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Harmonix drew a pretty sizable crowd today at their Penny Arcade Expo panel, entitled "History of Harmonix: The Rockening."
The panel was packed with veterans of the Boston-based studio: Dan Teasdale, Dan Schmidt, Ryan Lesser, Heather Wilson, and Sean Baptiste. The five talked about Harmonix's earliest project (the Epcot Center installation piece "What if music were in the air?") to designing their current blockbuster, Rock Band.
At the end of the panel, Dan Teasdale revealed one of Rock Band 2's most brutal achievements, "Bladder of Steel." This achievement from hell requires players to not only play through the game's endless setlist (comprised of all of the game's tracks, back-to-back), but to do so without pausing ... or failing.
Heather Wilson then revealed next week's Rock Band DLC, the "PAX Pack." Each track is 99 cents apiece (or 80 MS Points), or you can pick up the entire pack for $3.00 (or 240 MS Points). A portion of the sales go directly to the Child's Play charity. The pack includes:
- "Skullcrusher Mountain" - Jonathan Coulton
- "Livin' on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe" - MC Frontalot
- "Shhh…." - Darkest of the Hillside Thickets
I'm working on finding a solution for uploading and streaming audio of the entire panel; in the meantime, hit the jump for a few interesting tidbits that came out during the hour-and-a-half session.
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21 comments + 95764 views
Judging by the grammar and spelling errors in this post, Nick Chester is either drunk or in a hurry. I'm banking on a little bit of both.
I don't usually buy Guitar Hero/Rock Band DLC, but I'll get the PAX pack because A) Jonathan Coulton is amazing and B) Child's Play is awesome.
People aren't nearly as excited about the PAX Pack as they should be. Webcomics, mad science, and Cthulhu - in ROCK BAND?! Hell yeah!
If 80 spacebucks buys you a $1 song, then 280 clearly buys you $3 worth of songs.
Coulton and MC Front? I'll be buying them. I think thats a pretty sweet tie in with PAX to get PAX band DLC and kick some of the dough towards Child's Play.
Nice shot.
Achievement = heartbreaker to flub a song four hours in, or have an instinct pause slipup. Could do it on hard in the game now, but not expert. With some of the songs in RB2, I'd really have to play them before I could guess if it was within my reach.
BFeld13...no, you're just reading Destructoid. Par for the course, really.
@Bfeld:
Tired and in a hurry.
@mraka:
Yup, we're consistently pretty awful, aren't we?
Thanks for the info, Nick. Trent Reznor's awesome. I shouldn't be surprised that he was one of the first artists to be down with The Rock Band.
Holy SHIT. I never thought I'd see the day they'd put something like Front on rock band. That's fucking amazing.
Wow, that steel bladder shit is crazy. I would totally do that. Though it's good i can do it on my own now, I would be embarrassed to ask my brother to back me. Thats why Wayne Brady is still not a platinum artist :[
ITS AN ENDURANCE CHALLENGE
Epic news.
Good reporting sir. Harmonix is definitely an interesting developer when you look at everything they've done.
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