The Beatles' digital revolution: Are video games the future of music?

Call it “Beatlemania 2.0,” said Edna Gundersen in USA Today. Forty years after John, Paul, George, and Ringo last recorded an album together, their music has received a new lease on life. A digitally remastered CD box set of the Beatles’ entire catalogue, released last week, sold so quickly that the band’s website has pushed back delivery of new orders until late October. Simultaneously, The Beatles: Rock Band, a specially designed version of the popular play-along video game, has topped online retail charts across all game platforms.

The CDs make the Fab Four sound better than ever, but the game represents the real revolution, said Eric Gwinn in the Chicago Tribune. It works just like other versions of Rock Band: Players take up plastic controllers shaped like guitars, mikes, and drums and try to hit the right notes by following onscreen prompts. New to this version, however, is a “vocal harmony” function, in which players pick a part and try to harmonize with other members of the group. Gamers can assume the role of different band members as the foursome progresses through various stages of its storied career, said Dan DeLuca in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Start at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, graduate to The Ed Sullivan Show, and you’ll end up belting “Get Back” on the roof of Apple studios in brilliant re-creation of the band’s famous final performance. “I never thought I’d know what it felt like to be John Lennon, standing in front of 55,000 screaming teenagers at Shea Stadium in 1965, singing ‘Eight Days a Week.’”

Once the thrill wears off, though, you may wonder for whom, exactly, the game is intended, said Chris Kohler in Wired.com. It’s pretty easy, and experienced gamers will “likely blast through in a couple hours.” Longtime Beatles fans, meanwhile, may question the limited song selection. (No “Love Me Do”? No “Across the Universe”?) It’s also hard to take seriously the game’s account of the Beatles’ career, considering it presents “a mythologized, cartoon version of it in which no one ever had any sort of disagreement over anything.”

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But self-mythologizing has always been a part of the Beatles’ act, said Seth Schiesel in The New York Times. Bringing the spirit of the movies A Hard Day’s Night and Yellow Submarine into the digital age, the band is cannily “reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another.” Beatles: Rock Band promises to attract a new generation of fans, and bring parents and children together as no game before, said Daniel Radosh, also in the Times. If it succeeds, the Beatles will have once again found a way to “play a significant role in the evolution of popular music.”