Here’s two items via the Green Day Authority and Niki Lee regarding Green Day’s upcoming Rock Band video game to be released on June 8th. The first is a funny interview with Mike Dirnt on the making of Rock Band and the second is a MTV Buzzworthy video interview with the band.
The interview with Mike is also interesting because he touches on the question of the older Green Day catalog not included for the most part in the Rock Band game and why. The older material was recorded on analog tape and since it’s brittle and they would need to get to the “stems” of the tape for the game, they feared losing the analog tape due to damage to the original media. The geeky archivist in me perked up at this portion of the interview:
GS: Were there any specific songs that had to make it into the game?
MD: I think what we wanted to do was represent at least a few full albums. One of things that we’re really working on still and weren’t able to do is to get some of the earlier records in there only because those were recorded on old analog tape. And analog tape becomes real brittle after a while. And to really get the stems from that…from the individual tracks…in order to put them in the game, you have to record them from analog to digital. And you get one chance to do it once the tape is really old. It’s a really tedious process to not lose your entire history, so with that said, we are working on that diligently right now. But that’s something we’d like to see in there as well.
Clicky on Cyber Mike Dirnt for Interview on Green Day Rock Band (June 8 release date)
Green Day Mind 