Konami legal action against Viacom for RockBand*

[archie4oz]

Didn't Samba Di Amigo for the dreamcast with the maracca's come out in 1999 ? Or was that 2000 ?

Japanese arcade 1999, console release 2000... The Beamani games however have been available since 1997/1998 in the arcades and on the consoles respectively. In fact, I found the whole ruckus over Red Octane and 3rd party guitar controller makers quite amusing since Konami's been dealing with it for years rather well and had in fact been rather dependent on 3rd party instruments.

One caveat though is that Konami has never released any of the GuitarFreaks or DrumMania games in the US/North America. Usually you only see the arcade systems at the occasional rare and decent arcade or you import the PSone or PS2 titles (which my GF does extensively). The only reason I can think of why Konami never pursued it in the US, the percieved lack of interest and the difficulties of building a music catalog tailored to the US market. They did manage to do with North American releases of Karaoke Revolution though...

What's amusing is that a bunch of folks at Harmonix have long been fans of GuitarFreaks & DrumMania for a long time and those titles were inspirations to do Guitar Hero.

 

[cthellis42]

This is pretty low. I would understand if Konami made the first "rockstar"-type game, and EA basically go copy it. but Guitar Hero was the first guitar game i think or atleast the first really successfull ones, and its rather obvious that both EA and Konami are now trying to cash in on the success and market that Guitar Hero made.

Guitar Hero was not the first guitar game by many years and many more iterations. So, too, was Rock Band not the first game with drums, nor (obviously) the first game with vocals. Bemani's heritage is utterly huge. (I fell in love with Beatmania a decade ago, and was always going into Chinatown to pick up more imports when new MIX would come out.)

Guitar Hero was, however, the first music game in the West (they have been quite popular in Japan, just not really in other markets) to tap our music properly and do it in a stylistic fashion that would actually be embraced by our audience. Rock Band was the first game to take that sensibility and apply it to multiple instruments simultaneously, which is something I was bitching that Bemani should do for YEARS. (Especially since they did have titles that could be linked in the arcade.)

It's a dickish "cash-in," but not because they have nothing behind their case. Since Konami had an active relationship with Harmonix for years before, what they really SHOULD have done is picked them up instead and have them move forward with their western music arm, and try to link and share with Bemani where important. For whatever reason they didn't see those games as marketable at all out here, so they never made a major push. They should, of course, be trying to leverage their expertise to make a GOOD game, but right now Rock Revolution is looking excessively mediocre, which is a damn shame.

So, yeah... I guess they're licking their wounds in whatever fashion they can.