Episode 440 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Eran Egozy, Professor at MIT and Co-Founder & CTO of Harmonix, the creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
I love interviewing current entrepreneurs who are making waves in the platform shift to AI, but I am also a Boston tech historian with a passion for telling stories about the great tech companies of our past. And do I have an incredible one for you today.
Harmonix was a company that became a true cultural phenomenon in the late 2000s. It was an overnight success… well, not really overnight, but rather a 10-year journey of grit and iteration that resulted in video game franchises generating over $1B in revenue with more than 35 million units sold.
As you’ll tell, I majorly geeked out on this interview. I am not a big gamer, but Harmonix hit massive product-market fit for me: music, gaming, rock star… sign me up! The song selection also struck a chord (pun intended), as it was pure gold.
You’ll notice this episode is longer than my typical interview. I went long form because there were just too many amazing stories to tell, including:
- Eran’s background story and how he got his start playing the clarinet.
- Studying music and engineering at MIT.
- Meeting his co-founder, Alex Rigopulos, and how they landed Brad Feld as an early investor.
- The seven game iterations with modest success that eventually led to massive PMF with Guitar Hero proving the 8th time’s the charm!
- Blowing up and taking the market by storm, leading to their acquisition by MTV Games.
- Launching Rock Band with multiple instruments plus the behind-the-scenes story of The Beatles edition.
- His current role at MIT as Professor of the Practice in Music Technology.
- And, so much more!
I’m thrilled to share that The VentureFizz Podcast is a 2026 NEVYs Community Content Creator! I’ll be telling stories about New England’s innovation ecosystem, like this podcast interview, all the way to the NEVY Awards on December 3rd at House of Blues Boston. Presented by NEVCA. Purchase your tickets and join me at thenevys.com.
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Transcript
Keith Cline: Eran, thanks so much for joining us.
Eran Egozy: Pleasure to be here.
Keith Cline: I think I start off every podcast by saying I’m so excited for the conversation, because I generally am excited for every guest. I think what founders and investors are working on is important, extraordinary, and hard. But with this one, I’m just on a next-level fanboy level, because I spent way too much time playing Guitar Hero.
Eran Egozy: I’m sorry! I’m sorry about that.
Keith Cline: It absolutely nailed product-market fit for me. I love music. I’m not really a heavy video game person—I’m casual, I like sports games like Madden Football. It’s not like I had a major console at home where I just played games all the time. But this thing… I was like, Yeah, game on! It had the music genre that hit right at home with me, and I’m a casual guitarist.
It was this perfect meld of goodness for my soul. My kids were really young then, so this was probably my break.
Eran Egozy: Did you play with your kids?
Keith Cline: They were a little bit too young at that point—maybe two and four years old, so one would just kind of mess around with it.
As a Boston tech historian, I love telling the stories of great things that came out of Boston. I guarantee people know Guitar Hero and Rock Band were cultural phenomena. Very few franchises have sold 35 million units into households and generated over $1B in sales. Yet I bet most people ask, “That was a Boston company?” Boston is so humble that people don’t realize it was in their backyard. That’s why we have to tell this story.
Before we get into Harmonix, let’s talk about your background journey. Where did you grow up, and what were you like as a child?
Eran Egozy: Where I grew up depends on how far back you want to go! I’ve been in the Boston area for quite a while, but I was born in Israel, and we moved around a lot when I was a kid. My childhood felt kind of unstable. We moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee when I was in first grade, so my very first English had a deep Southern accent.
I was there for two years, then moved back to Israel for three years, and then we moved to Lexington, Massachusetts. One thing about my childhood is I always felt like I was behind. I’d show up in a new place and wouldn’t know the language or the math curriculum, so it was always a matter of, Okay, I’ve got to catch up and figure out what’s going on here.
