Michael Shanks is an actor, and while it’s easy to get lost in the character he has played on, off and on again for a dozen years, there’s a lot under the surface.

Born in Vancouver and raised in small town British Columbia, Shanks began his acting career playing Charlie Brown in the fourth grade play. He witnessed his first television production in college while taking a beach break from trying out for a play. Ironically, it was “MacGyver” that shanks saw being filmed, not knowing of course that he would one day star beside Richard Dean Anderson in “SG-1.”

He made his television debut in a 1993 episode of “The Commish,” a popular ABC crime drama. He landed a lot of minor roles before getting his big break on “Stargate SG-1″ in 1997, staring in 196 episodes in the series as an adventurous archeologist named Dr. Daniel Jackson. Since the end of “Stargate SG-1″ in 2007, Shanks, 38, has been trying to remake himself as an actor

“Well its a double-edged sword, I will say this,” Shanks said in his interview with Blast. “The things that come down the pipe, career-wise, that are offers to pay the bills are sort of sci-fi related projects.”

But, humbly, Shanks admits that all he can do is keep trying to land roles — hopefully roles that aren’t nerdy archeologists. “You just have to get back in a line as if you’re starting all over again,” he said.

We saw some of this. Shanks left “SG-1″ after season 5 and landed a few small roles, including two episodes of “Andromeda,” where he met his wife. It’s possible we may never have seen Daniel Jackson again if Shanks was offered another starring role (pure speculation). But Daniel’s was a popular role, and Shanks returned to “Stargate,” first as a guest, and then in his everyday role.

After “Stargate,” Shanks got to show some range by playing a pseudo-villain in the popular USA series “Burn Notice.” He played Victor, a rogue secret agent taking revenge on the shadowy intelligence agency that killed his family. He also recently landed a role that could bring him more into the mainstream by appearing in The CW’s “Smallville,” as comic book hero Hawkman. It’s still in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy, but the show has a wider following.

Still though, we can’t forget what Shanks and the “SG-1″ crew did in making the Sci-Fi/SyFy channel what it is today. A new Stargate show, “Stargate Universe” began this year, even as a rumoed “SG-1″ straight-to-DVD movie is on the shelf.

“Stargate Universe” is a much younger, more melodramatic, almost juvenile take on the franchise, and fans are conflicted. Shanks is too, even though he’s slated to appear in at least four episodes this season.

“It is really slick and pretty,” Shanks said. “[But] from what I’ve seen I’m not on board. … I’m not hooked in.”

Shanks said the drama and conflict seems forced. “They’re creating tension, pathos and angst,” he said. “The conflict with the characters seems a bit forced.”

One thing I did not dig deeply into was Shanks’ relationship with Christopher Judge. At the San Diego Comic-Con International in 2008, Judge boasted that he and Shanks started their own production company. We later heard about a production about the archangel Michael. But Shanks said the production company was off. He didn’t discuss his relationship with Judge, and I didn’t press him any further on the matter.

BLAST: So you and Christopher Judge are best buds. You have a production company you’re putting together? What’s happening with you guys?

MICHAEL SHANKS: Yeah. Let’s just say the production company’s not happening anymore, and I’d rather not go down that road and talk about Christopher Judge at this particular junction.

Shanks lives in Vancouver with his wife, the beautiful British-Filipina-Canadian actress Lexa Doig (Jason X), whom he got to work with when she played a doctor in 11 episodes at the end of “SG-1’s” running. She is also known for her sci-fi/fantasy work. The couple has two children, and Shanks has an 11-year-old Daughter, Tatiana, born in 1998 to then girlfriend Vaitiare Bandera, who played Daniel Jackson’s wife, Sha’re on “SG-1.” Shanks also said he’s been known to enjoy a good game of Hockey — like any true Canadian.

Editor’s note: After readers called out Blast — and called us liars — for not including the audio of the Christopher Judge portion of the Michael Shanks interview, we are posting it in the interest in full disclosure. We wouldn’t lie about or improperly quote an actor who agreed to give an interview to Blast.

There will be some spoilers in the podcast. Click at your own risk.

Now that the movie has been shown to fans, we can finally sit down and talk about it.

I saw “Boondock Saints II” last week. I liked it.

I didn’t like it in the way that I’m a news editor and occasional film critic. I didn’t love it in the way that I’m an artist and I can appreciate a classic piece of film.

Let’s face it, there’s two kinds of people in the world: The ones that love “The Boondock Saints” and the ones who hate “The Boondock Saints.”

And I love “The Boondock Saints.”

Shit, I put it on the cover. But I’m not a damn fanboy. I’m not a fanboy about anything. In fact, the more I like something, the harder I tend to be on the people in charge. You can ask the people at Sony when PlayStation 3 first came out, and you can ask Boondock writer/director Troy Duffy, because I changed the pace on Monday and asked him some pointed questions.

What you’re going to hear in the podcast on the top of this article is my session on one of a series of roundtable interviews that Duffy and actors Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus, and Billy Connolly put on at The Black Rose bar in downtown Boston. We had a good time and we laughed throughout most of the 20-minute session, but I was on a mission to bring home some data for this piece of our month-long coverage on the sequel, “All Saints Day.” But, besides that, the podcast is mostly hilariousness and gay jokes.

“It was just like riding a bicycle,” Duffy said about his return to directing.

“He sucked equally on this one as he did in the first one,” Flanery added after a pause, laughing.

But return it is. Duffy made Boondock in 1999 and hasn’t made a film since. He was a young director coming out to Hollywood, and he made some mistakes — and I’m probably being nice here. But he still managed to make a good movie amidst it all.

“They talk about Troy as a new director, but from day one it looks as if he was doing it his whole life,” Connolly said.

Just as people either love or hate Boondock, they either love or hate Duffy. (The Documentary “Overnight” really hurt him too)

The people in the original movie seem to be loyalists. Nearly everybody — including someone you don’t expect (it’s in the podcast) — is back for the sequel.

“Everything just happened,” Connolly said. “Everybody seemed to be there for the love of the piece, not just to be in a movie or earn some money.”

It showed. When you listen to the podcast and check out our other interviews, you’ll hear how good of a time they all had making both movies.

Boondock is an organic cult success, and the cast and crew know it.

“Half of Boondock was one guy sitting another guy down going ‘you’re watching this movie,’” Duffy said.

Will there be a third movie?

“Lets just ride this one into the shore and see what happens,” Duffy said. “I got some ideas.”

It’s also up to the studio and the fans. If the sequel makes money in theaters, I say bet on a trilogy.

At the end, I asked Duffy what we could expect from him going forward.

