A few weeks back I sat down for a phone interview with Kasson Crooker, Songwriter for Freezepop and Audio Director at Harmonix. We discussed his band's successes and having songs in games, PAX, life at Harmonix, the MTV acquisition and more. I'd like to thank Kasson for taking the time out to talk to us. It's greatly appreciated.

If you'd like to see Freezepop in action, they have shows coming up on March 9th in Sacremento, March 23rd in Pittsburg and the 24th in Ohio. Check their website for all the details!

TheBBPS: What sort of effect have you seen between your appearance in these games and your popularity as a band?

Kasson: To say that those games never helped our career would be a total lie. Those 2 games [Frequency and Amplitude] in terms of sales never did incredibly well, so it’s not like we were suddenly thrust in front of millions of people like, say, the Guitar Hero games have been doing.

But it definitely opened us up, especially Amplitude, which was a little less focused on electronic music and more focused on a wide variety of music. It definitely opened us up to an audience that probably never would’ve head of Freezepop before. Like the 14 year old boys who are into blink-182… We would’ve never have gotten them as fans, now we have a lot of them.

TheBBPS: So obviously you’ve done well with having the songs in-game. And has that continued into Guitar Hero with the unlockable songs?

Kasson: Yea. In between Amplitude and Frequency there wasn’t a whole lot happening in the rhythm genre. I think we also got Science Genius Girl into the first Karaoke Revolution game, but it was a hidden bonus track so I’m not sure many people even knew it was there. You couldn’t get to the song until you played the game all the way through.

We had our song “Bike Thief” in Downhill Domination, but it was like one of those you could buy in-game. But people were spending in game money to upgrade their bikes, not buy songs. When we got into Guitar Hero, obviously it was a little bit of a stretch, since we don’t have a guitar player. So it was more of a joke that we were the one band in the game that was all synthesizers.

Getting exposure in games has been huge for the band. Immensely huge. I could not think of a better way to get exposure.

TheBBPS: Even without the guitars, those songs in Guitar Hero are really well suited to the game and the controller.

Kasson: What ended up being cool as that even though we didn’t fit stylistically with the game, the songs are really fun to play and actually I think people really liked it because it gave them a mix, it gave people something different to play than just a lot of metal songs.

Now you’d be hard pressed to go to Activision and say “oh you should turn Guitar Hero into Amplitude and put all the genres of songs regardless of whether or not they have guitar in them,” cause they would never go for it. So I think we kind of lucked out in that respect that we were like the one band that was able to sneak in and give people like a tounge-in-cheek different experience than all the different rock songs.

TheBBPS: Now I know you wrote songs for Frequency and Amplitude under different names like Symbion Project, Komputer Kontroller, and Cosmonaut Zero. Are those all just pseudonyms?

Kasson: Yes, but Symbion Project is a real side project. With Frequency and Amplitude we knew we only had a limited music budget, so we would not be able to go out and get all of the songs as licensed tracks and so we knew we were going to have to compose some in-house. Especially to fulfill genres that were not represented in the game. So as the song list licenses expanded we kind of knew “Ok we have this and this we probably don’t need another Drum and Bass song”. I would just kind of write songs in genres that were missing from the game, and then rather than just put them all under one band name we just decided to make up other band names.

TheBBPS: Is it coincidence that most of those songs are the hardest songs in the game, or could you not find songs complex enough to put up in that grouping?

Kasson: The reason there is 2 fold; one is that we wanted to be able to put the well-known songs earlier in the game. You spend thousands of dollars on a Garbage song you don’t want to hide it at the end of the game where only the hardcore gamers are gonna be able to find it, so we put the very popular songs as early on in the process as possible. But the other reason is because of none of the other licensed songs were actually written for the game, so some parts were much harder than others, or wouldn’t have a complete instrument track all the way though. The songs that I wrote were specifically for the game, and so I had the ability to make them continuously difficult all the way through and so it just kind of made sense to put them at the end of the game since they were some of the hardest tracks.

TheBBPS: That Cosmonaut Zero song still haunts me, there’s that one track that I just cannot get.

Kasson: We had a program that would scan songs for difficulty, based on a whole number of things like BPM and other variables and we could map all the songs into a line graph and see the songs in the campaign and see how you would progress through the difficulties and when we looked at expert it was really funny to see how even on expert the progression was pretty fluid until you got to the last 2 levels. It really ramped up to get very hard and then Cosmonaut Zero was just off the map all together.

That song in particular because we knew that would be the last song in the game we wanted to just make it mind blowing.

TheBBPS: Going back to the Freezepop, did I read you guys are playing PAX (Penny Arcade Expo)?

Kasson: We are.

TheBBPS: and how did that come about?

Kasson: We had kind of been mutual fans of each others “things” but we never really any direct contact with them until we played at arcadia which is in Montreal…. And there are 2 things in Montreal at the same time as Arcadia… Arcadia game convention and there’s also the Montreal game summit. And so we went up there and played for the game summit event and we opened a show for the convention for the Minibosses and the people from Penny Arcade were there. We got a chance to meet with them and talk with them and they liked the lineup of our two bands together. We’re both really different but have that unifying theme of video games. So I believe it’s going to be the same at PAX.

TheBBPS: Do you find that with Freezepop getting more popular and things are getting busier at Harmonix, especially with the success of Guitar Hero, do you find it getting harder to balance the time it takes to work with the band and the time they’re probably asking you to give at Harmonix?

Kasson: Most definitely. Personally I’ve been the audio director here for about 4 years, but about a year and a half ago I started to transition away from doing actual audio and getting my fingers more into game design and being a producer. And so my actual involvement with audio creation is very low. I still kind of oversee the different teams that are working on Guitar Hero and different games in progress. But since I’m not really doing any audio production for those games it freed me up to work on prototype teams, so I actually been like leading little prototype concepts here that I’ll work on here and assemble a team of like 4 or 5 people and go off and make little mini game demos and shop them around here in house and to other developers to see who’s interested in it. I have a game I’m hoping will be released this year. So I’ve actually moved away from audio and more towards project lead.