Just as I’d finally learn English, acclimate, and make a couple of friends—boom, we’d move back to Israel. Now I was behind on Hebrew and missed two years of school there, so I had to catch up again. Right when I felt caught up, we moved to Boston, and my English wasn’t awesome. That was the story of my early childhood.
Keith Cline: What was your first computer?
Eran Egozy: My first real computer was an Apple II. Before that, I had an Atari 400. You had to be around back then to know what I’m talking about—it was the cheap version of the Atari computer, so the keyboard was flat without real keys. Mostly I played games on it, but the Apple II was my first real computer.
Keith Cline: From my research, you programmed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on it. How did you figure out how to do that?
Eran Egozy: That was a project with my friend Eric Reisman. We were both musicians—I played clarinet, and he played violin. One day, I noticed he wasn’t just playing games or programming in BASIC; he was diving into machine language. He had a book on how to program the 6502 8-bit processor in machine language. I thought that was cool, so I started typing machine code to get programs running.
Back then, things weren’t overly complicated, so you could figure it out by reading the manual. Because we were into music, we wanted to create a music-playing program that was better than whatever came with the computer. We had a sound synthesizer board called a Mockingboard, which actually allowed real sounds and polyphony—multiple notes at once—which the built-in Apple speaker couldn’t do.
We set out to figure out how to get this computer to play music. Essentially, like MIDI, you tell it what the notes are, how long they are, and when they should play, and it goes through and plays them. But getting the music into it was tricky—there was no internet, no GUI, and no download options. The only way to enter data was to literally type hexadecimal values into the computer.
Every day after school, I had a giant 100-page score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I started at the top left corner: Okay, the violins are playing a D for one bar… and kept going. I got halfway through the first movement, which was a lot of work, but it was fun because it actually worked and played the piece!
Keith Cline: You are an actual musician, playing the clarinet. Why did you choose that instrument?
Eran Egozy: It was pretty random. I saw a TV program featuring different musical instruments and thought the clarinet sounded interesting. When we arrived in America for the second time, my parents asked if I wanted to try an instrument, and I said, “How about clarinet?” based on that memory.
They found me a teacher who was wonderful, inspiring, and caring. I started clarinet late compared to most kids who start in fourth grade—I was already in seventh grade. But I took to it and really enjoyed it.
Keith Cline: My fourth-grade instrument was the saxophone because I wanted to learn how to play the Star Wars anthem. I never learned it, and I never succeeded at the saxophone.
Eran Egozy: Which is funny because the Star Wars theme doesn’t even feature a saxophone! It shows how random instrument selection can be.
That reminds me of when I was at MIT. Someone asked if I could teach a kid who wanted to learn clarinet. I had never taught before, but I agreed. During the first lesson, the kid asked, “Do they make brass clarinets?” I said, “No, they’re made of wood.” The next lesson he asked, “Are you sure they don’t have a metal version?” I said no. Then he asked, “Does Kenny G play clarinet?” I said, “No, you’re thinking of a soprano saxophone! Sorry buddy, you’re playing the wrong instrument.” That was the end of the lessons!
Keith Cline: That’s a perfect segue into MIT, where you studied both electrical engineering/computer science and music. You really caught up academically.
Eran Egozy: Yeah, from always feeling behind, it eventually made for a good college essay! I got in, and I played music all through high school in the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, which is a fantastic group.
At MIT, my major was Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and music was my minor. Back then, they were totally separate tracks—ships passing in the night.
Keith Cline: Through 435 episodes of this podcast, I’ve noticed a huge correlation between successful tech founders and playing music.
Eran Egozy: Music is deeply mathematical and scientific in addition to being an art form. It activates so many different parts of your brain. The singing part of your brain isn’t even the same as the language part. It’s fascinating how culturally important it is to us as humans.
Keith Cline: You hear a song, and it connects dots in your memory—you remember being seven years old or watching a movie that came out that summer.
Eran Egozy: There’s something about how music enters your memory that is super deep. It’s why successful commercial jingles work so well.