“During that 10-year period, I have written a bunch of scripts,” he said, “and I intend to knock them down like dominoes one by one. They’re in ascending budgets, all different stories. One is a period piece, a buddy comedy, a black comedy, one is about serial killers, one is called “The Peregrines” which would take me an hour to describe what the’s about, one is about a historical figure, which will take a lot of money to do that last one.”

The four guys also toured Boston College and Emerson College before premiering the movie for fans on Monday night. Here’s a vid from their day:

“Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” is in theaters October 30.

Here is a podcast and gallery from the Boston Film Festival about the film, including a lengthy Q&A session with the star and director.

Photos and audio by Melissa Unger for Blast

It’s the stuff of a movie itself — our hero is in a nasty car crash, laid up in a hospital bed for weeks, and he needs an interpreter to tell him what the doctors are saying. He’s black-and-blue, his face is badly swollen, and he wears an eye patch to cover the scars from the surgery to implant an artificial eye socket.

But his devotion to his art is true. He devises and storyboards a movie from that hospital bed and sneaks out late at night. He flies to Los Angeles with the eye patch still attached to his face and directs the movie he envisioned.

Fiction this is not.

It’s part of how Norman Reedus spent the ten years between “Boondock Saints” installments. Reedus, who plays Murphy McManus in the upcoming sequel, “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” said he “dropped off the face of the earth for a while” following a serious accident several years ago.

“It was pretty dramatic, I didn’t think I’d be an actor again,” Reedus said. But even if he had been unable to act, he planned on staying in movies. And his short film “I Thought of You” is proof-positive of that fact. Reedus escaped briefly from a hospital in Germany to shoot the movie, which he wrote and assembled from his hospital bed.

And though Reedus said he was worried he didn’t look the same after the accident, Boondock fans still approach him daily, recognizing him on the street.

“I’m impressed every day. Sometimes people come up and they have my face tattooed on them,” he said. “I say, ‘I hope you were drunk when you got that.’ Almost 90 percent of the time they say, ‘yes I was.’”

Reedus said that in the ten years since the original movie, there were several false starts at getting “Boondock Saints II” up and moving.

“It came and it went so many times in the last ten years,” he said. “You get excited and you start to work with your schedule.”

But when the project was finally green-lit, Reedus said it was easy to drop back into Murphy McManus mode.

“I started working with a trainer right away, with a dialect coach right away. Then it was just ‘Boondock Saints’ camp,” he said. And gathering everybody together again helped, too. “It was a déjà vu once we got on the set and in the peacoats, once we got the guns and started reciting the prayers and stuff.”

And that thick Irish accent that Murphy has? It’s not natural.

“It’s not super hard once you get going with it. Everybody on the set’s speaking like that all day long,” he said.

Reedus’ impression of his character is one of respect and awe.

“They sort of have this calling from a higher power to take out the bad guys that have slipped through society and are getting away with it,” he siad. “I don’t think they’re bad killers or nasty people, they’re just stepping up to the plate.” The public really connected with the Saints in the first movie, and the controversy of are-they-good-or-are-they-bad helps them relate, he said.

The new “Boondock Saints” movie isn’t the only chance the public will have to connect with Reedus this fall — he’s also got a new movie, “Pandorum,” which recently hit theaters. Reedus described the film as a sci-fi thriller set in an abandoned spaceship.

Reedus also addressed amost important question: Will there be a Boondock Saints III?

“I hope so — I could do a bunch of these,” he said. But he added he hoped it wouldn’t be ten years down the road, imagining “Sean and I walking with walkers, trying to lift our guns and we can’t get them up. Hiding out in an old-folks home in Miami.”

And he doesn’t mean knocking down a mafioso or some badass Russian crime boss.

Ten years ago, David Della Rocco played a character named after him, but the character is not him. Rocco, a college-educated, classical actor, couldn’t be farther removed from the dumbass street thug he plays in the “Boondock Saints” movies. He had to knock himself down a little bit to his character’s level.

He did like the freedom in the dialog and the way he was able to put some of himself into the character, but David is not Rocco.

“I had a lot of freedom,” he said, “in the way, you look at the script and — Troy directs what he wants for an emotion — and basically I could use so much of myself, which is really nice when you’re an actor.”

This student of the stage still doesn’t have many Hollywood films to his name, and that’s become hard to believe because he’s recognized everywhere for his role in “Boondock Saints,” which is extremely popular in Boston and a cult classic everywhere else.

In fact, the only other film to his name is 2008’s “Jake’s Corner,” about an ex-football star who has a family tragedy. He plays a minor character named “Wheels.” He said he’d love to get more roles, but acknowledged how hard it is to make a living as an actor.

He told Blast that he reprises his role in “All Saints Day” in a dream sequence in three different spots, filmed in three locations, where he interacts with the two brothers.

Rocco lives in Hollywood and has a girlfriend named Debra Donovan.

As for his favorite Rocco line in the two films, he threw a nod to the often vulgar writing in the flicks:

“Shut your fat ass, Rayvie! I can’t go and buy a pack of smokes without running into nine guys you’ve fucked!”

Bob Marley’s not a reggae star. He’s a local boy, from New England. He’s the comedian who gained some measure of fame for his role as the bumbling Detective Greenly in “The Boondock Saints.”

His most famous line — “Where you goin? NO WHERE” — can still be heard 10 years later at bars across Boston.

We tapped the phones in the Blast newsroom to Podcast our 20-minute interview with Marley, where we talked about terrorism, comedy and most of all the hotly anticipated sequel to the 1999 cult classic (if all of Boston is considered one big cult) “Boondock Saints.” Marley reprises his role in “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day,” which is due out October 30, despite the utter lack of publicity surrounding the flick so far.

Contrary to some published reports, Marley hadn’t known “Saints” director Troy Duffy since childhood. They met about 12 years ago.

“A buddy of mine introduced me to Troy and then they came to see me at The Laugh Factory (in Los Angeles) and he said ‘come audition,’” Marley said. “When that movie came out it was like nothing happened, and we were like ‘oh I guess nothing’s going to happen.’”

But something did happen. Suddenly, larger crowds were coming out to his shows, and they started firing lines from the movie up on stage.

“Then I realized it was taking off,” he said.

The original film helped lift the careers of the actors and comedians like Marley and guys like Brian Mahoney, and David Ferry. Marley said it was vital to bring this trio of cops back — as well as so many other actors, right down to the more obscure Tom Barnett, who plays the Irish gun dealer in both films.

So why did it take 10 years to make another “Boondock Saints?” In that case, the published reports are true. Duffy had problems with Franchise Films — and there was money involved. It was one big mess.

We do know that Marley’s character, the Boston Police Detective, will have a larger role in the sequel. He even tries to get with the gorgeous FBI Agent Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz).

