Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Harmonix heads into its post-Rock Band career with funding for three new games

By
Rock Band
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Harmonix is entering the next phase of its storied life as one of the most exciting video game studios in the business. The group started as makers of peculiar experiments like FreQuency and its sequel Amplitude before moving onto early Playstation 2 EyeToy games like AntiGrav. Then it struck the big time with Guitar Hero and its successor Rock Band, games that literally defined a genre and gave gaming its very first billon dollar game. Now, after some successful Dance Central Kinect titles that melded its camera experiments with a love of music, the company is ready for the next era. Harmonix has secured funding for three brand new games.

Venture capital firm the Foundry Group announced Thursday that its managing director Brad Feld has joined Harmonix’s board of directors, and is using a chunk of its money to back three brand new projects the studio is prototyping. After Harmonix founders Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos demonstrated their new ideas to Feld, he signed on.

Recommended Videos

“We’ve known the Harmonix founders for 18 years,” wrote Feld on his blog. “What they and their team have accomplished is the stuff of legends, and the new games they’ve showed us are all mind-blowing. We believe once again they are about to give us a window into the future.”

Related

Feld has a long history with Harmonix. He met Egozy in college where they were fraternity brothers, and made an initial investment of around $500,000 in the studio when Harmonix first tried to get off the ground in 1995. He and the Foundry Group invested their funds – a pool of about $225 million in investment capital – into companies working on human computer interaction (HCI), technologies that excite people not unlike a plastic video game guitar. The companies backed successful tech companies like Organic Motion, who specialize in motion capture technology, and Zynga, whose successes vary depending on your point of view.

Feld says Harmonix has three very different games it’s working on, all of which include different forms of interaction. The studio began hiring developers for a motion controlled action game in May of last year for next-gen consoles. While there are no release dates, we can at least Harmonix’s first PlayStation 4 game to feature a significant shift, since the job listing described a title with “emotionally compelling storylines.”

[Source: GamesIndustry International]

Editors' Recommendations

Anthony John Agnello
Anthony John Agnello
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Anthony John Agnello is a writer living in New York. He works as the Community Manager of Joystiq.com and his writing has…
The best Stardew Valley mods
Emily talking to the player in Stardew Valley.

After so many years of support, it might feel like there's nothing left that needs to be added or changed in Stardew Valley. This farming sim lets you live your best life in the quiet countryside with your own farm, NPCs to meet and date, Easter eggs to find, and quests to complete.

Multiple updates have only expanded the number of things to do in a game you could already spend hundreds of hours in. But the developer behind this game is just one person, and even an entire team couldn't match the output of the entire modding community. Given the meteoric success this game has had and sustained for so many years, there have been hundreds of mods created by passionate fans. These mods can make your humble little farm life feel completely fresh, as well as smooth out a couple of lingering rough edges in the game. We've farmed up the absolute best Stardew Valley mods you should try for yourself.
Stardew Valley Expanded
Each major update to Stardew Valley adds a host of new features, but one fan just couldn't wait and decided to make their own unofficial expansion called Stardew Valley Expanded. Just looking at the feature list of this mod, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a true expansion, or maybe even a sequel. It adds 27 new NPCs, 50 more locations, 27 fish, two new farms, and even updates a couple of existing things. That's not even mentioning the new music, quests, objects, festivals, and more. The entire thing was made to feel as seamless with the base game as possible, and is intended to give that same feeling of wonder and joy players had when playing the game for the first time.
NPC Map Locations

Read more
This fun and frustrating mountain-climbing game is worth the hike
Climbers climb a mountain in Surmount.

For whatever reason, the internet seems to love mountain-climbing games. Some of the most viral games of the last several years on platforms like Twitch have been titles like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy and Only Up! -- games where it’s difficult to climb up something and the punishment for failure is massive. If you’ve found yourself playing or watching content about those kinds of games, then you’ll want to check out one of the first notable games to come out this May: Surmount.

Released by indie developer duo Jasper Oprel and Indiana-Jonas, Surmount is a roguelite where players climb and fling themselves up a huge mountain. The way players have to swing around is reminiscent of Getting Over It, but its controls have a lot in common with the somewhat obscure Game Boy Advance title DK: King of Swing. The controls take a bit of getting used to, but that’s part of the fun with these games. Surmount is the latest in a long line of hilarious climbing games.

Read more
A former Stadia exclusive comes to PC and consoles this week, and it’s a blast
Pac-Men chase one another through a beach maze in Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs.

If you're a fan of Pac-Man, you're in luck. On May 9, Pac-Man Mega Tunnel Battle: Chomp Champs (not the catchiest name, is it?) hits PC and all major consoles. The online-only multiplayer release is a battle royale game where 64 players fight to survive across interconnected mazes. It's a chaotic use of the Pac-Man formula that fans of the series should enjoy.

If all of this sounds oddly familiar, it's because the game originally launched nearly four years ago ... as a now-lost Google Stadia exclusive.

Read more