Keith Cline: How did you transition into the MIT Media Lab for your master’s degree?
Eran Egozy: During my undergrad, I had a research position at the AI Lab in Kendall Square where iRobot was born. Rod Brooks was building robots two floors up, while I was downstairs working on chip interconnect architectures for parallel machines.
After a couple of years, I talked to the senior professor, Tom Knight, and said, “I don’t think this is my thing. I find this boring, and I don’t know if I want to work at a giant company on this.” Tom knew I was into music, so he said, “If you don’t like this, go to the Media Lab and talk to Michael Hawley.”
Mike Hawley—who unfortunately passed away a few years ago—was an amazing pianist and computer scientist who was right there when Steve Jobs developed the NeXT machine. He had a den in the basement of the Media Lab that was a playpen of awesome stuff: racks of audio gear, a nine-foot player piano, cameras, and lights. I walked in and thought, I’ve found my place!
I started working with him as an undergrad on random projects connecting music and computers. Then I met Tod Machover and Neil Gershenfeld, who were doing exciting things with computers and music, and that led me into the graduate program for my master’s degree.
Keith Cline: You worked on a project involving Penn & Teller doing software for music and magic?
Eran Egozy: In Tod Machover’s group, projects often ended up in performances or concerts. We did a cello project with Yo-Yo Ma and an electronic violin concerto with Ani Kavafian. Then Tod connected with Penn & Teller to design a magic-music trick, and I was the lead programmer. Working with them was fantastic.
Keith Cline: Are their offstage personalities similar to their stage personas?
Eran Egozy: Their onstage personas are an exaggeration of who they actually are. Teller talks in real life, but he’s understated and astute. Penn likes to be the center of attention.
Keith Cline: How did you meet your co-founder, Alex Rigopulos, and get Harmonix started?
Eran Egozy: Alex and I were office mates in Tod Machover’s group. We became fast friends, working together on grad school projects like a music joystick controller.
Alex graduated a year before me. When I graduated, I planned to look for a standard job, but Alex said, “Hey, let’s start a company!” My parents were chemists with PhDs, so I had assumed I’d get a PhD too. But I said sure!
We joke that we started the company because we were working on cool real-time music interaction projects in grad school, loved it, and realized no company would hire us to do wacky stuff like that—they’d want us adding features to Excel spreadsheets instead. So we started a company to hire ourselves!
Keith Cline: I read that you noticed a trend of gaming, tech, and music coming together, including a PlayStation game called PaRappa the Rapper. I laugh because my roommate in Malden was obsessed with that game and played it non-stop while we ate dinner!
Eran Egozy: When we started Harmonix, it had nothing to do with games! We were not a game company. Games were something we loved, but we thought our company was going to make “interactive music experiences.”
At the Media Lab, Yamaha and Sega were corporate sponsors. Yamaha was about building instruments, while Sega was about entertainment. Our goal was to build software that helped people feel more musical, similar to how a Yamaha keyboard auto-accompanies you when you press a key.
Keith Cline: What was your first product, The Axe?
Eran Egozy: The Axe was our first product—a CD-ROM software program, not a game. You booted it up, picked a song or genre, chose an instrument, and used a joystick connected to your computer. Moving the joystick left/right changed pitch, and pushing forward/back changed speed. It had an intelligent note-playing system underneath so whatever you did always sounded good.
We thought everyone would love it. We sold maybe 200 copies! It was so depressing. We spent two years burning through investor money. I pulled a double all-nighter right before shipping to fix bugs, only for it to completely flop.
We didn’t have a marketing budget, and no one understood what it was. Was it an instrument? A game? It was cool technology built without understanding who it was for or why they’d want it—a classic rookie startup mistake.
Keith Cline: How was it distributed?
Eran Egozy: Our strategy was to create bundled demos for computer manufacturers like Dell or Compaq, hoping users would try the demo pre-installed on new PCs and upgrade.
Keith Cline: Brad Feld was one of your early investors. How did he get involved?