Over the past decade, rumors flew around about a sequel, including one that would be set in New York. Marley was glad, however, that the film came home.

“I’m glad its in Boston and I’m glad it takes place in New England,” he said.

Although, despite the tax credits and “Hollywood East” mantra, the film was shot in Canada.

Marley said it was also fun to have a bunch of jackasses like comedians on set.

“Everybody on the film’s got a great sense fo humor, so it’s hard not to just sit there and laugh,” he said. “Judd Nelson is in this movie, and his part is menacing and yet hilarious at the same time. He’s really, really funny in the movie. There’s a bunch of clowns.”

Marley’s official website

Present during the first exploratory meetings between Harmonix and the Apple Corps. shareholders, as well the game’s final days in production, Randall possesses a unique perspective on the monumental effort put forth by the 300+ employees at the music/gaming company to render the Beatles properly in the video game medium. We sat down with Josh to discuss the need for secrecy, meeting with Macca, and the end of the affair.

Josh Randall: I’ve been working on the game since we first started talking about the idea of doing Beatles Rock Band. I was on the front lines between Harmonix and Apple Corps and the shareholders — the shareholders are Paul and Ringo, and Yoko, and Olivia Harrison. So, we had most of the company working on it — we’re about 300 people now, so most of us were focused on that.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: What was the first game you worked on here?

JR: Frequency. Before Harmonix, I was with Looking Glass Studios. We did Thief and System Shock.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: Now that you’re so close to release, are you looking back and reflecting on all the things that had to come to come together for this to become a reality? Does it seem like something you couldn’t have imagined happening a few years ago, with all the people and companies involved?

JR: There’s definitely been some reflection. Yeah, it’s been amazing. I still kind of — I have to say, I’m still waiting to see it on the shelves before I can actually relax. Because it was so secret for a really long time, that it was really tricky to sort of, every day — like, every email that I sent, I’d have to recheck all the people that that I was sending to, just to make sure. You know, like, ‘Am I going to blow it today? Oh, I didn’t blow it today! All right, great, it’s good till tomorrow!’ But yeah, it’s been a pretty amazing journey for everyone involved.

BL: How receptive were the shareholders initially? I know it was an idea that came, at least in part, from George’s son. Was it something that they had to be convinced to do? Something that appealed to them immediately?

Beatles Rock Band has been Randall's biggest challenge in more than 10 years with Harmonix (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

JR: It’s funny, Alex, our CEO, I remember talking with him years ago, and he was like, ‘Yeah, someday we’re going to do a Beatles game!’ I was like, ‘Ha ha ha, that’s hilarious.’ And then, I guess Dhani (Harrison) had been a fan of our earlier games, and somehow met the head of MTV, Van Toffler. And Van was like, ‘Oh, well we just acquired Harmonix, you should talk to Harmonix.’ So Dhani met with Alex, and they sort of kicked around a Beatles Game.

My interaction with all the shareholders was amazing. It was like they understood, just looking at what we showed them — you know, our first meetings were just showing them Rock Band and talking about our experience with Rock Band, and how we find that it’s encouraging people to play music, or to have a deeper understanding of the music they already love.

So I think they got that, and then once we started talking about some of the creative things we could do, I think they started getting excited, when they realized, ‘Oh, this is going to be like a new edition to the Beatles catalog, this is the real deal.’ So, with that in mind, they all really pushed us to do new stuff.

BL: You put a demo together for them initially, right? Did they play it, or did they just watch it?

JR: They watched us play it. It was basically, I think it was a few (Beatles) songs that you could play in Rock Band, and then there was a video, where we had spent a few months basically sculpting all the heads of the Beatles in 3-D, and sort of stuck them into the game, but didn’t have them animating, they were all just sort of posed. But our game engine used camera cuts and stuff to make it look almost like the Budokan concert, and we showed them that. They could use their imaginations to figure out where that was going to go.

JG: Obviously this game was a challenge, and every project you take on was difficult, but what was it like having Paul McCartney kind of correct you, and say, ‘No, that is not how I stand, this is how I stand!’ Did that, overall, make it a lot more difficult for you? What was that like?

JR: I think the biggest challenge for us on this project was really just the fact that most video games don’t look good until, really, the last month of production. And so, we were in a situation where we really wanted to show progress, and show that, like, ‘You guys are going to look amazing in the game, and the whole game is going to be fantastic and look gorgeous.

But, it was more like, ‘Right now all we can show you is that we’ve got guys on stage, and they’re kind of goofy because we might not have perfected all the technology’ or whatever. And so what we wound up doing was basically having a lot of visual milestones, where we would have to, pretty early on in production, push to have a demo that would maybe show like 3 or 4 songs, but they would be sort of like proof of concepts. Like, ‘Here’s what the guys look like in these outfits, here’s what they look like when they move, here are some of the venues,’ and stuff like that.

And every time we would get to one of those milestones, me and some of the team would get on a plane over to Abbey Road, or go to New York, or wherever we had to go, to basically sit with the Apple Corps shareholders, get their feedback, and discuss it. And then we’d get their feedback and be like, ‘Okay, we’ll see you guys in a few weeks,’ and then we’d iterate it and come back. So, trying to sort of push the visual quality earlier in the pipeline is really tricky. Sometimes you just need that time to get all the little nuances right. So, we would have certain meetings where we’d go, ‘Hey, it’s Shea Stadium, and it’s huge, and it’s awesome, and there’s a crowd, and there’s all this stuff,’ and Apple’s like, ‘Yeah, but they’re not singing into their microphones.’ And we were like, ‘Oh, yeah yeah yeah. Next milestone, next milestone!’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, but—,’ and we’re like, ‘No, it’ll be good!’

Before Harmonix, Randall was with Looking Glass Studios working on Thief and System Shock. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

And after a while, those guys started to trust us. When I said, ‘All right, trust me, next month you’ll see all this stuff,’ and then we would deliver, and then they’d be like, ‘Okay.’

JG: Was there a specific nuance that really stuck out that one of the shareholders made happen, and said, ‘No, this is how you’re going to do this, this is how this is going to look?’ Was there one particular thing that one of the shareholders kind of walked you through?

JR: No, I think it was more like helping us find our way through stuff. I think that just meeting with any of them, they could sort of help, like,’ Oh, actually, if you really want to capture the spirit of this particular Beatle, you should do this and this and this.’ Or sometimes they didn’t know the technical terms to be able to guide us to where we should go, but they would be able to say, ‘Oh, well…’ Like, our John model wasn’t that good for a while, because he was slightly stooped over a little bit, and talking like Yoko, she was like, ‘No, he was way more powerful-looking than that, he should look better than that.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, what is it, what does she mean by that?’ And we went back and looked at all the footage, and you watch John when he plays, and he’s just like (mimics John Lennon). Just totally owning 50,000 people. And it was like, ‘Oh, okay, I get it.’

