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The Beatles are one of the strongest and most enduring brands in the world. Without having the benefit of new material, the only way of staying relevant is to support each shift in technology. From remastered CDs through to staged performance of their songs with Cirque Du Soleil, The Beatles have manged to stay connected to the times.

The Beatles on Rockband is one of the most anticipated software releases of the year and will doubltless be a huge global hit for the 09 holidays.

Here's the E3 trailer
 


Posted by Ed Cotton The popular consensus on gaming is that it's an unproductive waste of time, with little productive or human value.

Jane McGonigal has a great argument that provides lots of evidence to the contrary suggesting that gaming is already make huge strides in helping to solve real human issues, to bring sociability to the world and to solve giant problems.

It seems to suggest the people who are engaged in creating traditionally popular gaming experiences could put their skills to use in new and potentially more interesting ways.


Posted by Ed Cotton Rockband and Guitar Hero have changed the face of video games. Now we have some stats from the folks at Guitar Hero that show the impact of the new title- Guitar Hero 3.

- $1billion in sales in a 26 month period- the first video game to reach $1 billion in sales

- 25,000 songs created and posted in the first 10 days

- 141,000 songs posted to date

- 600,000 community members

- 15-843% growth in the music sales for artists featured in the game

For years, no one could make a good music game and the whole genre was in disarray. However, fast forward to today with the impact of great user interfaces and co-operation from the music industry and you have a whole new world.


Posted by Ed Cotton Spore is the latest game created by Wil Wright, the brain behind Sim City and The Sims. It let's people create their own creatures and evolve them over time. Using simple creature creator tool sets, users get to decide how they want their creatures to look, feel, behave and evolve.



Could Wil Wright and EA's Spore be the latest research tool to help understand human behavior?

The latest issue of Seed, suggests it could.

"It's the potential Spore has to evolve over current and future interactions into a massive dataset of billions of human interactions and decisions that may make the game a target for scientific research rather than a reflection of it."

They already men prefer conquest through blood and aggression and women prefer non-aggressive methods which often involve singing and dancing, this is not especially surprising and seems perfectly obvious, but it's just the tip of the iceberg of data.

The game even in the test phase has an incredible level of participation. It took only 18 days for the Spore community to match the 1.6 million species on Earth. It took just 22 hours to generate 100,000 creatures.

As of the end of September, the game had sold around 1 million units, but more impressive are the 39 million creatures that have been created to date.

Seed Magazine confirms that EA has a massively powerful research tool in its hands, but it remains unclear if they are just going to keep it for themselves or make it public.


Posted by Ed Cotton There was an interesting story yesterday about BBC's Top Gear teaming up with Polyphony, the creations of the racing video game Gran Turismo. The deal involves Top Gear providing program content for the new Gran Turismo channel (I assume this is part of an extended TV network that Sony Playstation is building) and adding the show's unique test track to the Gran Turismo video game.

The channel will launch some time in 2008.

Clearly, it's an example of TV networks reaching out to ensure their content gets distributed as widely as possible. With certain audiences spending more and more time with video games, the seamless integration of additional content onto gaming platforms makes a great deal of sense, especially given the ability of the consoles to handle HD.

It's probably safe to assume that all kinds of media tie-ups will happen and be integrated into games, especially with the sports franchises sharing highlight reels and the like with their gaming partners.

It also suggests that brands might have the opportunity to generate more interesting content within and with video games than just placing their product in the game.


Posted by Ed Cotton In case you weren't aware, the World Cyber Games in Seattle just finished this Sunday, it's basically the Olympics of video games with competitions in Warcraft, Gears of War, Project Gotham Racing and more. In these games, contestants represent their countries. The tournament ended with USA on top of the medals table, followed by Brazil and South Korea. 

Here's a great interview with Geoff Robinson, a Team USA cyber athlete, who plays Starcraft for his country and claims his biggest challenges are getting his roomate to pay the internet bill and finding six hours a day to practice.

Sadly, the interview is cut a little early, just when Geoff starts to explain how he managed to take advantage of his dad's business trip to travel to a tournament.




Posted by Ed Cotton