It’s right there in the title. Music evolves, just like tastes evolve, and society evolves, and making and marketing games and movies evolves. Everything changes in time. When you hear that Harmonix, the studio behind the Rock Band and Dance Central games, is making a new game based on Disney’s Fantasia, you probably immediately think of classical music, and wonder what Harmonix will do with those hippos in tutus dancing around to Ponchielli, or the demons and ghosts that circle Bald Mountain while Mussorgsky thunders throughout the theater. So when you see Fantasia: Music Evolved in action and hear Bruno Mars, Elton John and New Order pumping out of the TV, you might be a little confused. Just remember: everything changes.
“Disney really wanted this to reflect the entirety of music history on some level,” Daniel Sussman, the game’s director, tells me at Harmonix’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re watching a Harmonix publicist play the game on a giant television in a dark room filled with videogame equipment and Harmonix history. There’s a phalanx of consoles and computers around the television, a Kinect camera in front and old plastic Rock Band instruments propped up in the corners. The publicist stands in front of the Kinect, sweeping and jabbing his arms to on-screen prompts while Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” plays. “We want big, iconic hit songs that reflect the magic and power of the original film,” Sussman adds.
Although there are elements of Rock Band’s timing and Dance Central’s choreography in Fantasia: Music Evolved, Harmonix is basically creating an entirely new genre with this game. It’s a music game where players remix songs on the fly while moving their arms as if they’re conducting an orchestra. Think Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, using his hands to make the waves rise and the stars streak while standing on top of a mountain in Fantasia, only you’re in front of your TV gesticulating your way through a chiptune / big band mash-up of Dvo?ák’s Symphony No. 9.
Manipulating music is the heart of Fantasia: Music Evolved, and part of why Harmonix wanted to work on the project to begin with. “The fun part of working on this game is that, where with Rock Band you play songs over and over again, here each song has a pretty deep well of opportunity,” Sussman boasts. “There are tons of choices you can make that change the output, and a tremendous amount of replay value in each song.”
Each song appears in its original version along with two remixes rooted in different musical styles. At various points while playing the song you’re given the option to pick between these mixes. Sometimes you can switch between individual instruments from one mix to another, mashing up elements of all three mixes, resulting in, say, a “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Freddie Mercury’s original vocals, classical strings and heavy metal guitar.
As Sussman describes how players can remix songs the publicist unlocks one of the game’s music manipulation tools. With his arms he slashes away at the edges of a floating geometric shape, gradually unlocking a device that lets him record a new guitar solo that’ll loop over the song. His on-screen cursor, called a “muse” within the game, shoots across a metallic oval that’s essentially a scale, with each section producing a different note. When the publicist finishes his solo the notes are seamlessly added to the song. He basically paints a new guitar solo over the original.
There are 33 songs in total on the Fantasia: Music Evolved disc. Sussman acknowledges that might sound light compared to the dozens of songs in each new Rock Band, but he cautions that the music in Fantasia isn’t comparable to any other music game. “It’s like we’re changing the definition of what a song is in the music game space,” he says. “Each song is actually a song plus multiple remixes plus all the manipulators. There are literally thousands of different permutations that a single song could take.”
Those options took time to produce. Harmonix was provided the original stems from the record labels, but had to record the new instrumentation for every mix, making sure they fit alongside the original songs. For “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Sussman says, “the audio director Eric Brosius recorded the heavy metal mix on his own and then we worked with Inon Zur to compose and perform the classical stems. We do a lot of the work ourselves and we’ll farm some of that out to professionals around the world.”
In the past some musicians have been particularly careful about how Rock Band and Guitar Hero could use their music or image. The level of editing and remixing done to the original songs in Fantasia goes far beyond any other music game, though. Sussman admits that Disney and Harmonix were requesting an unheard of amount of leeway with these songs. “Our offer letter was unprecedented in terms of getting license to do all this stuff, to remix the songs, to allow players to remix the songs,” he says. “There were artists who didn’t want to let people do that, and they’re not in the game.
