How to Save Rock & Roll

Photo: Andrew Hetherington/Redux

Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos
Co-Founders of Harmonix

The Big Idea: Created Guitar Hero — and a billion-dollar music video game business. After corporate mergers left the Guitar Hero name with a rival company, they regrouped and came out with Rock Band in 2007, which added drums, bass and vocals to the formula.

Why It Matters: Not only have the pair's games turned a new generation of kids on to classic rock, they've created a wildly popular and profitable new format for the music industry. Players can download additional tracks (at $1.99 apiece) and entire albums to their gaming consoles — when Metallica's Death Magnetic dropped on CD in September, it simultaneously arrived as a $17.99 expansion pack for Guitar Hero and the band sold 490,000 copies in a week. (The company is working on a Beatles-themed video game for later this year.) "Artists now see these games not as some frivolous licensing opportunity, but as a way to connect their fans to their music in a new way," says Rigopulos. Harmonix's products turn music consumption from a passive to an active experience. "You're not just listening to music, you're playing it," says Egozy. "You're understanding how all the parts come together and you're participating in the making of the music."

How They Did It: After the M.I.T.-educated pair's first product was a flop — a music-improvisation gadget called "The Axe" — they decided to focus on video games, inspired by the cartoonish mid-'90s PlayStation hit PaRappa the Rapper. "I'm a really shitty musician, and my whole life I've been butting up against my desire to make music, and the reality that it's so frickin' hard," says Rigopulos. "We wanted to invent new ways to bring the power of music performance to people who can't otherwise enjoy it."

What's Next: "We want to have thousands of songs that people have access to," says Egozy. "And we want to launch indie bands as Rock Band downloadable content. If something becomes big and you have a million downloads, a band can be essentially born overnight. It's up to the folks out there to decide."