Harmonix Music Systems

Harmonix Music Systems was founded on 10 May 1995. Its founders, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, met at the MIT Media Lab: Egozy was an engineer with an interest in music, Rigopulos a composition student drawn to programming. Their aim was to let anyone perform music without learning an instrument. Early products such as The Axe for PC and CamJam, which was used at Disney theme parks, brought in almost no revenue for five years. After studying Japan's music game market, the company refocused on video games.

Its first major game was Frequency (2001) for PlayStation 2, funded by Sony, which let Harmonix keep the intellectual property. Critics liked it, as they did Amplitude (2003), but neither sold well. For Konami it made three volumes of Karaoke Revolution between 2003 and 2004. Then peripheral maker RedOctane asked it to build Guitar Hero (2005), played with a guitar-shaped controller, which was a critical and commercial hit, as was Guitar Hero II (2006).

MTV Networks, part of Viacom, bought Harmonix in 2006. Under MTV it released Rock Band (2007), which added drums and a microphone to the guitar, and The Beatles: Rock Band (2009), made with Apple Corps. After Dance Central (2010), Viacom sold the studio at the end of that year to a holding company of investor Jason Epstein, and Harmonix became independent again, keeping the rights to Rock Band and Dance Central. Its former shareholders, including the founders, later won a court case against Viacom over unpaid earn-out payments.

As an independent it released Dance Central 2 (2011), Fantasia: Music Evolved (2014) with Disney, Rock Band 4 (2015), Rock Band VR (2017) and Fuser (2020), published by NCSoft. Epic Games bought it in November 2021, and since then it has worked on music for Fortnite: Fortnite Festival, which plays much like Rock Band, launched on 9 December 2023. In January 2024 it stopped releasing downloadable songs for Rock Band 4. The studio is based in Boston, Massachusetts.