Rock Band Was a Multiplayer Experience Truly Unlike Anything That Came Before or Since

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

I love music but never had the patience or dedication to learn an instrument. And I sure as heck can’t sing. So when Guitar Hero came along – more specifically, when it came to Xbox 360 in 2007 with Guitar Hero 2 – I and the rest of the Official Xbox Magazine staff I worked with at the time became obsessed with it. Fast-forward to some business drama and just a year and change later, the original creators of Guitar Hero had left the franchise with Activision and built something bigger and better with MTV and EA: Rock Band. It remains, to this day, the most unique and physically satisfying gaming experience I’ve ever had. It truly connected you to the music in a way that just listening to it by yourself can't do. And at OXM, we played it so much that we ended up pissing off our sister magazines in the building.

I remember when Rock Band was first demonstrated, though I don’t remember where. I just remember seeing a video of four people from the Harmonix development team – one on lead guitar, one on bass, one on drums, and one singing – playing “Wanted Dead or Alive” on a stage somewhere and looking like they were having the time of their lives. From that moment on, I couldn’t wait to try it. Something about the drums in particular spoke to me – perhaps because it might be the closest 1:1 to playing the real instrument. I finally got my chance at a preview event at EA’s campus, and it instantly became my favorite thing.

It only got “worse” when OXM finally got our Rock Band kit ahead of launch. We had to review it, after all, and magazines have long lead times, so it meant that we were lucky to get it in our possession a solid couple months before it actually came out. And while my name wasn’t on the review (we gave it a 9.5 back when we had a 20-point scale; IGN gave it a 9.4), all of us contributed to that review by volunteering to play so that our reviewer had as much of the full four-player experience as possible (we really sacrificed, I know… ;-)).

When Rock Band released and the rest of the world caught the fever too, our addiction deepened. We got more instruments (the original versions were, uh, shall we say, now known for their durability) and put stickers on them. We played every day. The weekly DLC song packs started flowing. And then someone had the bright idea to take our storage closet, which was full of old Xbox hardware and accessories, and turn it into a dedicated Rock Band room.

We ordered sound-deadening foam for the walls and a drum stool, put a flat-screen TV in there, and dragged in a spare set of 5.1 Dolby surround sound speakers with a beefy subwoofer. We changed the label on the outside of the door from “OXM Storage” to “Room of No Judgment,” because if you entered that room and picked up a guitar, microphone, or drum sticks, it wasn’t about being good. It was about having fun. And holy cow did we have fun. Too much fun, in fact, as our sister publication down the hall would constantly come into our office area and ask us to be quiet while they were on deadline with their magazine. I guess that sound-deadening foam wasn’t as effective as we thought.

We voted Rock Band as Official Xbox Magazine’s Game of the Year winner that year – beating out Halo 3, Mass Effect, BioShock, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. And I don’t regret it for a moment. Rock Band was a truly unique multiplayer video game that somehow achieved its goal of conveying the camaraderie and unity of “making” music with other people. I remain sad to this day that the moment has passed and probably never coming back. For me it peaked with Rock Band 2, the addition of keyboards in Rock Band 3 didn’t quite hit as hard, and the comeback attempt years later on Xbox One in the form of Rock Band 4 was awesome, but it just wasn’t a monoculture event anymore. To that end, Rock Band was special in a way that’s hard to explain if you didn’t live through it. Like the greatest concert you’ve ever been to, you can’t just watch a recording of it on YouTube. You had to be there. But if you were, you knew.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, and a co-host of Next-Gen Console Watch. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.