23 Facts About Harmonix

Harmonix Music Systems, Inc, doing business as Harmonix, is an American video game developer company based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Harmonix was established in May 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy.

Harmonix is perhaps best known as being the developer of music video games series Dance Central and Rock Band, as well as being the original developer and creator of the Guitar Hero series before development moved to Neversoft and Vicarious Visions.

Harmonix was founded on May 10,1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, who met while attending MIT.

Harmonix was built on the premise that the experience of performing music could become accessible to those who would otherwise have trouble learning a traditional instrument.

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Harmonix then designed "CamJam", which performed similar functions, this time using simple body gestures to trigger music sequences.

Konami, known for their Bemani line of music games, wanted to distribute their games in the United States, and Harmonix was the only music game developer in the country at the time.

Konami was responsible for publishing the Karaoke Revolution titles, of which Harmonix developed and released three "volumes" between 2003 and 2004.

Harmonix continued to support the game after its initial release by offering a variety of downloadable songs to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 players on a weekly basis.

Harmonix stated, despite building on the Rock Band gameplay, this would not be a Rock Band branded title, and that the songs would not be available as downloadable content for the Rock Band series.

On 10 December 2009, Harmonix laid off 39 of its employees, primarily in the QA department.

On 11 November 2010, Viacom stated that it was in talks with potential buyers for Harmonix, having already marked the unit as a discontinued operation to write off a $299 million loss for its 2010 third-quarter earnings statement.

John Drake of Harmonix affirmed that Viacom would continue to support Harmonix until the sale is complete, and the developer would still continue their normal operations for their games which is unaffected by the sale.

Epstein is a senior managing partner at investment firm Columbus Nova, though the buy-out of Harmonix was conducted by Epstein personally, and not Columbus Nova.

Approximately 6 to 9 months after its sale from Viacom, Harmonix started to grow again, boosted by sales of Dance Central which led to the development of its sequel Dance Central 2 in late 2011.

At the onset of the 2013 E3 conference, Harmonix announced that its next title would be the Kinect-enabled Fantasia: Music Evolved produced in association with Disney Interactive.

In February 2014, Harmonix announced a new title, Chroma, co-developed with Hidden Path Entertainment, which combines their music genre experience with first-person shooters.

In March 2015, Harmonix announced their plan to return to Rock Band with the next major title in the series, Rock Band 4.

Harmonix had $15 million in investor funding from Spark Capital and Foundry Group to support Rock Band 4, Amplitude and additional projects going forward including virtual reality-based games.

In September 2015, Rigopulos announced that he would go to the advisory board for the crowdfunding site Fig, through which Harmonix would obtain funding for its next, yet-announced game.

On 1 March 2016, Harmonix confirmed that the campaign was indeed to raise funds to port Rock Band 4 to the PC, but gamers would only have until 5 April to pledge US$1.

Harmonix stated that this does not affect their continued support for Rock Band 4 or Fuser DLC.

Harmonix stated it would develop "musical journeys and gameplay for Fortnite" in addition to making musical projects in the metaverse.