No More Nine Inch Nails in Rock Band?!
Dustin Burg from Joystiq was lucky enough to score a sit down interview with Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. Good to hear that he’s a fan of Rock Band in general, but he’s opting out of contributing any more content to Rock Band proper, and doesn’t sound like the Rock Band Network will be seeing any content, either.
As a HUGE Nine Inch Nails fan, this is indeed a sad day. Trent, please considering giving a few more songs… please! ‘Maybe Just Once?’ (NIN fans… see what I did there?) Too obscure… probably should have gone with the ‘Wish’ or ‘Something I Can Never Have’ reference.
From the interview…
Are you fans of Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
I dabble around in them and I actually think those games are fun. As a gamer, it’s interesting, fun and surprisingly rewarding when you get it right. As a musician, who’s watching the record industry look at these games as a type of salvation … it’s laughable. That’s just desperate people in the record business thinking. “Man, we finally have a way to turn people onto music.”
In a good way, a friend of mine who is my age, he has a couple kids under ten years old who now really like AC/DC and other classic music. Music they may not have discovered at their age. It’s kind of fun to walk into Best Buy and hear people get excited about trying to play a Beck song and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m kind of excited to see how they did on Beatles: Rock Band. I read about that in Wired, and it sounds like they did an A-list job in creating the depth of the experience.
How are your Rock Band skills?
I’m not bad, but to be honest with you, I haven’t allowed myself go too deep down the path of perfection.
If I were to set up a rock-off, a game of Rock Band between you and a band like … say, Coldplay. Who would win?
I don’t know, but if it descended into physical violence, we’d probably win. Those guys strike me as having a lot of time on the bus tweaking or stringing some riffs together. [Laughs.]
Will we be seeing anymore Nine Inch Nails DLC releases for Rock Band or Guitar Hero by year’s end?
No.
Is there a reason?
I just really never thought about it. When Rock Band first came out there were a couple songs involved and they asked for more in a content pack. I just said pick some of the hardest material we have, like “The Perfect Drug,” which has some difficult drums. Then I asked them to make it as hard as they could possibly make it. That led to me seeing a couple YouTube videos of people getting high scores and, well … that’s really it. I feel we did all we needed to do with it.
What do you think of the upcoming Rock Band Network? Will you support the service?
I think that’s an interesting idea, but I’d have to think about it some more. Would I do it for Nine Inch Nails? No — and I’ll tell you why.
At the end of the day, I don’t mind putting my song in a movie I like. Something like where JJ Abrams calls asking to use a song in “Fringe.” I say, “I like what you do, I know it’ll be used tastefully.”
Music isn’t a game, it’s supposed to be an emotional kind of experience.
If someone hears it in that context, well, okay, that’s cool. Again, at the end of the day, my concern is to write music and that’s what it is. Music isn’t a game, it’s supposed to be an emotional kind of experience.
When I heard about Rock Band and was asked to put some music on it, I did that. Then I thought, what if, with our next record, we release it on Rock Band first? The entire album. But then I thought about it some more and decided no, because I don’t want people remembering it that way. I want it to be an album, a piece of music and not a game. There’s a balance there, but music should have its own place, because it is not just about how many people can get it in whatever form.
Activision released special band-specific Guitar Hero games, like Metallica and Aerosmith. Have you ever been approached about a NIN edition?
Not that I know of. I’m not saying this to be modest, but we aren’t in the same demographic or audience size as those bands. NIN doesn’t really fit that mold, because there is no guitar in a third of our songs and, to be honest with you, I wouldn’t want to do that anyway.
Feel free to check out the entire interview (link below), where he gives his opinion on a great many things within the video game industry.
[via Joystiq]
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I hear what Trent is saying. As the business manager of an In-Home Music Lessons company, we have a hard time finding the right balance between our kids playing instruments, and playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero. We want them to enjoy and appreciate music they might never have had a chance to hear before, but we don’t want them to take away all their practice time on a real instrument by playing a video game. So it’s definitely a work-in-progress, between children playing Rock Band, and children rocking out!
“I just said pick some of the hardest material we have, like “The Perfect Drug,” which has some difficult drums. Then I asked them to make it as hard as they could possibly make it. That led to me seeing a couple YouTube videos of people getting high scores and, well … that’s really it.”
Wow. Really. Really? So Trent Reznor thought the hardest NIN songs, made harder, would be impossible to eventually FC or gold-star? And then when it happened, he threw a bitch fit, like a small child picking up her toys and storming off? Wow. What a loser.
He does have a point with wanting music to not be thought of as a game, just listened to. He could have carried that point a little further; on the opposite end of the above spectrum, to see people not doing well on his songs, and instead of the composition he’s put together, this broken song because some newbie is missing every other note. Another point he only half developed, he says RB (and GH) is great for letting kids discover new (older) music, but he left out that NIN is really too new to be “discovered” – that’s a solid point as well.
And he may be disappointed in the sales of the 6 downloadable songs. Article doesn’t say, but they picked six that weren’t singles — NIN didn’t have many big singles anyway, but where was “Head Like a Hole”? Where was “Closer”? — so he shouldn’t be surprised, let alone angry, that they didn’t sell as well as they perhaps could have. As DLC, “The Perfect Drug” would have done better than the rest, maybe they should have swapped it with one of the others, put one of the others on disk.
Anyway, cool interview, good find.
I think he’s wrong about something, though. The idea that his music is only thought of in the context of a game is incorrect. Most people I know that play RB/GH, will not play songs they don’t like simply to play “a game”. The people that are really into scores and making YouTube videos don’t represent the vast majority of people playing RB/GH. I pretty much listen to the same music I play on RB/GH. I might try some out, but if I don’t like listening to a particular song in the game, I won’t every play it again.
And really, the idea that it bothers him that someone is only exposed to his music through a game and aren’t sitting in their bedroom tripping on it or some shit is kind of pompous. Like we can only experience *his* music the way *he* intended. I don’t know…
–Mr. Bildo