PAX East: Harmonix Has Awesome Plans For ‘Rock Band’ And ‘Dance Central’

Back in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st Century, music games, especially those imitating a rock band, were the biggest rave in the video game community. The Hero Series, which included Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and Band Hero, flooded households with plastic controllers of guitars, drums, turntables, and microphones, just to give gamers the feel of being in a rock band. Prior to that, dance games were the rave, especially with the Dance Dance Revolution Series followed by the Dance Central Series. Then sometime in 2009, possibly 2010, the fad started to die and it wasn’t worth making a game in this genre.

Now, four or five years later, Harmonix, the company behind Rock Band and Dance Central have big plans for their games. They want to bring Rock Band and Dance Central back to mainstream gaming. According to IGN, Harmonix CEO, Alex Rigopulos, told the audience at a PAX East panel, that the studio has “grand plans” for reviving Rock Band and Dance Central for a whole new generation of home consoles.

Just by the statement above, this probably means the next installments in both the Rock Band and Dance Central franchises will appear on Xbox One, Playstation 4, and/or Wii U. Also, it should be noted that Rigopulos started his panel – titled “Storytime with Alex Rigopulos” – by stating Harmonix would not be announcing Rock Band 4 or Dance Central 4. However, he did verify both are in the studio’s plans, as reported by GameSpot.

“[The Rock Band and Dance Central franchises] are near and dear to our hearts and our minds and we have grand plans to bring back both of them with guns blazing at some point in the coming console cycle.”

In other related news pertaining to PAX East, Green Lava Studios showed off their newest game Fenix Rage, which is a mix of Super Meat Boy and Flappy Bird, as reported here on The Inquisitr. Pertaining to Harmonix, they are busy working on Fantasia: Music Evolved, which is based off the third (Fantasia) and thirty-eighth (Fantasia 2000) films in the Disney Animated Classics Collection, and is also being featured at PAX East too.

However, just the notion that gamers, who loved Rock Band or Dance Central, are getting the chance to jam on plastic peripherals again is enough to pull in the inner rock star within all gamers. Not to mention, there is a good four to five years in between the last installment to the next, so that means a new generation can jam hard.

At this moment, Rock Band and Dance Central are just in the stages of “grand plans”. There are no release dates and no information on either.

[Image via Screen Cap]