So we basically just took his skeleton and bent him back, and made him always sort of look down his nose, and it was like, ‘Hey, it’s John.’ It was just stuff like that that they sort of pushed to capture that spirit. Paul sat with Chris Foster, and I think we had written a few things, and he was just like, ‘No, actually that’s not how it happened.’ I think Paul realized, ‘Oh, now I can finally clear the air on a lot of this stuff, or I can put down how I remember it.’

It’s weird, because that’s one guy out of four, and he remembers it that way. So we had to sort of talk to him, then basically I think what Chris did was have all of his facts straight from a bunch of different books, and when he walked in or when he talked with Paul, he could be like, ‘All right, well this guy reports that it was this way, and this guy reports that it was this way.’ And Paul would be like, ‘Oh, well maybe it was this way.’ It was a long time ago.

JG: You mentioned kind of being part of the Beatles catalog with this game. With all the previous music games, both of the major competitors, there are dozens of dozens of bands poured into the game, there are hundreds of songs now, and it’s a game. How do you feel about how now you have all the Beatles albums — and Beatles Rock Band? It’s got all the intimate details, and their outtakes and stuff. How do you feel about this game not being just a collection of songs, but actually part of Beatlemania?

JR: It’s amazing. For us to be a part of that is really like a dream come true. And I think that when we were showing it to the shareholders, they sort of realized, ‘Oh, this is the new Anthology.’ That’s what they were saying. And ‘This is the way that kids are going to be introduced to us now.’ And so, they were like, ‘Make sure this is right!’ And we were like, ‘Okay!’ So I think what we tried to do is really sort of make the game feel like it came through them. We wanted it to feel like the Beatles in-game. It hasn’t totally hit me yet, but I’m sure in a few years, I’ll look back at this time and think, ‘Whoa, that was really cool.’

JG: What do you think is the most epic part of the game? The one that’s really going to capture new fans, and make our moms scream and cry when they see it?

One of the challenges Harmonix faced was showing the Beatles shareholders their progress over months and months of building the game. They created milestones to show specific aspects of development.

JR: Oh, yeah. Well, I think there are a few dreamscapes in there that have really had an emotional impact on people. I think it depends on what your relationship is to the Beatles. For my mom, she was more into the early pop stuff, and so when she’s seen the stuff in the Sullivan show, she actually remembers watching that on TV, or seeing the Shea Stadium concert. She gets caught up in the sort of Beatlemania, fan aspect of it. But I’ve seen other people really respond to dreamscapes. ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ that one in particular is really moving. And I think that for me, the most moving one is either ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ which still makes me smile every time I play it — I’ll get like halfway through the song, and think ‘This is cool,’ and then something will happen on-screen, like the guys will look at me or the sun will come up or something, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is awesome.’ The one that’s probably most epic is ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ just because that was our biggest one. That one took a long time, and you’re sort of going from one place to another, and all this stuff. Another one that, for me, is pretty moving, is the ‘Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows,’ that’s another that’s really trippy and has some good shots of George looking at you, and the drums are really awesome.

BL: Does the fact that you’re dealing with such an iconic band, and the fact that most people will be coming into it knowing not only the music, but the visuals, the way these guys acted, and some of the history, did that make your job easier, knowing that there would be some currency among the players, or did it make it more difficult because you had to conform to those expectations?

JR: I think it was basically like, ‘Oh, great, everyone’s going to know these songs already. That’s awesome.’ And I think that happened with the whole vocal harmony feature, where it’s like, people already know how to sing the main part, so if they want to reach and try to sing the harmony parts, they at least have that foundation there. So, there was that. But more than that, it was the challenge of like, ‘Okay, we now have to make four of the most recognizable people in the world, and make their 3-D avatars look good.’ And that’s incredibly daunting. And then with the dreamscapes, that was another one where people have had this music in their heads for their whole lives, and every time they hear this music, they get a certain image in their head of what this song looks like. And so, we were pressed with coming up with these, basically interactive music videos, that somehow meet or exceed the visuals that they have in their heads. Which was like, ‘I hope we don’t screw this up,’ you know?

BL: Was there every any consideration of going with a hyper-realistic look, or was it always sort of a toned-down, Rock Band, cartoony version?

JR: I think that we very early on realized that the closer you get to hyper-real, the closer you get to the Uncanny Valley, where it’s like the closer it gets to human, but is not, your brain is like, ‘Hey, that’s not a human!’ and instantly picks it out. So, we were all really concerned about that. We didn’t want these guys to be creepy. We wanted them to be cute and lovable and have all the charisma that the real guys do. If you watch these guys play live, there’s just so much joy that pours out of these guys, and they’re so clever. They always seemed like they had some sort of inside joke while they were playing, little smirks and things like that. So we really tried to go in and identify that stuff, and sort of put that into our characters. But I think if we had gone for a more realistic thing, it just would’ve come off creepy. You just can’t do it yet. Maybe at some point your brain will not care, but right now, it’s like—especially if there are still movies that are kind of creepy in that way when they try to make 3-D humans, trying to do it on a game console is really hard.

BL: Was there any consideration ever given to trying to cram a second guitar note chart onto the screen, or did you always know that you were going to try to compress them into one?

JR: Yeah, I think that early on, we sort of realized that doing our standard Rock Band thing of taking all the guitars and putting it on one track was going to be more fun, because then you’d have, you know, when you design a Rock Band “level,” when you’re looking at a song, you want to make sure that each player has enough note content to last the entire song. So, if there are these big, long pauses while you’re waiting for someone else to play something, then it gets kind of boring. So I think if we had two guitar tracks, then that’s probably what would happen. Each person would have a track that was kind of spotty. So I think we all just kind of quickly were like, ‘Yeah, just put it all on one track to make it fun to play all the way through.’

BL: Did you ever worry that maybe the Beatles, despite their popularity, weren’t the band best-suited for a game like this, because of their experimentation, the unusual instruments, the fact that they don’t really fit into the “rock god” paradigm?

JR: Well, they don’t shred, right? That was one thing that was just like, ‘Oh, well, there aren’t a million insane guitar solos,’ so just from a difficulty standpoint, in the beginning I was like ‘Well, how is this going to work?’ And then once we added vocal harmonies and were basically having people play an instrument and sing in harmony like the Beatles did, it’s really challenging. So I think for people who want a challenge out of this game, it’s like, ‘Hey, the Beatles could do it — can you do it?’ That sort of thing.

JG: What’s your favorite song on the list so far?