TheBBPS: You find that more exciting?

Kasson: Harmonix has definitely moved in more of a rock guitar type angle, and away from the electronic genres. And if they were making an electronic music game I’d be really interested in continuing to write songs for them. But since Harmonix, at least for the time being, has moved towards this rock-based stuff it’s been less of a challenge for me. I’ve been more interested getting my fingers into doing other things. But all that’s definitely impacted how much time I can work on the band.

Quite the challenge to find the amount of time to find time to work on the games at Harmonix and continue to work on writing music, and playing shows. It’s been a balancing act; the most affected area has been the ability to play shows.

TheBBPS: I see you have some dates coming up in California?

Kasson: The dates in California coincide with the GDC, and we’re going to be out there anyway so we figured we’d pack some dates on. It’s not the kind of thing where we could go on tour for 3 months… cause I would lose my job.

TheBBPS: What about Liz and Sean (other member of Freezepop), it’s not a full-time thing for them either then?

Kasson: All of us have normal full-time jobs; well they’re actually freelancing so I’m the only one with a full time normal job. Sean does freelance audio production, and Liz graphic design for web and print. Even though the band has become more successful it’s not to the point where were quitting our jobs to do it full time. Which is fine, we’ve always treated Freezepop as a fun hobby.

There are a lot of business aspects and it takes up a lot of our time, but we’ve always had a lot of fun with it.

TheBBPS: Kind of like our web site here…

Kasson: Yea you do it cause you love it.

TheBBPS: Changing gears... The MTV acquisition, has that been positive in the halls of the company? And has that accelerated the move away from electronic music towards more mainstream stuff?

Kasson: From a high-level concept it’s been pretty interesting, hearing people’s responses to their knowledge of the whole thing. And that’s true of Harmonix employees as well. Where the 1st thing you think when you hear MTV is… like… yea they’re kinda sucky.

It’s interesting because well before MTV came along we kind of moved away from that genre of music… and it’s not due to the genre, it’s just due to sales. Amp and Freq were really great games, but they didn’t have the sales… and when you want to get a publisher to run your games. And they look at you electronic music rhythm action games and they sold X and they see guitar hero and they see sales as Y obviously they want you to make more guitar heroes.

But with MTV, everyone here views it as a really good thing, and he reason is they’re not actually doing anything to Harmonix, They were aware if all the games in production right now and when they came in, they didn’t change any of those games.

The decision to not do Guitar Hero 3 is not because of MTV but of what Harmonix wanted to do.

Ultimately we want to work for ourselves. With Guitar Hero, we built that game for Red Octane. They brought us the idea and we made it into an incredibly fun game, but at the end of the day they make all the money. And we have lots of great ideas, and MTV puts us in the position that we don’t need to necessarily to go to the smaller publishers who will end up reaping all the rewards. We want to be in a position where we come us with the great ideas AND reap all the rewards.

TheBBPS: Are you looking to publish yourselves as opposed to going through a Konami or Red Octane?

Kasson: We’ll always have a relationship with publishers, it just means the terms with the publishers will be much more favorable. The other thing is that it’s all about intellectual property. Red Octane funded Guitar Hero, they own all that intellectual property, all the code, the art, the art style. We want to own all that stuff. And that’s what great about MTV is they’ll enable us to be in a spot where we own all that stuff.

Also, with Frequency and Amplitude, I don’t think MTV would push us away from that, in fact I can see them enabling us to get more involved in Hip-Hop, we’ve had some rap in past games but never made a whole game about it.

TheBBPS: Do you think downloadable content will enable you to take a look at doing songs in niche genres again? Since you can sell a song pack for 3 or 4 dollars and not have to worry about wrapping a $50 game around it?

Kasson: Totally, having downloadable content is going be huge because it takes the game that shipped with 30 to 50 songs and makes that completely flexible. If the game does well we’re going to keep funneling new content. you just need a front end that’s suited to all those kinds of music.

TheBBPS: do you see that content coming out for awhile for the 360 version?

Kasson: Eventually it’ll stop because they’ll want to focus on Guitar Hero 3. But our plans are to provide content for as long as Activision wants there to be content.

TheBBPS: that something that MTV will be able to help out with? Finding more licenses?

Kasson: Definitely. One of the things we learned it was pretty hard for us to get access to master tapes and then with the success f the 1st Guitar Hero it was SO easier the second time around, because everyone wanted to be a part of it. And the same goes true with MTV, we now have access to their connections. So with a few phone calls we have a much better chance of getting the master recordings.

It’s been pretty amazing, I would love to see another version of Frequency or Amplitude and if we had tired to make another one before Guitar Hero… Every time we brought it up it was shot down immediately. But now with the success of those kinds of rhythm games, even if it’s not a sequel, but something where you’re just not playing guitar.

And not just from Harmonix, but with companies like Konami & Activision. People are starting to realize that rhythm action games are more than just a niche market.

TheBBPS: With games like Ouenden! coming stateside as Elite Beat Agents.

Kasson: That kind of stuff is awesome, and we’ve always been fans of the early Japanese rhythm games like Vib Ribbon and Rez and that kind of stuff.

TheBBPS: Excellent references.

Well there ya go, that's it. I was promised that their 3rd CD is in the works, but until then I'll tide myself over with the "Rokk Suite" off iTunes. I'd like to thank Kasson once again, it was fun. It was also my 1st telephone interview, so I'm sure there were numerous times he thought about hanging up on me... though I'm glad he didn't.

:)

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