Yeah, so I haven't updated my gaming news in awhile and there's plenty to talk about, like Smash Bros Brawl and Lost Odyssey, but I figured this needed to be posted, as it is the ROCKINGEST THING IN GAMING HISTORY. Today, Harmonix announced what their first downloadable full album is for Rock Band. It will be coming Tuesday, Prepare to Scream For Vengeance!!
From wired.com...
First Downloadable Rock Band Album: Judas Priest
"Heavy metal fans are about to get a very special Rock Band treat.
Judas Priest's classic Screaming for Vengeance will be released next week as the first full album available for the popular game's online music store, MTV said Friday.
"In the domain of metal, this is a historic, influential album," Alex Rigopulos, CEO of Rock Band developer Harmonix, told Wired.com.
Priced at $15, the album will be available on Xbox 360 on April 22 and PlayStation 3 on April 24.
Individual tracks from the British band's 1982 disc, including the No. 1 hit "You've Got Another Thing Comin'," will be available for $2 each.
Harmonix said two more albums, The Cars self-titled debut and The Pixies' Doolittle, would become available for Rock Band in May and June, respectively.
Downloadable add-on songs have been a huge moneymaker for Rock Band since the game's launch last November. MTV and Harmonix have sold more than 8 million extra songs at an average price of $2 each. More than 80 songs are currently available from the in-game Music Store, more than are available on the $60 game disc.
The downloads currently available in Rock Band's store are packaged as both single tracks and packages of songs from the same artists, including Boston and The Grateful Dead. Motley Crue was the first band to use Rock Band to release a new single, "Saints of Los Angeles."
Downloads of full albums have been promised since before Rock Band launched.
MTV originally announced that Who's Next, the classic album by The Who, would be the first full disc available for download, but we've heard nothing about it since the original announcement last May. Ditto Nirvana's Nevermind, which appeared in a leaked list of upcoming downloadable content that MTV later confirmed was real.
MTV maintains that all will be revealed in due time. "We really can't go wrong with the albums that we have in the queue," said Paul DeGooyer, MTV's SVP of electronic games and music. "We plan to release albums on a regular basis."
As for the selection of Judas Priest for the first album, MTV said that the tracks simply had the distinction of being finished first.
"The process of asset delivery for a complete album is actually pretty complicated," explained DeGooyer. He says that the biggest issue with turning music tracks into Rock Band levels is that until relatively recently, recording studios did a lousy job of keeping master tracks straight.
"Nobody anticipated there would be any use for the multitrack masters after they made the albums," he said. Master tapes were frequently labeled or filed incorrectly, or simply lost as time passed.
Boston's self-titled debut could have been been the first album released for Rock Band, but "one of the masters from that first album was lost. The band tracked one song in a different location," said DeGooyer. So Rock Band fans got a six-pack of songs from the album, instead.
Filing and indexing of master recordings improved drastically about 10 years ago, so if your musical tastes run to newer fare, you should be in luck. Those of us hoping to rock out to older albums will simply have to cross our fingers and hope that someone in the studio had a case of OCD.
Of course, Rock Band fans whose consoles aren't connected to the internet won't be able to join in the album-downloading fun. Owners of the PlayStation 2 and upcoming Wii version of the game won't have a download store at all.
Rigopulos said that Harmonix is exploring ways to keep these fans happy, too.
"We want to make this content available to as broad an audience as possible, and we're examining all our options," he said."
Oh, this is only the beginning, I will totally be buying my Priesty Package of Joy on Monday, and hopefully will follow in the future with other rumored metal classics like Master of Puppets, and is it too much to hope for Piece of Mind/Powerslave?