JR: It kind of changes, you know? I think I’m still psyched about “Sgt. Pepper,” because that’s my favorite Beatles song, going back to when I was a kid, and favorite album. But it depends on my mood. We definitely play the game around here a lot. When we were making the game, we’d play the game just to sort of blow off steam, which was great. I’d sort of go between, if I needed to chill out, I’d play ‘Here Comes the Sun,’ if I needed to blow off steam, I’d play ‘Helter Skelter’ or some of the early tracks that are pretty fast and fun, and we’d sort of clear our minds to go back and finish working. But I think probably ‘Sgt. Pepper.’

JG: On the question of the two major music games out there: Guitar Hero was a phenomenon that Harmonix brought into the world, really introduced everyone to. And for the last couple of years, Guitar Hero has still been — when people think of music games, the first thing they think of is Guitar Hero. With Rock Band, you really turned a corner, and really got people thinking about the multiplayer aspect of this. Do you think Beatles Rock Band finally kind of comes full circle for Harmonix, that now you’ve kind of taken back the throne of the music gaming world?

JR: I don’t know. I guess for me, I’m still surprised that there are other people making music games besides us. When I started, there was Harmonix, and then these Japanese companies, whose games didn’t really come over to the States. So, now I think that it’s a really interesting time, that there are all these people making music games. And I think for people that love music, it’s a fantastic time. As far as the throne, or the king or whatever, I don’t really have a comment on that. I’m just really amazingly psyched that the Beatles chose to work with us, and I’m so proud of my team for what they were able to accomplish. And I really hope people will love it when it comes out. I think it’s an amazing game, and I think pairing the music and story of the Beatles with our gameplay is — well, it’s really fun.

BL: Could you see yourself doing another band-centric game in the future, or would it just be all downhill from here?

JR: Oh, it’s all downhill. (jokes) I don’t know. I’m taking a vacation. (laughs) It would be cool to work with other bands if they were cool and creative and wanted to engage with us on a creative level. I’m kind of up for anything.

JG: Is there a band that’s not been in a Rock Band game that you’d really like to work with?

JR: I don’t know. I’m actually a big techno guy, so there are a bunch of bands or types of music that I’d like to see in our games again, but I already got to make a bunch of those games ten years ago, so I’m not complaining.

BL: How much more effort goes into prepping one track for this game, as compared to one track for Rock Band, where you’re not necessarily having to tailor the video to a specific band, and maybe you’re not having to deal with audio that’s from 45-year-old two-track sources? How much more effort goes into a single track of this game than would go into downloadable content for Rock Band 2?

JR: Right. Well, Rock Band is made in a pretty modular way, that allows you to—talking about offering stuff. Our venues are set up in a way that basically for any song, it’ll sort of look good in any venue. For the Beatles Rock Band, since we have this concept of dreamscapes, we wound up making a bunch of graphical assets that are really specific to that one song, which is just a mammoth undertaking. Also, we had never done that stuff before. You know, we’d never had guys walking through a field or anything like that. So, from that standpoint, that’s a huge production difference, custom-crafting all the graphics for each individual song.

BL: Does that limit the scope of what you’re looking to do with the DLC at all?

JR: Actually, no. What we did, which was tricky, was we made, for songs that are going to wind up in dreamscapes in DLC, there’s actually stuff that’s on the disk that you haven’t seen yet. So when new DLC songs come out, that’ll help conserve new custom assets for that. And then some stuff is going to be, almost doing a mash-up of the stuff that you’ve seen before. So you might revisit certain dreamscapes that have been tweaked out or changed in different ways. We tried to come up with a modular system that would work for these dreamscape elements as well. If there were time, it would be cool to like, for every single song, go really deep and make it totally custom for every DLC song. But I think the level of customization that you’ll see is actually really good.

BL: Are you looking at making the whole catalogue available eventually, or is that a little ambitious?

JR: Yeah, it’s a little ambitious. I think right now we’ve got three albums that we’ve announced, plus the “All You Need is Love” single. It would be cool to keep going.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: Well, we’ve talked to the audio guys already, and the project lead on the game. You had to kind of take the audio and the concept and all the orders from the shareholders and crew and make it look good. What was part of the challenge of doing that?

Dare Matheson: What wasn’t part of the challenge of doing that? Obviously, it’s like you’re taking some of the most iconic popular music, and everybody who likes the Beatles, and who’s listened to the Beatles, has their own sort of connection with it. People listen to the lyrics, and have their own interpretations and visualizations that go along with it.

It’s sort of like, with the historical venues, that’s sort of one thing, and that’s really tied up in our interpretation of the characters and the settings. Maybe I’ll just speak to that really quickly and then go to the dreamscapes, because I think that’s really where things get crazy, and that’s really where the biggest challenge for us in the game was. So, with the characters, we really wanted to get something that felt—you know, there’s a whole range of ways that the band has been depicted in terms of art. Everybody’s familiar with their likenesses and their personalities, and the emotions that they show on their face, so we really wanted to get the emotional side across. They’ve been depicted in, for example, the Yellow Submarine movie, which is a great reductive approach to them that could represent the furthest extreme of what we could’ve done. And we like that style, we like that look. But it felt like that would be too limited for the majority of the experience, for a total experience of the band in this medium. So we kind of looked at that possibility.

What we wanted to do was get something that immediately was familiar as the Beatles, had all of their unique identity and personality that could show through for the four guys, that people could pick up on and really connect with, and have it be a bit stylized. Because on the one extreme would be going too cartoony, and you wouldn’t get enough of the identity and richness of connection — you’ve seen photos and footage and all that, so it could be sort of like you go too far in that direction. The other danger would be to go sort of too realistic, and you know how it is in games where it’s like, you see something where somebody’s trying to make a real person, and it just looks creepy, and it just looks kind of scary and kind of gross, so we wanted to avoid that.

The dreamscapes Matheson helped create add to the Beatles experience in the game.

So that was the key, and that’s the thing that stands true whether you’re talking about the historical venues or the dreamscapes. With the historical venues, we really just looked at a lot of the archival footage, and we really tried to get a sense of the atmosphere, and that’s the thing that we went for, we went for the atmosphere and tried to find, for each one of the five historical venues, that each one of them had a distinctive atmosphere from each other, and it so happened that we did. In some cases, we exaggerated a little bit.

For example, Budokan was — you know, typically in these games we go from a smaller venue setting to a bigger one, showing a sort of career arc there. And in this case, Budokan was a smaller place than Shea Stadium, and Budokan happened afterwards. So in the case of Budokan, we didn’t want it to feel like a letdown, so we exaggerated the verticality of Budokan, and really had it feel like this sort of compressed version of a giant arena. And the stage in Budokan is — I think the real stage was something like 12 or 15 feet, really tall, just this giant blue plan box — so we even exaggerated that a little bit further, and just made everything feel like it was going ‘up.’

