Epic Games acquires Rock Band maker Harmonix

Epic Games has acquired Rock Band maker Harmonix Systems, GamesBeat has learned.

The deal is expected to be announced shortly.

Epic has been on an acquisition binge during the past year, as it has raised well over $1 billion. Based in Boston, the company has been devoted to making music video games for decades. Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney wants to build the metaverse. We’ve asked the companies for comment and will add their responses.

Here’s what our own Jeff Grubb wrote about Harmonix back in 2014:

Alex Rigopulos founded Harmonix is 1995 with Eran Egozy. While attending MIT, the two co-developed an algorithm that could generate music on the fly and started considering how they could use that for games. In 2001, the company teamed up with Sony Computer Entertainment to create Frequency, a rhythm game that has players traveling down an octagonal highway of musical notes. The studio followed up Frequency with 2003’s Amplitude.

Over the next several years, the company released more music-based hits like Karaoke Revolution before breaking out with the novel smash hit Guitar Hero. That game came with a plastic guitar controller that required players to strum and hit buttons along the neck in time with onscreen prompts. It caught on with a huge audience well beyond typical gamers.

Harmonix went on to developer two more Guitar Hero games before publisher Activision moved development to its Neversoft and Vicarious Visions studios. That prompted Harmonix’s most ambitious release, Rock Band, which took the idea of Guitar Hero and turned it into a local multiplayer game with multiple people on different instruments and vocals.

Rock Band became a hit party game. Harmonix developed and released multiple sequels and sold hundreds of different songs as downloadable content. After Rock Band 3 in 2010, however, the market for music games with plastic instruments dried up. The studio moved on to Kinect-controlled motion games like Dance Central, which performed well for Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

The company is now attempting to bring music concepts into several different genres as it looks for ways to remain relevant on consoles as well as PC, smartphones, and tablets. Since then it has worked on titles like Fuser, Drop Mix, SingSpace, and more.