Rigopulos Wants More Amplitude

Before Harmonix was teaching the mainstream how to faux-raux with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the Cambridge-based developer had spend several years blowing my mind with its techno-heavy Frequency and Amplitude games. I had played plenty of Japanese-developed rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution, PaRappa the Rapper, and Samba de Amigo before then, but Frequency was the first time I had seen something like that from a Western developer, and it carried a certain sensibility, as well as a variety of licensed music, that spoke to me more personally. While the plastic-instrument evolution of the rhythm game genre looks to remain the dominant form for the foreseeable future, I've maintained the tiny hope in the back of my mind that Harmonix's newfound cache would allow it to one day revisit that franchise.

Based on a recent Ars Technica interview with Harmonix cofounder Alex Rigopulos, a follow-up to Amplitude might not be as much of a pipe dream as I had thought. In the interview, Rigopulos emphatically shouts “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” at the prospect of making Amplitude available as a PlayStation Network game, though he follows that up by saying that he'd “love to do a sequel to Amplitude, actually,” and that he “would love to come back and do it right for the PlayStation 3, for example.”

Obviously, there are a few hurdles before we could see an Amplitude sequel. Harmonix is plenty busy cultivating its highly lucrative Rock Band series at the moment. There's also the issue of Sony owning the rights to the Frequency and Amplitude names. Then again, Harmonix has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years, with a current staff of over 300 making multiple projects much more feasible, and it essentially made a quasi-sequel to Amplitude already with its iPod game Phase, which was done without any involvement from Sony. It's still all just talk, but it's encouraging to know that Amplitude still holds such a special place in Rigopulos' heart.