From the beginning, with the psychedelic dreamscapes, when we showed an early prototype of a dreamscape — it wasn’t even a prototype, it was just a storyboard, an animatic — to Giles Martin, it was this idea that the band would depart from Abbey Road, and they would change into more psychedelic outfits, and they’d be in a magical land. And Giles was like, ‘Okay, that’s cool. Looks good. I just want to make sure that you guys don’t hold back.’ And he’s like, ‘Make sure this is as psychedelic as you can make it.’ Because, going to a magical land — I think the land in our animatic looked a little bit like the Yellow Submarine movie, and he basically said, ‘Okay, that was psychedelic in the sixties, but what’s psychedelic now? You guys have to bridge the gap, because something that is truly psychedelic is something that is a new experience.’

You're taking some of the most iconic popular music, and everybody who likes the Beatles, and who’s listened to the Beatles, has their own sort of connection with it, Matheson said. (Darcy Hoffman for Blast)

So, that was our big call for ourselves, that in the dreamscapes, and in the style of the game generally, we wanted to find something that — you know, the Beatles’ music, the most amazing music, happened forty years ago. So, we’re trying to find something that will feel authentic and connect clearly and well with that time, for people now, so that people who were there then and saw the Beatles will immediately connect with it, and yet people who have never heard of the Beatles, who see this game and will be able to experience them for the first time, it will feel connective for them, as well.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: How much of a help or hindrance was it that the Beatles have this legacy of visual creativity themselves? We didn’t get to see your dreamscape for “I Am the Walrus,” but I’ve read that it sort of mimics the Magical Mystery Tour ethos that they created. Is that something that made you feel constrained by what they had done in that area already, or did that free you to be even more creative?

DM: No, it was awesome. First of all, they set the bar high, and so there’s a ton of rich material there. There’s all the album art, there’s their movies, their crazy clothes, their avant garde look, the music itself. It’s like they shot for the skies, so there’s a ton of rich material to draw from, for one thing. For the second thing, they — Apple Corps, and the shareholders themselves and everybody we worked with — were very encouraging of us to not hold back. So, basically, as opposed to what you might think could happen with sort of a ‘brand’ that is from that far away of an era, there’s a chance that it could have become rigid, and only presented to the world in a certain way that’s comfortable for them. But no, they totally wanted—once we gained their trust, once they saw that we had people that could interpret the Beatles, and they were comfortable with that—they really encouraged us to go nuts. You know, they told us what they thought, we had weekly calls with them, and we worked through everything together, but they were very encouraging of that. So, again, on another level, it was not constraining. And I thought there was a third thing, but, there’s only two.

JG: Building the characters themselves, the four guys on the stages, were there specific things that the shareholders would insist on, or were there things that you really wanted to make sure you captured, like the way someone stood, or the way someone strummed the guitar, or the way Ringo banged the drums? Were there certain things about the Beatles, when building the characters, that you were encouraged not to miss?

DM: Well, first of all, we absolutely set that challenge for ourselves. We knew that we wanted to make the characters look, visually, a little bit reductive — you know, they don’t have skin pores, and we sort of buffed out certain areas of detail to try to find the distilled version of Paul McCartney’s face. But we really wanted the animation to feel very much like them. So we really tried to nail the movements and the little nuances. We tried to pick up everything little nuance. Generally, peoples’ faces are much more expressive than you find in videogames, and much more nuanced. And we tried to get that. Somebody told me recently — maybe it was a cover band or something — got a hold of one of the demos and was like, ‘Oh, this will be the acid test for this game — did they pick up on Paul’s crazy, weird, extra eyebrow motion on one side? They got it, they got it!’ We concentrated on Paul’s eyebrow for like a week straight.

One of Matheson's challenges was capturing the essense of The Beatles without crafting creepy, hyper-realistic computer people.

But in answer to your question, we had our own bar set very high. And we actually got feedback directly from the shareholders. Most intensely, actually, from Olivia and Yoko. I think Paul and Ringo gave us feedback, but they were kind of like, ‘Yeah, I look awesome in that!’ I think Yoko and Olivia have a legacy to maintain that goes beyond their own selves, so we got a lot of direct feedback from both of them, and it was super-helpful, incredibly useful.

A few of us went out to meet with Olivia in Friar Park out in England, and we brought the George model that we had at that point. And she opened up her private photo albums and showed us a bunch of pictures of George. And we earmarked some, and she had her assistant scan it and send it to us. And Yoko visited here, visited the office, and we looked at the game together. And she gave us a lot of detailed feedback on, specifically, ‘Well, there’s something going on here, there’s a way that John is nodding his head that he just doesn’t do that, he wouldn’t do that.’

So somewhere along the way, we may have added in a little of our own thing, or a motion capture actor added in something extra, and that was something that Yoko didn’t find to be authentic, so we stripped that out. We had pages of notes. She was here for about four hours, and we had pages and pages of notes, and we just responded to that feedback. Super, super helpful.

JG: What was it like being that hands-on with the band and the shareholders? Usually you’re dealing with dozens of bands, and you’re never really putting that much detail into what specific members of bands look like, like in Rock Band or Rock Band 2. What was it like having this level of detail, focusing on this one particular band?

DM: For me, it was great. I love it. I mean, I love Rock Band, and it’s sort of a platform, and that’s its purpose. But because of that, you’re automatically, things get more sort of dispersed. So it’s great for me. This game has been my favorite version of this type of game to work on, because the music — there’s something already that roots it and makes it consistent, and that is that it’s based on a real band that had an artistic legacy. And it was such an artistic legacy that, like with your question, it basically, we had the world to go after with this one.

Blast got to play Beatles Rock Band at the Harmonix Studios in Cambridge (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

BL: Do you feel that some of the customization options that were present in Rock Band or Rock Band 2, do you think that’s something that will be missed? As a fan, I don’t think it would be for me, but if there are players who take a lot of pleasure in dressing up their characters, or making them personalized, putting their stamp on them somehow, do you feel like that’s something that will be lacking here?

DM: Well, I think that the idea of a Beatles dress-up shop would be fun for some people, because obviously they had this very exciting, avant-garde fashion sense. But really, the choices that we made in terms of the design, and what we exposed to the player, we tried to keep everything to the core experience of the Beatles. And I think that that might be a fun novelty, but I don’t think that it would add to the game, and in fact, it kind of would subtract from it. And there are other places that we had to make concessions like that, but I think that with every choice we made, we tried to always go towards advancing this very core, Beatles-centric experience.