Eran Egozy: Brad is an amazing guy. He and I were in the same fraternity at MIT, though at different times.
When Alex and I entered MIT’s business plan competition with a terrible plan, Brad happened to be one of the judges. I mentioned we were fraternity brothers. Out of the goodness of his heart, he helped advise us when we didn’t know what we were doing.
Our first round was $100K from friends and family. Brad led our second round of about $1M. It might have been one of his very first venture investments.
Keith Cline: After The Axe, how did you pivot to the Disney Epcot project, CamJam?
Eran Egozy: After The Axe failed, we looked at how to repurpose the tech. People got bored of The Axe after five minutes, but where is a five-minute experience an advantage? Theme parks!
We pitched Disney on an exhibit at Epcot Center. Instead of a joystick, we used a contactless spatial sensor—a frame that tracked your hand’s X/Y coordinates using hardware long before the Kinect existed. Moving your hands controlled music alongside Disney animations.
It ran at Epcot for years, and we got paid for it. But there are only so many theme parks, so while it was a moderate success, it wasn’t a scalable business.
Keith Cline: What was the third iteration?
Eran Egozy: Our third attempt was trying to install our interactive music software into Japanese karaoke systems. Karaoke in Japan was a multi-billion-dollar industry. Our idea was that while one person sang, another person could use our software to play an instrument along with them.
Doing business in Japan was expensive, and we didn’t understand the culture. We had meetings with top karaoke companies, and they showcased our prototype at a trade show.
I was at the trade show demoing the product, trying to gauge excitement, and Alex was nowhere to be found. It turned out Alex had already seen the writing on the wall. People were giggling out of politeness, but no one was jumping up and down. We misread Japanese politeness as commercial interest. It took us a year to realize it was another dead end.
Keith Cline: How did Frequency come about?
Eran Egozy: While in Japan, we saw massive lines outside arcades for a music game called Beatmania. People were queuing for an hour to put quarters in and play music.
We realized games provide a motivation loop that keeps players engaged. We retooled Harmonix entirely: laid off half the company and hired game developers like Greg LoPiccolo and Dan Schmidt.
That led to Frequency, our first true music game, published by Sony for the PlayStation 2. We went through intense game development crunch and shipped it in 2001.
Keith Cline: Building a gaming studio in Boston was unique at the time.
Eran Egozy: Looking Glass Studios was the big influence in Boston back then. They pioneered open-world 3D games like Thief and System Shock. Founded by MIT alumni, Looking Glass heavily influenced the local scene. MIT also created Spacewar! (one of the earliest video games) and Infocom (Zork).
Keith Cline: Did Frequency get traction?
Eran Egozy: Frequency gave us a legitimate business model: the publisher-developer relationship. Sony paid us to develop the game, handled manufacturing and distribution, and offered milestone/royalty potential.
Frequency sold 100,000 units. In console gaming, that’s modest, but Sony funded a sequel, Amplitude, which also sold 100,000 units.
After that, Sony wanted games with higher sales volume, so we partnered with Konami to make Karaoke Revolution. It came with a microphone, tracked your pitch in real-time on screen, and awarded points for singing correctly.
Keith Cline: So Frequency, Amplitude, and Karaoke Revolution built the mechanics—3D scrolling music tracks and real-time pitch/hardware input—that eventually led to Guitar Hero.
Eran Egozy: Exactly. Entrepreneurship is about iteration. You learn from each attempt until you hit product-market fit.
Before making Guitar Hero in 2005, we had made seven video games and ten total products.
Frequency and Amplitude had the 3D scrolling note highway, but the gameplay was abstract. Karaoke Revolution proved that physical peripherals and on-screen avatars worked.
When we combined them for Guitar Hero—a plastic guitar peripheral where you play rock guitar solos along a scrolling note highway—everything clicked. Playing rock guitar had a huge cool factor.
