Guitar Hero Live devs discuss soundtrack selection process

A portion of an MMGN interview with Jim Norris of FreeStyleGames...

MMGN: The tracklist is quite varied, and GHTV allows you to keep adding more post-launch, but it’s hard to please everyone. So what’s your initial focus? Do you look straight at what’s most popular or at genres previously popular with Guitar Hero?

JN: t’s a number of different things. Obviously we’re going to put the big tracks in that GH fans would expect to have in a Guitar Hero game. Then is goes through a list; can we license a song? That’s first, then we markup – when we transpose the notes into gameplay – and we do that to a lot of different songs including some songs that will never make it into the game. We rate those based on how fun they are to play.

Then we make sure we have a little bit of everything so there’s going to be something there that you like. Plus you’ll be playing one song and then another might come on that you don’t know, but because we made sure it’s fun to play you may end up finding a new band that you didn’t know that you loved.