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Harmonix recruited game developers Randall and Greg LoPiccolo, former bassist for the defunct alt-rock band Tribe. Both had been working at Looking Glass Technologies, a Cambridge-based PC-game-development publisher that pioneered the 3-D technology that would later make blockbusters like Doom and Quake possible. Looking Glass was so renowned that to this day one of its hallmark games, System Shock, still has fans petitioning online for a sequel — even though the company no longer exists. "It was like the Merchant Ivory of game companies," says LoPiccolo. "If you’re a PC game nerd, it’s a big deal."

When Randall and LoPiccolo, along with Looking Glass freelance artist Ryan Lesser, joined Harmonix in 1999, the redefined company channeled its vision into a new mission: building a prototype for its first production, FreQuency, a beat-matching demo that Sony would later publish in 2001, and then a sequel, Amplitude. Although they were two of the most critically acclaimed video games (not just music-video games) ever produced, neither was a commercial success.

Perhaps this is because the games’ arcade-style premise isn’t easily explainable. The point is to match the beats of jukebox selections like Garbage’s "Cherry Lips," Weezer’s "Dope Nose," and Run DMC’s "King of Rock." But to accomplish this, you drive along in a gleaming black spaceship in a virtual world of DNA-shaped sculptures, blue energy crackles, and bowling-alley-like traffic lanes. You trigger each instrument by shooting invisible musical notes that are inside gems embedded in floating streets. Play two measures, then a new instrument unlocks; your goal is to get as many instruments playing before the song is finished. Get it?

Critics did. FreQuency won a 2001 British Interactive award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. IGN.com, a gamers’ Web site with millions of members, called it "digital crack in the purest sense"; its sequel was selected one of the top 10 games of 2003 in a readers’ poll. Rolling Stone named Amplitude one of the four best console games of 2003.

"They were very true to the guiding philosophy of the company," says LoPiccolo of the games. "You really do immerse yourself into the fabric of the music, where you’re doing this very simple sight reading, but you end up absorbing the essence of each track, you end up absorbing the bass line. You actually get to hear how the bass part sounds, how it fits together with the drums and kind of breaks each song down into its important parts. And then you have to kind of assemble it in real time. It’s really addictive, really fun in a basic arcade game, in a sort of spinal-cord kind of way."

FreQuency and Amplitude may not have been huge money-makers, but in addition to their critical praises, the games drew a cult following. "Say you’re a big fan of Run DMC or the Crystal Method or any other artist featured in the game. You’re able to control the sound, speed, and vision of the songs — how cool is that?" writes 25-year-old Jim Govoni, who moderates the forums on a FreQuency fan Web site. "Instead of you sitting there playing a video game, it feels like the game is coming through you."

"[FreQuency and Amplitude] kind of put us on the map," says LoPiccolo. "And now everybody in the industry knows who we are."

WILLY WONKA land for gamers" is how the Phoenix’s video-game critic Mitch Krpata described Harmonix’s Central Square headquarters. The sixth-floor walls are painted in shades of alien green, deep red, and honey mustard; in every direction are monitors displaying animated figures. In a plum-walled community area that’s also used as a lunchroom, there’s a computer station and a large-screen television hooked up to various gaming consoles. There are white boards scribbled with employees’ high scores, a few tables, and a rack of more than 150 video games. In one hallway there’s a coin-op version of the early-’80s arcade game S.T.U.N. Runner. In the kitchen, there’s an entire wall of sketched Karaoke Revolution characters tacked to a corkboard.

The place is focused but laid-back. Someone sails through the common area, standing on the pedals of a two-foot bicycle. Managers leave their office doors open when they’re away. There are toys everywhere: LoPiccolo has a shelf of Simpsons figures; Crooker has still-packaged Dune collectibles; a stuffed organ-grinder’s monkey smiles impishly on a table. In the kitchen is an industrial-size refrigerator, stocked with everything from Starbucks frappuccinos to a couple of Newcastles. On Fridays, there’s a company-wide free lunch during which Randall projects animated footage, like ’60s-era Disney cartoons of hippopotami, while everyone feasts on pizza, lasagna, and dessert trays.

At other times, the vibe is much more intense. When there’s a big deadline to meet, employees work six-day weeks of 12- and 13-hour days. "During those periods, we bring in supper every night and people stop, eat supper, and go back to their desks and keep working until 10 or 11," says LoPiccolo. "We dabbled in seven-day weeks, but we don’t do that anymore. It just ends up being counterproductive. After the end of three weeks, everyone’s toast and you don’t get anything done. A big management focus here is try to ensure quality of life and keep insane crunch to a minimum."

"Compared to the horror stories you hear from other companies, we’ve been doing a really great job of just limiting that time to as small as possible," says Randall. "But still, it’s not fun. It’s still a month of not seeing your friends and not going home."

One of the things that works so well at Harmonix, say its managers, is that they hire people who are not only smart, but — simply put — cool. "People have to be really smart and really on top of what they do. That’s pretty much a given," says Crooker. He’s in his office, surrounded by knobs, switches, monitors, dual-shock controllers, computer mice, and musical keyboards, one of which bears a half-torn DO NOT X-RAY sticker. "People who know how to be eclectic, but still make that work in a commercial aspect. A good equivalent would be like Beck or Björk or Trent Reznor: people who go off and they do their own thing and they really don’t kowtow to anybody, but they still do really well commercially."

Harmonix is also committed to supporting its employees’ art, letting them go on the road or take mini-sabbaticals to finish up records. Last fall, Freezepop went to Europe for three weeks and then to the West Coast for another three. Harmonix granted Crooker the time off. "If I give them warning, they’re like, ‘Hey, you want to go play shows for six weeks? All right, go. If you come back and you’re happy and you’re dedicated to the next project, that’s awesome,’ " says Crooker. "Most companies would be like, ‘Six weeks? We already give you two weeks of vacation. What more do you want than that?’ "

Working at Harmonix, Crooker has also exposed Freezepop to a whole new fan base. Their "Super-Sprøde" and "Science Genius Girl" were on both Amplitude and FreQuency, right along with tracks from David Bowie, No Doubt, and the Crystal Method. "We got tons of fans from putting Freezepop songs into games," says Crooker, who composes all of the group’s songs on a hand-held sequencer that only allows him three effects and 128 sounds — restrictions that seem fitting for video games, since software limitations confine a game’s audio to two megabytes of RAM. (Crooker also contributed to the games with his solo project, Symbion Project, and composed many of their other tracks under pseudonyms like DJ HMX, Cosmonaut Zero, and Komputer Kontroller.) Instead of CDs, fans sometimes lug Playstation 2 game boxes to shows for the group to autograph. Last month, Freezepop played at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Rigopulos sees the artistic support and overlap as a fundamental part of the company’s mission. "What makes our games so special is the passion for music that people pour into the making of the games," he stresses. "We don’t want to crush the people’s expression of musical passion that they have in their lives outside of Harmonix to make these games. I think it’s really important that we nurture those passions so that people will grow and people will continue to funnel them into the games we’re creating here."