DJ Hero's the long-coming Guitar spin-off Red Octane and developer FreeStyleGames have been quietly mixing up in the UK.
With a bizarre but accessible turntable controller primed for debut, and top vinyl heads inlcuding Mr. DJ Shadow providing the tunes, it could well emulate the success of Activision's other music series. But will it ever match it?
We recently sat down with FSG studio head Chris Lee and art director Jamie Jackson...
How does the DJ Hero controller work?
Jackson: The controller is split into two parts, the first part is the platter with a full 360 degree rotate. It's smooth and friction free. We've mapped track 1 onto this green button, we've mapped track two onto the blue button and the red button is a sample button.
On the mixer side, the crossfader is the most important component. While it's all the way over to the left, you're only hearing record one and vice versa. When the fader is in the middle you'll hear both records at once.
The effects dial allows you to apply real time effects to the mix. That can be on just one record, perhaps where someone's singing and you want to apply a filter, flanger or a delay, or it could be across all three levels of audio.
The euphoria button is similar to star power in guitar hero. It triggers a multiplier that increases your score. And under a panel at the top we have the native controller buttons which allows you to easily select each track you want.
You can also move the platter over if you decide you want a different configuration.
How many iterations of the controller did you go through before deciding on this one?
Lee: Quite a few, and not all of them were made of plastic. We were just trying to get the idea of how we can make a DJ set feel authentic. The big iteration for us was the fourth or fifth iteration where we put the buttons on the platter. As soon as we did that we thought, we've got something that people are going to enjoy.
That started to evolve what we could do with the game and develop the input device as well as the software. We've got a hall of fame at freestyle of all the different prototypes we developed. There's at least ten or twelve iterations.
Any favourite blunders?
Lee: The wooden ones are definitely the favourites. When people try to grab them off the wall and play with them, that's kind of funny.
What's most exciting is seeing the stuff come out of RedOctane now. Some of the innovations are just huge. Simple things like the 360-degree rotate; I would take that for granted but that's actually quite a challenge from an electronics and design perspective. They keep giving us greater and greater looking, and feeling devices.
Did you get any feedback from big artists?
Jackson: We've been working with DJ Shadow and others and whenever we get our hands on the latest version of the deck they give us feedback. We then feed that back to RedOctane.
Shadow has long been a hero of ours so when we first thought about the opportunity of working with licensed DJs he was naturally one of the first ones that we wanted to contact. He's famous for being a crate digger - he'll go into people's record shops and dig around in the record boxes. He'll find something you don't know and dust it off and make something cool with it.
Everyone knows how to strum a guitar but not necessarily how to use a turntable. How are you going to overcome that?
Jackson: In the same way that people know how to strum a guitar, there's an international hand sign for being a DJ [scratches with hand] and we knew we had to make a game experience that would reflect that, at a very early accessible level. Get your hands on a platter, start feeling it and moving it around.
We decided that the best way of introducing you to the easy mode was to concentrate on the platter and layer up the difficulty with the mixer later on. At the top difficulties it's incredibly deep and complex. With the tracks DJ Shadow created for us, if he's done a fast forward or a fast back, you have to hit it at exactly the same time.
What you saw in the presentation were direction scratches. You're being encouraged to scratch in the direction of the arrow. On the easier levels, we call this freestyle scratching where it really doesn't matter which direction you're scratching in.
There's a natural thing when it comes to DJing that people are afraid to come up to the decks. They don't know what's going to happen when they get up there so we had to make it really easy and really simple. To begin with, it's effectively like GH the first time around. You're just on the three buttons and scratching when we give you the chance to.
Why don't you have two platters?
Jackson: We found that as soon as you have two of them, the player starts looking down instead of what's on the screen. And this is potentially fatal in gaming terms. It was a real innovation when we found a way of mapping both records onto a single platter. It was a way of us simplifying it.
What can you tell us about the tracks in the game?
Jackson: We've got great music from Gwen Stefani, Tears for Fears, Marvin Gaye, Benni Benassi and Black Eyed Peas. It's a very interesting mix. The great thing about developing DJ hero is that it doesn't limit us to any particular genre, or any particular era either. The one I like is Tears for Fears vs Eric Prydz. When I'm playing that I'm listening more to Tears for Fears, but my nine year old niece will probably be listening out more for Eric Prydz. It opens up a whole range of music to people who might not have experienced it before.
Not every remix is old vs new or rock vs hip-hop, it's definitely an opportunity to blend tracks that might surprise the consumer a little bit. That might give more of an edge to the gameplay.
And you use the masters... ?
Jackson: Yeah. We request all the stems in the same way they do for Guitar Hero. If we have all the stems, it makes the mix more exciting and a lot easier for us. If we don't get the stems, just the records, we can still make great mixes with it. The stems give us the ability to take great little bits from the records and place them onto our sample button. But really we can work with anything.
A lot of the tracks you showed today are mash ups. Why did you choose to focus on that?
Lee: When you take two tracks and sit them together, that really is our gameplay. Your older audience is listening to it saying, "that sounds like a remix" and the younger audience is listening thinking, "who is that guy's voice, it sounds amazing!"
Do you think this will revitalise the careers of some artists?
Lee: Some of the artists we've announced, and some we haven't - some of them are already planning their tours off the back of appearing in DJ Hero. I think it'll open up music that you might not have necessarily listened to.
Will there be a music studio like GH?
Lee: In this version we've concentrated on providing mixes for the player to provide that accessibility as a DJ. What's exciting for us is what the consumer expects next. We love Guitar Hero and using the music studio, so there's so many places we can go in future.
How does the game let you know when you've messed up?
Lee: Well, there are different ways that you can mess up. When you're working through a scratch path and don't quite get it right, you'll hear that stream drop out altogether and then it comes back three or four seconds later, depending on what difficulty you're at. On easy, it comes in quite quickly and you get to hear more of the mix. On hard you're left with whatever audio you've got on the go like the samples.
US and Europe DJ cultures are radically different. How have you addressed that in the game?
Jackson: I think that comes from the tracks we've licensed. So we've licensed lots of American artists, plus lots of other artists from around the world.
Have you set a price for it?
Lee: We're still discussing price, but we're expecting it to be around the same price as other music peripherals available now.
I'm almost interested in this game... Although to be honest, anyone really interested in it will probably already have something like virtual DJ on their computer, which means you can work with any music on your computer. I have high hopes it'l be a fairly interesting game, but we'll see I guess...
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