E-Mail This Article to a Friend Games people play (continued)

NOT LONG ago, Josh Randall went to a house party in Central Square. He’d heard there’d be a projection screen at the party, and he wasn’t sure he’d know many people, so he brought along Karaoke Revolution 3 as social grease, a kind of cheesy-when-sober but amusing-with-liquid-courage prop that has a knack for disarming even the most cynical hipster. At the party, KR3 went over big; people lined up and waited for their turn to belt out songs like "ABC," "New York, New York," and "Oops ... I Did It Again."

What Randall didn’t realize was that one of his favorite local musicians was in the house. "A bunch of the guys from Count Zero were there, and I used to be big fans of Think Tree," he says, referring to the late ’80s/early ’90s industrial band whose three members founded Count Zero. "I was sitting on the couch, helping people play. I handed the mike over, and I look, and it’s Peter Moore from Think Tree." Randall was amazed at how psyched he got. "I always try to be super-cool about that stuff. It caught me by such surprise. He sang and it was incredible. I was like, ‘Wow, he’s singing my game.’ "

Ed Lewis, associate editor of gaming Web site IGN.com, named Karaoke Revolution 3 one of his top-10 picks for 2004. "Trust me on this one because with two mics and the duet feature, it’s a party," Lewis wrote. "Not a ‘break out the punch and pie’ event, but more of a ‘let’s get loaded and sing Sonny & Cher’ type of bash where you’ve already lost your keys and just don’t care."

"Being a fan of karaoke for numerous amounts of years was great and all, but when the first Karaoke Revolution was announced, it was great," writes Thomas Lane, a New Hampshire resident who runs the Harmonix tribute site KaraokeRevolution.net. "No longer would I have to go down to a club and sing to some words on a blank screen but now I could stay at home, invite a few friends over and sing."

The genius of KR3 is in the details. You can see the zipper down the back of Joe’s bear costume. The cast of characters is a pool of hilariously precise stereotypes: Helga, a podgy Viking-horned opera singer; Kat, a vegan-skinny punk rocker with torn fishnets and combat boots; Katelyn, a rockabilly chick with a Laverne-style cursive capital ‘K’ on her sweater; and Dwayne, an archetypal chubby dork wearing Hawaiian shorts, a giraffe-headed inner tube, and a snorkel, and who can change into an alternate T-shirt reading DUNGEON MASTERS DO IT IN THE BASEMENT.

Before the finished product went to the publisher, Harmonix recruited karaoke barflies to test it. They hated the game. "They were like, ‘This game stinks because it’s nothing like real karaoke,’ " recalls Randall. "We realized the picture of karaoke in our heads was different from what this whole karaoke audience was like." KR awarded impersonation, not improvisation — a detail that upset obsessive karaoke stylists. "Our game is about singing as well as you can, matching the original vocals and nailing them dead on — that’s how you get points. And these people, when they had to do that, they felt so constrained and frustrated," says Randall. "They were like, ‘There’s no room for me to flip out and be me and do that thing that I always do. This part, I like to sing it differently. And your crowd booed when I did that.’ They were really upset." So Harmonix installed another mode for the game, which didn’t score or judge players but was essentially an animated karaoke machine.

"Ultimately, I think most of our fans don’t play that," says Karaoke Revolution’s project manager Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom. "They want to be judges, they want the game to judge them, they get platinum records, they want to be awesome Karaoke Revolution gamers. Because there’s a different kind of achievement than going to a karaoke bar and having a bunch of drunk people cheer you on."

The KR series has been popular enough that it’s spawned imitators like Get on Da Mic, a "raparoake" dud, but Rigopulos can’t say how many have sold. "Our agreement with Sony prevents us from giving sales numbers," he says. "But I can say this: millions of units is a homerun franchise; a top-10 hit sells four or five million. A base hit sells anywhere from one [hundred thousand] to a couple-hundred-thousand units. Doubles and triples are anywhere in between, in the range of three [hundred thousand] to 500,000." The KR games were base hits.

Their popularity is no surprise to people like Lisa Shea, a video-game critic for the family-oriented women’s site Bellaonline.com. "A lot of people have suspicions about karaoke, that it’s something done at strange bars at strange hours of the night when people are drunk," says Shea. "[Karaoke Revolution] is the most harmless of games you can get. There’s no shooting, no blood, nothing like that. Most of the video games you play are competitive. It’s quite a different experience when the aim is to do as well as you can without hurting someone else."

"It’s not like many of us don’t play violent games and enjoy them," admits LoPiccolo. "[The industry] is overloaded with blood-soaked, muscle-y heroes and women with giant breasts and those clichés, they’re out there. But we are committed to making games that are inclusive and celebratory and creative, that families can play and kids can play. Not because we’re particularly PC individuals, but just that we think this medium has a tremendous amount to offer along those lines, and there are not that many developers pursuing that thread."

Harmonix’s most recent game, Antigrav, isn’t musical, but it’s a completely surreal game that has players using their bodies as controllers — an example, say its developers, of the future of gaming. The New York Times lauded it as "the closest thing yet to a game that allows the player to merge physically with the video console," and it has won sundry design awards. "We were willing to embrace it because it was about getting people off the couch and getting their bodies moving and getting their blood flowing, which we thought was a comparably celebratory experience worth trying," says Rigopulos.

"There’s a widespread notion that a video game is just something that you play casually, it’s a piece of software, you play it for a while, and then you go on to something else," writes fan Jim Govoni in an e-mail. "But if you can sing into a microphone, and hear your own voice coming from your television, or make a character move through a playfield simply by moving your own body in the same way in front of a camera, and not even touching a controller, you get the feeling that you are part of the game."

And that, say the folks at Harmonix, is the future of gaming. "We all feel that this is this compelling creative medium, but it’s like the movies in 1912: all the good work hasn’t been done yet," says LoPiccolo. "We’re really doing Birth of a Nation, that level of stuff where people are just figuring it out."

In two weeks, at the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), in Los Angeles, Harmonix will unveil its newest batch of games. Although their future titles are currently top secret, Rigopulos says the studio’s projects will continue to "reach out to people who don’t traditionally consider themselves gamers."

"I do believe that we are actually contributing to the world," says Lesser. "We’re doing something that’s interesting and we’re making games. I personally believe that games are ultra-important. Games have existed since the dawn of humanity. Someone’s been kicking a ball around, aiming a thing at a target forever. These things have existed and there’s a reason: it’s because you need them. I feel that we are producing stuff that’s really good for that part of existence."

Camille Dodero can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com