A few weeks ago, I went to a Fortnite event where developer-publisher Epic Games unveiled its plan for the near future of its game: a Lego survival game, a racing game, and a music game à la Rock Band and Fuser. This is on top of the toolset allowing anyone to make and publish their own games within Fortnite.
The whole thing was kind of weird.
Not that any of the experiences are bad – the Lego thing is super not for me, but I really like the racing game (made by Psyonix, developer of Rocket League), and I think the music element has the potential to become something interesting down the road.
I'm just not so sure Epic's utopian vision of Fortnite as this everything app makes sense. I agree with the idea that Fortnite is a great social tool – but only in the way most online video games can be great social tools. However, if my friends stopped playing Fortnite tomorrow in favor of, say, Call of Duty, I'd never play Fortnite again. It's simply the loose glue that holds us together. We certainly aren't seeking out Fortnite for thousands of different experiences – we just want the mindless shooter that allows us to hang out and talk. And thus far, Epic's curation of user-created content on the Fortnite homepage does little to inspire confidence – it's full of copyright infringement and mobile game ripoffs, and I don't really want any part of it.
That said, I'm happy to be proved wrong – Roblox has certainly proven out this particular model, and even though it wasn't much of a success, I adore Dreams, which has a similar concept. And numbers speak louder than under-paid game journalists. Fortnite is undeniably one of the biggest games on the planet, so it has the user base to pull something like this off in a way Dreams never did. Epic's pitch is an admirable one – inspire anyone to create whatever they want and publish it within the Fortnite ecosystem. It's also acquiring fantastic studios to make high-end games for Fortnite (which I also don't love because Epic still lays off hundreds of people despite its success). Epic, in its hunt to make the metaverse, has also signed deals with dozens of IP across film, games, and so on, creating a mess of intellectual property – everyone knows that for more than a few dollars, you can play Fortnite as your favorite character from your favorite whatever. So, who knows? Maybe this whole thing is building up to Epic's grand utopian vision of a game full of thousands of other games where the entire world is brought together.
I bring all this up to highlight my thoughts going into my single interview of the day. I talked with Alex Rigopolous, the founder and head of Harmonix, creator of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and most recently, Fortnite's new music mode, Fortnite Festival, about what exactly a studio under Epic is doing to support Epic's vision. We only had 20 minutes to chat, so it didn't get as in-depth as I wanted, but I always enjoy talking with Rigopolous; I love Harmonix and want to see it succeed, and I think there's a lot of promise with its music modes in Fortnite – especially once plastic instrument peripheral support is added. I wish them luck.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Game Informer: I feel when you all were updating Rock Band, it was kind of ahead of the curve looking at living games. But now you all are in this ecosystem within Fortnite with a bunch of living games, it feels like? How do you find yourselves trying to fit in when there's so much vying for attention in one executable?
Alex Rigopolous: Sure. It's a big question. You know, there's several facets to the music experiences that we're working on at Harmonix as part of Epic. So, there's Festival, which is a new, big first-party game in the Epic first-party portfolio. And our job there is just, like, to try to build the biggest and best music game the world has ever seen. Because it's a live game, it's going to be evolving and expanding on a regular basis over time. Our goal there is just: make the best music game with the broadest reach that has ever been made.
Meanwhile, we've created this jam system, which you can play in a special mode in Fortnite Festival on the Jam Island [on the] Jam Stage. But it's envisioned as an ecosystem-wide feature. So, you can also play with the Jam system inside of Battle Royale. Soon enough, you'll be able to play with it inside of creative islands. Hopefully, eventually everywhere in the ecosystem. So, the goal there is to just permeate the entire Fortnite ecosystem with music and social play experiences [with] music.
And then finally, the Patchwork system that I mentioned, which we also just released this past month, it's like an interactive music creation toolset for Fortnite Creative in UEFN [Unreal Editor For Fortnite]. That's all about empowering third-party creators to dream up their own music play experiences. So, you can use the Patchwork toolset not just for making original music but also as an adaptive soundtrack system. You can make whatever game – make up any game with Fortnite Creative – and then that music system will listen to what's going on in the game and adapt accordingly. Or you can set up a control flow in the opposite direction to have the music control the game systems – the animations and gameplay mechanics. So, we're empowering creators to just, like, dream up completely new kinds of music games.
With all the Guitar Hero stuff – you and I talked about this years ago – all the people who picked up instruments because of the game. Is there still that thrust within Fortnite?
Absolutely. I think we're expecting to see a lot of that within the music game we're creating, as well as on the creative side with it with the jam system and with the patchwork toolset. We're putting very accessible tools for music creation into the hands of – whatever – 100-plus million people. And I think we're going to see people who maybe didn't consider themselves musicians at all developing new skill sets and emerging as music makers through some of these new places.
How big is Harmonix these days?
Well, it's funny. It depends upon what you count as Harmonix. Because, I mean, essentially, we operate as part of the greater Fortnite development team now. We still have our studio in Boston, which is our core. But about a third of our workforce now is remote in other locations.
If you look at something like jamming in Battle Royale, that's just a collaborative effort between us and the Battle Royale team. So, the lines between Harmonix and the greater Fortnite team are not so clear. But we're still a studio that's, you know, under 100 people.
Rock Band – at some point, I think you all had every song under the sun. But Epic and Fortnite, specifically, are such cultural touchpoints. Is getting artists to send you stems of songs easier now? Do you still have hesitance from anyone? Or is Fortnite big enough that people are just sending you stuff?
Yes. So far, we've had great success in putting deals together with our music partners, music industry partners. We're now starting to clear songs in very high velocity. As you saw in our history with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, et cetera, we do plan to be rolling out hopefully many hundreds of songs a year, growing to a library of thousands over time.
The big difference now – this music will be free to play. We're going to be releasing new songs every week into the game – top-shelf hit music that is completely free to play, which has just basically never really been done before.
How do you get artists to agree to that?