The Drive to Innovate

A mere 15-minute walk from where the mouth of MIT's Infinite Corridor opens onto Mass. Ave., Eran Egozy, surrounded by dozens of employees in Harmonix's second-floor office in Central Square, listens intently to a speaker giving a talk on neuroscience and music. One month after the release of Rock Band 2 in September 2008,Egozy has a bit of a beard, and the slender face below his shock of thick, misbehaving hair bears the look of someone in semi-stunned recovery after a hard push toward a goal. He adopts a serious tone as he reflects on the company's long struggle from obscure Media Lab research project to stardom. (As of December 2008, U.S. sales of Rock Band had hit 4.5 million units, and Rock Band 2--barely three months after its release--had sold 1.7 million units.)The rush of the new release and the company's recent years of success haven't diminished his memory of the lean years, when many of the company's investors had written Harmonix off.

"We're taking music, which is something that is older than the hills, really established, and has a strong emotional connection," he says, "and we've figured out how to apply technology to that, and bring it to more people and have them experience it in this new way." He and cofounder Alex Rigopulos shared this vision while still at the Media Lab, in Tod Machover's computer music group, where they took on projects that included modifying a cello for Yo-Yo Ma. But, Egozy says, they decided they were more interested in using technology to help average people express themselves musically.

Egozy and Rigopulos started out by breaking down classics such as Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" and identifying aspects of the music that users could change. People are used to turning the volume of a song up or down, but what if there were a knob on the stereo that could make a song sound "more excited" or "sadder"? They decided to develop an intuitive way for a user to control these aspects of the music.

Egozy says that as the project's engineer, he would hack while Rigopulos, the "idea guy," played with a flight simulator on his computer and helped brainstorm ideas. One day, the two activities came together. "Alex says, 'Hey, Eran, what do you think about hooking up this joystick to this music system that we've been working on?'" Egozy recalls. The result quickly became a favorite stop on Media Lab tours. Egozy remembers demonstrating it to dozens of people, including the musician Peter Gabriel.

When the pair graduated, they wanted to keep working on their project. They founded Harmonix and built a product called the Axe, a commercial version of their joystick device. The software allowed users to jam along with songs on a CD provided by Harmonix, selecting lead instruments such as piano or guitar and controlling them with a joystick. The Axe gave players real and sophisticated control over the music while preventing the off notes that a beginner would be sure to play on an ordinary instrument.