GameZone Interview: Rocking Hard with Ultimate Band's Development Team

GameZone writes: "Guitar Hero's popularity has had a profound effect on the game industry. Everywhere you turn, new music games are cropping up. One of them is Ultimate Band, the Fall Line Studio-developed and Disney Interactive Studios-published title created exclusively for the Wii and DS platforms. The developers say that the basic idea was to create a music game for a younger boy (tween) demographic, and make it entirely peripheral-free. "Remember that when we pitched this, there was no such thing as Rock Band and the Wii was still called the Revolution," laughs Tim Huntsman, Senior Producer.

"Ultimate Band itself, the whole idea behind it was to encapsulate the physicality of playing. Not just playing to a certain rhythm or certain beat, which of course we do because that's where the rhythm side comes from. The performance side comes from what you can actually do with the Wiimote and the Nunchuk. We spent a lot of time, we got a lot of talented people that have been in this industry for a long time and have worked on a variety of genres and different types of games. We put our heads together and kind of picked through good ideas, what would work and what wouldn't. Coming up with the instruments that we came up with, again, coming up with the performance aspect. Because we're Disney, we decided to actually put a story into it."