There’s only one truly disappointing aspect to The Beatles: Rock Band: Future games made around your favorite band probably won’t be half as good. If you’re part of the largest fan demographic on the planet and the four chaps from Liverpool happen to be your favorite musicians then you’re dialed in. This game is the ultimate love letter, crafted with reverence and imagination. It feels like no expense was spared. Unheard studio chatter fills the anticipatory moments before songs kick in. Abbey Road Studios is digitally enshrined, like a mythical font where only magic can be conjured. And the musicians themselves? They live on as romanticized digital avatars—like archival footage freed from the frame, filtered through the hands of animators and brought to new, somewhat artificial, life.
The songs, of course, are uniformly great. And the game’s loose story does a fine job of Gumping through the band’s progression from amped-up rabble-rousers to pioneering arena rockers before settling on their final incarnation as beings of pure energy at one with the universe. That’s the one tiny detail that The Beatles: Rock Band artfully sidesteps. Despite needing only love, the four mortals that made up The Beatles were, like us, weighed down by everything else. The only way to pick up anything suggesting conflict or turmoil in The Beatles: Rock Band is to read between the lines. And that’s totally cool. Nobody really expects to see bloody letters spelling “death to pigs” splattered across the wall of Abbey Road when the band plays “Helter Skelter.” But a few more teeth ought to have been bared when The Beatles surely intended to break skin.
But this is a family game, and one notable bit of subversion is plenty. The Beatles: Rock Band lets the Fab Four reclaim their role as the pre-eminent purveyors of pop psychedelia. It’s been decades since The Beatles first touched a tab to the world’s tongue, and the trippy goings-on while the gems for “Octopus’s Garden” and “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” tumble down from the heavens are righteous videogame eye candy. Mind-bending, musical games like Rez, Frequency, and Space Giraffe couldn’t have existed if it weren’t for The Beatles. It’s more than a little cool that those same games paved some of the way for The Beatles: Rock Band. That’s revolution.