redesign, causing production costs to be unusually high. I can see a similar situation arising in attempts to digitize the great classical works.

The recently released DJ Hero has suffered a similar fate, as high costs for the peripheral turntable, $129 for the standard set-up (a cheap plastic turntable), $199 for the Renegade Edition (a metal set-up), have resulted in sales well below expectations.

According to an analyst over at Lazard Capital Markets, slow sales for the highly anticipated DJ Hero are a reflection of a consumer electronic market resistant to anything over $100. Popular chains such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart have been cutting back their stock of such high-priced items, and it looks like advertising has been geared at simply moving games.

So, will Orchestra Hero be making it’s way into the hands of shoppers any time soon? Probably not, and I think that the companies behind the already existent rhythm games, such as Activision, are with me. What we are more likely to see, will be downloadable content released for the instrument peripherals already in the hands of consumers.

Do I want Orchestra Hero? More than words could express. I’m dying to play that bassoon solo from Rite of Spring and my double-reed skills are, well, less than up to it.

Note: The picture is from Wii Music, I won’t even begin to get into what let-down that game was…

Orchestra Hero
Beatles: Rock Band Execs Say Yoko Ono Gave the Designers Hell’
Analyst: DJ Hero Sales ‘Modest,’ Consumers Resisting Games Over $100

Posted on November 4th, 2009 at 4:48 pm | Filed under General |