RockBand Mods.net

Peter Moore, ex-Microsoft exec, current EA exec, and known around the Rock Band community as being “pulled” recently sat down with the fine folks at Xbox World 360 to discuss his plans for Complete World Domination EA Sports.  When asked if casual games are the wave of the future, Mr. Moore had this to say:

Well, look at Rock Band. It really came home for me when we were in Munich for our global marketing meeting and we took over the Hard Rock Café for the night and had a Rock Band competition. There were a hundred of us and it was like a real rock concert. It was a blast. I stood back and I thought that this was an incredible cultural phenomenon.

The crowd were going wild, but all we were doing was playing on toy guitars, toy drums and singing badly into a microphone. Now the beer might have had something to do with it, I don’t know, but it was a great social thing. And I said, “Boy, this product is going to change the way we think about games”.

I don’t know if I would tag Rock Band as a casual game, more like a social game, but he’s right on the money. No other game that I’ve played can bring together a large group of people and have all of them interested in what’s going on in a video game. From everyone playing the song, to the onlookers just watching, they all seem to be “into” the game. It will be interesting to see where this takes games in the near future.