The Song, At Least, Remains the Same

You know what still hits? Rock Band. I turned 30 to find out why.

18 years ago, I woke up on Christmas morning to find Rock Band—like Guitar Hero before it, just a few years prior—under the tree. It was the big box bundle, including a revamped guitar peripheral, USB microphone, and the all-important drum kit. Did I have siblings in the house to play with me? No. Were my parents interested, themselves? Also, no. I had asked for Rock Band because it was destined to be an instant institution: everybody wanted Rock Band.

And the next month, at my 12th birthday party sleepover, that destiny bore out. Completed with the addition of an off-brand Guitar Hero controller, a full band united in the late-night haze emitted from my parent's big-screen rear-projection television. The lyrics to Radiohead's "Creep" and The Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps,"—discordantly shrieked from prepubescent vocal chords or otherwise tunelessly mumbled—joined fumbling frettings of "medium" difficulty guitar and bass, accompanied by the staccato clacking of my own tireless, arrhythmic attempts at keeping a percussive beat, until, as happens in the course of every band's tenure, we were broken: not by drugs or lawsuits, but by Iron Maiden's "Run to the Hills."

God bless my parents' patience. We played till dawn. It was magical.

Over the holidays, my wife and I helped clean out my parents' garage and along the way finally claimed a whole rental stow-and-go's worth of my miscellaneous childhood, teenage, and undergraduate effects. A heap of books, collectibles, board games, and video game hardware found its way into our home, including almost all of that age-old music game periphera. (Except, confounding me, that damn drum kit.) The easiest thing to do was to sell it all of Facebook marketplace, but upon testing that the controllers still worked, we discovered something incredible. You may not believe this, but Rock Band is still a damn blast.

So, when a whole bunch of friends came to town for my 30th birthday last month, amid the first round of bitter winter storms, and just in time for the coldest day on record since we moved to Chicago, there was really only one thing to do.

Okay, well, first, we spent a while massaging the Xbox 360 disk drive's failing laser; then, we played a few rounds of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and some Halo 3 happened while the dumpling stuffing was getting going, and some Mario Kart World got thrown in there, too, alongside a couple rounds of college-favorite Nidhogg 2—but eventually there was only one thing to do. We played some Rock Band.

Rock Band! There was that opening cinematic that still goes kinda hard, even if everybody's got weird Gorillaz-y noodle limbs! There was "Maps" and "Creep!" There was our band! Or, most of it, anyway: our lack of drums meant we seemed to be spared the sight of my customized drummer with his (don't judge) steam-punk goggles and mutton chops. But he was there, somewhere, too! Out in the alley or the bathroom stall, doing rockstar stuff. Rock Band!

Guitars passed around. Turns were taken at the mic. All those years ago I only knew Steely Dan from "Dirty Work," but my mature, refined taste was delighted to find "Bodhisattva," off their underrated second album. Trying to keep up with Donald Fagen's bleating vocals nearly killed me, but I—we—made it. (The astute reader will note that, for simplicity's sake, I'm mixing up our playthroughs of the first and second games in the series.)

As far as guitar goes, in the intervening years it seems I developed an idea that, in spite of my sabbatical from plastic peripheral rhythm games, learning to play actual instruments would have afforded me an aptitude I had lacked as an awkward preteen. I was mistaken. Immediately, I was thrown back into that dreaded limbo between "I can hit 99% of these four green-through-blue notes, provided my nose doesn't itch" medium difficulty and "what the hell do you mean I have to move my hand to hit a fifth, orange note" hard mode.

But at least I wasn't the only one under that impression! "Down with the Sickness?" Sure, expert, why not. "Painkiller?" I thought you were gonna suggest something hard. In fact, nothing felt more like the Rock Band I most fondly remember than making it 1/3rd of the way through "Foreplay/Long Time" only to have the virtual audience boo you off stage before the vocalist even got to sing. It's hostile. It's kind of obnoxious. You could activate the no-fail cheat, but it'd be a whole lot less funny.

Still, that moment when you do manage to break through the song by the skin of your teeth? Eyes bloodshot. Hands cramping. Were the guitars always this small? That's the moment you feel, well, like a rock band.

Now, one of the friends who braved the cold to join us was, in fact, a member of that original band from way back when, but we were joined now by friends we hardly even knew back then, and by our wives and by our friends' wives, and suffice it to say, the colliding of timescales threw me—and I suspect him, too—for a loop. Was it just yesterday that we young metalheads were mourning the loss of Ronnie James Dio? Just this past year that Ozzy died? How did I get here, et cetera, et cetera?

But inasmuch as Rock Band was simply a rockin' and rollickin' good time, it also emphasized to me and, talking to my buddies later on, to them, how much had changed about video games vis a vis what playing them with people looked like. It's no coincidence that, when I unveiled my recently returned Xbox 360, a splitscreen shooter seemed like the natural test run, but even that was no Rock Band.

The social context in which that game existed, whereby it was assumed that, if you were playing video games with your friends, it was likely that you were, at least occasionally, doing so at each other's houses couldn't be further from the norm today. Even by the time I was in college, alongside most of the people in my basement last month, our options for gaming on the couch, cooperatively or competitively, were vanishingly few. Gone even then were the days of the dorm room LAN party. Nintendo, I suppose, kept and still keeps the faith, but they do so rather inelegantly—more often than not, at the expense of accessible or intuitive online play, marking them as a perennial odd duck.

Of course, the studio behind Rock Band, Harmonix, is still doing its thing, albeit as part of Epic Games. Accordingly, its current project is Fortnite Festival, or, as The Verge puts it, "Rock Band without the plastic instruments." But even if Chappell Roan is there in Fortnite, my friends still aren't in the room!

In an era when think pieces are written regularly about returning to analog pleasures (whether or not those analog pleasures are actually digital, albeit unconnected to the internet) or bringing back house parties, I can't help but think that whatever it was that Rock Band was doing deserves a nod it's not getting. This was a video game that got people to play video games who didn't play video games, and it did so by getting them to look ridiculous doing it.

Catastrophic tariff policies notwithstanding, I think the continuing cultural renaissance of the board game industry actually points in a positive direction here: there are a lot of people who like playing games with their friends in the same room. (And, let's not mince words, they're willing, like Rock Band owners before them, to pay a premium in terms of price and space to do so.) Many of those people, like myself, are certainly old enough to miss when that used to be normal. Other folks—and here I make myself kind of sad—don't even know what they're missing.

If I felt any pang of the passage of time over my 30th birthday, it wasn't, I don't think, the fault of the Big Three-Oh, necessarily. It was, instead, about a thing that's gone, not just from my life or my friends' lives, but, for all intents and purposes, from the medium of video games, generally: the thing you can break out at a party. The thing that gets cheers. The thing that locks in even the people whose hands aren't on the controller. The thing that makes people look silly, together.

For a time, some years ago—but also, just last month—that thing was Rock Band, a game whose 4th and latest iteration, released itself now more than 10 years ago, was summarily de-listed from online storefronts late last year, its music licenses, finally, expired.

It makes me glad I've got my discs, but that pesky laser won't exactly last forever, either.

POF

As a post-script to this newsletter, I want to mention the other, bigger, reason I've been reflecting on time's passage. Amidst all of what I wrote about above, my wife and I said goodbye to our beloved 20-year-old puggle. Older, even, than Rock Band, she will be missed. Rest easy, Choc.