BL: Do you feel that in the in-studio portions of the game, does the fact that the band was, at least by modern standards, pretty restrained in terms of their movements and actions on stage — obviously with the dreamscapes, you can kind of get away with it, but with those actual segments in a live setting, was there less for you to focus, less going on on the screen, less action?

DM: Well, the Beatles had a ton of energy on stage. I mean, they weren’t kicking over props or spewing fire or anything, but they had a tremendous amount of live energy. But yeah, in the studio, the great thing about the studio is, so, right, they’re not performing for an audience, they’re not performing for the camera, they’re performing for the audio track. In the studio parts, every time they’re in the studio, and you see that in the game, the song ends up expanding out into a visual dreamscape. So it’s actually really cool, and this is something that we haven’t seen in these games before, where it’s a much more intimate feeling. So rather than having it be about, ‘I’m performing to a million people,’ or whatever, it’s more about, you really do feel like you’re sitting there watching John Lennon close his eyes and rock his head back and just sing into the microphone, and you get this much more emotional thing that just sort of bravado and antics. Which is fine, too, but this is something a little bit nice to have in a Beatles game.

BL: How much research did you do even before you put anything on paper?

DM: Well, I’ve been researching this band since I was six years old. As a team, we did a ton of research, and in addition to other planning meetings and design meetings, we had, a couple times a week, we would spend an hour or two together. We spent, probably, several hours a week, just as a whole team, watching the Anthology, watching the movies, watching whatever we could get our hands on that would expand our knowledge. We were sending around emails with links to anything we could find. It was crucial. On the team, it goes from people who have been mega-Beatles fans since they were born because of their parents’ record collections, to people who, it’s newer for them and they’re learning a lot about it. But it’s crucial for everybody to be experts, Beatles experts, so that’s what we went for.

BL: Have you gotten a chance to see in person any of Paul’s recent concerts, where he had the footage playing behind him? Because for me, certainly, that would be pretty awesome.

DM: Yeah, I did, actually. It was cool, yeah. It was great. I saw him at Fenway Park a couple weeks ago, and yeah, he had two songs where he played footage from the game. One song he had dreamscape footage, and another one, he used some of the Passion Pictures intro footage. Yeah, it was great. He talked about the game on stage, and it was really, really cool.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.

We talked to Eric about crossing Abbey Road, the fleeting nature of fame and the tyranny of two-track recordings.

Blast’s Ben Lindbergh: When you sat down to select the songs initially — I don’t know exactly who was involved in that — how much weight was assigned to the popularity of the song of the song or the success of the song, versus how much fun you thought it would be to play, or how easy it would be to represent with the notes?

Eric Brosius: We definitely considered both of those things, like we always do. Actually, that’s pretty much what we do in all of Rock Band, there’s always this balance between playability and how popular it is, and some songs are in there for different reasons. But yeah, we wanted to find—pretty much all the Beatles songs are famous, outside of just a few. They’re one of the rare bands where like 80 percent of the catalog is completely famous, and 20 percent is lesser known. So, it was pretty easy to find songs that we thought everyone would just love playing, but that were also giant hits.

But we definitely looked at that, for sure. We also looked out for — you know, we wanted to grab songs from their entire career. From the beginning, and have roughly an equal number of songs from the different periods, just to make sure we hit all of their major albums and all of the time periods, and stuff like that. So it was just balancing those things together. There were some tricky things in the early songs, because some early songs were maybe harder to get, just because of the limited number of tracks that they had. So, we were always balancing that, and then we were talking to Giles Martin, who did all the actual mixing for us, because he knew the track layouts for every single song they’ve ever done, and he would always go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s problematic because of this, but this one I think we could do instead, because there’s some an extra tape of other stuff on here that we can use to make the song work.’

BL: So he had some sort of software that would be able to pick out the instruments individually when there was only a two-track recording, and then separate them somehow?

Harmonix Music Systems audio lead Eric Brosius makes his living playing with the soundtrack to your life, and he’s never had more fun than with Beatles Rock Band. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

EB: Yeah. And sometimes with a two-track recording, it also depends on even what was on the tracks, because some things are easier to separate, and some things are not, just depending on how it was mixed. If it’s a two-track recording, and they had some things panned to one side, that’s easy to separate from stuff that’s in the middle or on the other side. If it was a two-track recording where the whole thing was a stereo wash right down the center, that makes it a lot harder. So he kind of knew, not just the number of tracks of each song, but kind of where things were, and whether we would have an easier time separating them. Because yes, you can separate stuff, but it’s not a perfect solution. Some songs are kind of easy to get nice, clean separation, and some songs are harder, so we used all of that knowledge together.

BL: So then he would do all the work in Abbey Road, with some assistants, and then someone would come over here with a briefcase chained to his arm?

Sometimes with a two-track recording, it also depends on even what was on the tracks, because some things are easier to separate, and some things are not

EB: Well, he knew all about the Beatles stuff and mixing, so he and his guy, Paul Hicks, were in charge of actually recreating the mixes. Because the first step is just to like bring up the tapes, transfer them to digital, and then recreate the mix. Because what’s on the raw tape doesn’t usually sound like the raw mix in music. So, they spent a lot of time doing that, just making sure it came out, and they can recreate all the effects if there weren’t effects. Because sometimes effects weren’t printed to tape, right, they were this old gear, so they spent a lot of time doing that. And then we would usually fly over there and spend like five days there when we were going to pick up a batch of songs, and where they would bring up the mixes they had, and we would do some further editing, deciding which parts are going to be our playable guitar part, and which parts are not.

And then while we were at the studio, we’d bounce out the actual stems we needed for the game, and then we’d encode them into the final version that the game ships with right there, which was encrypted and high-security and all that kind of stuff. So we did everything there, and then we just brought the finished game assets back with us, because they were pretty keen on leaving all the original assets at Abbey Road, because they’re somewhat protective, as they should be.

BL: Was the fact that the remasters were being developed simultaneously, was there any work that was able to be saved or shared there, or was it just two separate processes?

EB: It was pretty much two separate processes, because on things that we’re doing, we’re going back to the multi-tracks. I’m not sure what was done in the mastering process, but usually remasterings are just, you go back to the two-track mixes, and then you use modern mastering techniques. So it was kind of separate, what they were doing was totally separate. I mean, it’s nice that they’re going to release them at the same time, which kind of shows how enthusiastic Apple and the Beatles are, which is cool, but it was really two separate processes.

Blast editor John Guilfoil: Can you kind of run our readers through the process of taking a song and putting it into Rock Band?

