Fuser. Harmonix. Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. 2020

Abstract

In 2005, game developer Harmonix rose to prominence in North America after releasing Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero allowed players to emulate live performance as the guitarist or bassist in a virtual rock band. Part of the draw of the game was its method of interaction: Instead of using the standard hand-held controller with a few buttons and a joystick, Guitar Hero used a nearly full-sized plastic guitar, with buttons placed along its neck as frets and a toggling lever on its body to imitate a strummable string. Successive variations on this game (most notably Rock Band [Harmonix, 2007] and its successors) added a microphone, plastic drum kit, and miniature keyboard, filling out this band simulation. In 2010, the game DJ Hero (FreeStyle Games, 2010) was developed as a spin-off of the Guitar Hero franchise and featured a turntable controller to simulate the remix and mashup possibilities of DJ turntablism. These games—which defined a new rhythm game genre premised on the simulation of a musical performance—were commercially and critically successful. However their popularity soon waned in the 2010s. Shared-space multiplayer gaming, the primary mode of play in these sorts of games, was more or less overtaken by online multiplayer gaming, and the significant added cost of those instrument controllers was a barrier to entry for many players. Harmonix and others nonetheless continued to develop games in the genre of music performance. In 2017, Harmonix partnered with Hasbro to capitalize on the mobile market with the game DropMix, which used physical chip-embedded cards as songs that could be scanned by a mobile device to create musical mashups. In 2020, Harmonix developed this mashup idea further into a full game, releasing their DJ Hero-style game, Fuser. Unlike prior titles, Fuser requires no additional physical objects—the game and all of its component songs and upgrades can be downloaded directly. Moreover as it is available on Windows PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, it is the most accessible major music performance game to date. Fuser lets the player become a DJ. In the main single-player “campaign,” players perform musical sets to increasingly discerning audiences at different festival-style venues. With a virtual turntable overlaid on the screen, the player “drops” discs that contain the instrumental or vocal tracks isolated from a variety of popular songs spanning several decades. For example, the player can hit one button to drop the percussion from 50 Cent’s “In Da Club,” another to add on the bass from Billie Eilish’s “bad guy,” another for the strings from Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and then yet another to layer on the vocals from Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” Players can also add filter effects and digital instruments atop these mixes, increasing the possibilities for musical creativity. Importantly, the game—not the player—does the work of synching the tempo and key of any track that the players wish to use. This synching works quite well, save for the occasional excruciatingly slow or tonally awkward transposition. Considering the game as a kind of mashup-creation app alone, Fuser is incredibly fun. As a DJ, I aimed to create thoughtful mixes of songs that might go together well, but then found myself nonetheless jamming along to serendipitous mixes created from a mispress of a button. With tempo and key controlled by the game, it is difficult to make something that sounds truly terrible, and thus