Eran Egozy: Game Developer

- [Announcer] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

- At Harmonics, what we're trying to do is connect people with music and have people who've never experienced professional music making get together and feel that amazing power.

So we're all of us artists and programmers and sound designers, and everyone else is getting together, putting all this knowledge into the software, into the game itself and trying to sell it out there so everyone in the world can experience that awesome feeling of playing music together.

What was that?

27 seconds?

That was fast.

Should I do it again?

When I was at MIT, my major was electrical engineering and computer science.

Then I found out about the MIT Media Lab.

That was a group that directly combined computers and music together.

Alex Rigopulos and I were thinking about taking all this technology and making it useful for everyday people, not just for expert musicians.

The big aha moment came when Alex, who was at the time really into video games, took the joystick from the flight simulator and said, "Hey, Eran, what if you took this joystick and hooked it up to the music program we've been working on?"

So I said, "That seems like a cool idea."

And in about a couple of days, I had it set up and working.

And what we had was this thing that for lack of a better name, we called joystick music.

If you move the joystick left and right, the notes would rise and fall.

If you move the joystick up and down, the notes would get faster and slower.

But no matter what you did, it always sounded good.

So we programmed sort of the thought process and the mechanics of a master musician or an improviser into the computer.

That's when Harmonics was born.

The goal of this company was to bring the joy of music making and the joy of music performance to everyone out there.

There were plenty of dark moments at Harmonics where we weren't sure if we were gonna see the next day.

The first 10 years, we were working very hard on a lot of different things, but nothing was really panning out in a big way.

And then all of a sudden we did Guitar Hero.

You know, we just got the package right between the guitar peripheral itself, the music selection for the game, the characters in the game the moment to moment experience of playing the game, everything completely worked.

And from that day, the world changed.

This great feeling you have when you're playing music, very few people get to experience that.

And what we've done with games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero is tried to grab some of those feelings, some of those hard to describe connections that you can get with people because of music.

(people cheering) I started playing clarinet when I was 12 and just instantly gravitated towards it.

I didn't even know that playing an instrument was supposed to be a struggle.

I just kind of started playing and it was fun and I kept playing.

When I was in junior high school and I had just started out, they immediately put me in the junior high school band.

I was sitting last chair, third clarinet, just the very bottom place.

And I remember looking over at the first clarinets and looking at their fingers moving.

And I was thinking, "Wow, how are they doing that?

I wanna play like that."

And it was probably a year and a half later that I was sitting first chair.

I was in Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, and then I just kept going.

And when I went to MIT, it turns out MIT has a great music program.

So I just kept playing music all throughout college.

I play in a classical chamber music group called Radius Ensemble.

It's a group in the Boston area and we perform a concert season every year.

It's a completely professional group.

So everyone in group is actually a professional musician.

Meanwhile, I'm there too and I have a day job which is running the engineering department at Harmonics.

It's kind of fun leading these sort of dual lives.

There is this sort of wonderful thing that happens when you're playing music with other musicians, where you don't have to say anything.

The music itself is the language.

And if you really click with whoever it is that you're playing with, that magic starts to happen.

That feeling of playing in a band, of connecting with other people in the room, that's what games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is about.

I think it's because the company Harmonics is filled with musicians, we all know what that feels like.

We've all experienced it.

Whether it's conscious or not, we are essentially putting that into the games.

And so when you play our games, that's what you're feeling.

Rock Band.

It's a better game.

It's about the collective, right?

It's about everyone playing together.

My favorite is playing chamber music, which is me plus about two or three other people playing together.

Oh, Beatles.

This is super old school, but it's Missile Command.

Panic Attack by Dream Theater in Rock Band 2, probably the hardest song.

I guess I try to make the avatar look like me.

My guy has glasses.

Grand Theft Auto was pretty amazing.

I mean, Mario has a whole history, but GTA was a pretty groundbreaking game.

Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.

Oh, that's a good question.

If the White House does not have a copy of Rock Band, they totally should.

When I'm 64, I'm gonna be playing that tune on my clarinet.