EB: Sure. So, for old songs like this, a lot of them are stored on magnetic tape. So the first thing to do is to transfer them to a digital format like Pro Tools, which is the standard that everyone uses. So you digitize all the tracks, and then the next step would be to take those and remix the song so it sounds like the original. Once the song is sounding good, with all the effects and levels balanced, then we bounce out stems, according to our specific needs, the ones we need in the game. Because we have one guitar player in the game, so if there are several guitars playing, at every given moment through the song, we decide which one is going to be the part you’re going to play. And that ends up being a composite of, maybe a little of John’s guitar here, maybe a little of George’s here, and that kind of thing.

And we bounce out the stems that we actually need for the game, then we basically encrypt them, interleave them into a single file that our game reads. So we have that, and that’s the audio part of it, it’s fairly straightforward. And then we have a team of people here that kind of transcribe all the music, putting down all the gems that you see, laying down all the tracks and putting the lyrics in. And that’s basically kind of like transcription using MIDI files, basically.

BL: So for someone who grew up listening to the ’80s pressings of the CDs, or compressed .mp3 versions of the songs and hasn’t heard the remasters yet, would this be the cleanest and the best they’ve ever heard the Beatles, even though it’s meant for playing as well as listening, and so there are compromises that have to be made there?

Blast spent the day at Harmonix learning about the game and its development. (Darcy Hofmann for Blast)

EB: I think so. And the thing that’s going to — yes, because part of the thing with Rock Band is, we’ll sometimes make some changes to the mixes. Sometimes, if there was a guitar part that was pretty buried in the original mix, but we want that to be the playable one, sometimes we’ll boost it a little bit so you can hear it more, because you want to hear the notes that you’re actually playing. So we always try to walk this line between — we don’t want to change history or anything like that, but with Giles’ approval, we would sometimes alter things. You know, ‘Let’s bring that up a little bit, because that’s going to be the playable part.’ So there are some things like that.

And the other really cool thing about the game is that, because most of our game is kind of featured around live stuff, most of the songs, we don’t have fadeouts in them, usually. And many times they went back to the way they actually played it in the studio, that usually had a proper ending. Because they’ll usually do the fade-out later, right in the mix. So in our game, a lot of times you get to hear the proper endings, which is really cool. So it’s like a little bit of extra material in most songs. And probably the biggest one is in ‘Helter Skelter,’ we don’t do the big fade back in, so you get to hear the way they played it through, which is pretty cool, and I think Beatles fanatics will love that stuff.

BL: Did you sit down initially and say, ‘We know we’re going to have forty-five songs,’ and then get a list of the catalog and cross things out, or did you start with a blank page, and say, ‘We have to have this one, and we have to have that one?’

EB: Well, we knew that we were going to have roughly forty to fifty songs, but we didn’t know exactly until the whole deal was worked out. So basically, everyone wrote down sixty or seventy of their favorite songs, and it was a bunch of the higher-ups at Harmonix, and the people at Apple, and Giles, and everyone, and we all kind of got together and came up with about forty-five, and then once in a while Giles would say, ‘Oh, I know this one can’t work, because this was actually just recorded on one track,’ and we would just kind of work it out.

And then there would be a little bit of back-and-forth, of course, about, ‘Let’s make sure that we have a good balance of Paul and John songs, so that we don’t just by accident have too many John songs and too many Paul songs,’ and ‘Make sure that we include the important George songs,’ and all this balancing. Same thing we do when we select songs for Rock Band. You balance out a bunch of things—we want to have songs from different decades, different styles, different things, so the same kind of process went through. And then we presented what we thought was our song list to the shareholders, who were Yoko and Paul and Ringo and Olivia Harrison, and they would give us their two cents on it, and we would make some adjustments. The song list was fairly easy to do.

BL: So they weren’t dictating anything, like ‘This song has to be in there, this one’s off-limits.’

EB: No. And the good thing is that Giles has worked with them before. He did the “Love” show, which is the big Cirque du Soleil thing in Las Vegas, he’s already kind of gone through this process with them, and he knows them very well, and they trust him. So that was one of the best things. Because we could kind of make all of our musical decisions, and if we got them blessed by Giles, then we were pretty confident that he could get them blessed by the important people. So, it made things very smooth.

Three-part vocal harmony is part of what makes Beatles Rock Band different from all other music games

BL: Were there any specific challenges that you faced as a result of the Beatles’ experimentation in the studio, or using somewhat exotic instruments that might not conform to the four-instrument mold? I know you have songs like ‘Because’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home’ coming out soon—how do you face those challenges, or how do you conform to this set-up?

EB: Well, in some songs—in the Beatles game, one of the cool things is we’re doing the harmonies, so that’s a big thing, because there’s so much importance on that. On other things where they had, maybe not a prominent guitar, but they had different instruments, we would probably swap them around, which we do in Rock Band once in a while. Like in, I think in ‘Strawberry Fields,’ you might end up playing the string parts a little bit on the guitar. And in a song like ‘Because,’ which has no drums, right, that would be a song where the drummer just kind of sits out and relaxes for a while. We’re not going to add anything to it, because we don’t want to change the song.

BL: I know you wanted to span the whole career and represent each part accurately—was there any thought that maybe the early Beatles or the late Beatles would appeal or connect to the modern audience more? Your first three downloadable albums coming out are from the middle-to-late period—is there any consideration given to emphasizing that period?

EB: We didn’t really think about that too much. I think that we wanted to—different fans have their different favorites, of course. So we really just wanted to tell the whole story of their career, so we wanted to just do that. As far as the downloads go, we know that technically we have an easier time with the later albums, because they tend to be cleaner, on four-track, where it’s easier, and harder times on the earlier albums. So it would be difficult to do Please Please Me as a full album, because while we could probably do a lot of the songs, it might be difficult, there might be some there that we’re just like, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get the separation.’

But that being said, if we choose to do more albums, I’m sure we’ll do some early ones too, because we want to do as much as we can. It just also happened that I think the first three albums that we picked are three of the pretty big, iconic ones—Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper’s. And we were going back and forth between Rubber Soul and Revolver, because we wanted something from that period, but we were debating back and forth.

BL: Would most of the team working on the game have described themselves as Beatles fans coming into it, or just sort of passionate music fans who came to appreciate the Beatles more during the process?

EB: Well, everyone’s a passionate music fan. I don’t think we had everyone was a passionate Beatles fan — certainly a fan in some ways — but we have a few people who were just obsessive. And so we set those guys on all the research. They’re the ones who spent hours poring over things, and making sure that the right person was playing the right guitar part, and they would look up, ‘Okay, is John playing this lick, or is George playing this lick?’ And they would try to figure it out to make sure the animations looked right, because we can kind of control that. So we had at least a half a dozen Beatles fanatics, which was really good.

John M. Guilfoil and Marc Normandin of the Blast staff and Blast correspondents Steve Bagley and Darcy Hofmann contributed to this report.