While My Plastic Guitar Gently Weeps

This may be old news to some, since rumors of a music game based on the career of The Beatles have been surfacing steadily since late last year, but The Beatles: Rock Band has finally been given a solid release date.This is good news because:

1. Rock Band is the tits.

2. The Beatles are the tits; and,

3. allowing their music to be used in a video game is a set of giant fun bags.

The Beatles are notorious for being one of the last major groups (if not the very last) to shy away from digital distribution of their tunes, although it seems the surviving members of the band are not to blame.

"We'd like to do it. We are very for it, we've been pushing it. But there are a couple of sticking points, I understand," Sir Paul McCartney told the BBC last November when asked about selling their music through iTunes. Rumor has it such a deal with Apple has been stalled time and again by EMI, the Beatles' music distributor for the last forty-ish years.

How MTV Games (publishers of Rock Band) managed to score a deal that not even Apple has been able to iron out is anyone's guess (read: lots and lots of money was involved), but I personally am really looking forward to banging out some Sgt. Pepper's on my fake drum set come September.

(Yes, I actually own this drumset, and yes, it is incredibly unnecessary.)

So I am excited that the forces behind the most popular band in history are finally coming 'round to the glories of current technology, not to mention that McCartney and Ringo are supposedly pretty excited to see what the music games genre can add to The Beatles' legacy. That's what Yoko told Entertainment Weekly, at least, assuring readers that they are all "pretty hip."

Here's hoping their faith is well-founded. Apparently more information on the game will be released sporadically on //www.thebeatlesrockband.com/ as its release approaches.

-- Mike Rougeau