Keith Cline: How did the partnership with Red Octane happen for Guitar Hero in 2005?
Eran Egozy: Red Octane was a small startup founded by Charles and Kai Huang. They knew how to manufacture hardware in China, having built high-end dance pads for Dance Dance Revolution.
They wanted to publish their own game, but weren’t game developers. We had game software expertise, but no hardware manufacturing capabilities. We partnered up: Red Octane manufactured the guitar, and Harmonix built the software in a fast nine-month development cycle.
Keith Cline: How did you select the setlist?
Eran Egozy: Harmonix was filled with opinionated musicians. Alex played drums, his brother Chris played guitar, Ryan Lesser played in a metal band, and Eric Brosius was in Tribe.
We focused the setlist on 70s and 80s rock with iconic guitar solos. We weren’t trying to make a pop playlist for everyone; we built a focused, high-energy rock list.
Because licensing original master recordings was difficult, we hired WaveGroup in LA to re-record high-quality “sound-alike” covers for the first two games. We secured iconic tracks like Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated,” White Zombie’s “Thunder Kiss ’65,” Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” and tracks by David Bowie and Deep Purple.
Keith Cline: What was it like the first time you held the guitar peripheral and played the working game?
Eran Egozy: Honestly, you’re so exhausted during development that you just hope there are no bugs!
I remember the very first crude prototype built by Dan Schmidt. There were no graphics—just dots on a screen and a score counter. Even then, people in the office were competing for high scores. That’s when we knew we had found the fun.
Keith Cline: How did Red Octane get the demo stations into Best Buy and GameStop?
Eran Egozy: Red Octane hustled! Best Buy buyers took a gamble on us.
Because the game came in a huge box with a plastic guitar, it took up massive retail space and cost $100 instead of $50. But having working interactive demo units in stores created lines out the door. Once people tried it, they had to have it. That was true product-market fit.
Keith Cline: How were sales after the 2005 holiday season?
Eran Egozy: After shipping, Alex told the company, “We’re going to make 75,000 people really happy, but now we need to figure out our next project.”
Then January came, and we sold more units in January than in December! Word of mouth exploded. Red Octane had to mortgage their houses to fund expensive injection molds for China factories to keep up with guitar demand.
Guitar Hero crossed 1 million units sold. We dropped all side projects and went straight into Guitar Hero II.
Keith Cline: Guitar Hero II sold over 3.1 million copies. What was that period like?
Eran Egozy: It was wild. Guitar Hero II ended with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” and its 10-minute guitar solo!
Within six months of launching the first game, acquisition talks started. Red Octane was acquired by Activision, and in October 2006, Harmonix was acquired by MTV Games (Viacom).
Keith Cline: How did the transition to MTV Games create Rock Band?
Eran Egozy: Activision owned the Guitar Hero brand name through Red Octane, while Harmonix owned the software code and expertise.
MTV Games wanted to publish games and own an IP. Partnering with MTV gave us direct music industry relationships. We decided to build a new franchise from scratch: Rock Band.
With MTV, we made the commitment to license original master recordings instead of covers. We also expanded beyond guitar to full band gameplay: drums, bass, guitar, and vocals.
We pioneered downloadable content (DLC) for consoles. Rock Band launched with 40 songs, but we built an online store selling digital tracks for $2 each. We broke Xbox and PlayStation backend systems because they weren’t built for games selling thousands of individual DLC items. We eventually sold over 100 million DLC songs in Rock Band.
Keith Cline: What was the manufacturing effort like for Rock Band?
Eran Egozy: Rock Band came in a giant $200 box containing a guitar, drum set, microphone, and drumsticks.
Rock Band 1 sold 4 million units, and Rock Band 2 sold 6 million units. Manufacturing was insanely complex. We worked with multiple Chinese factories across Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii. We literally caused a global shortage of wooden drumsticks because we bought out worldwide inventory!
Keith Cline: Then came The Beatles: Rock Band. How did that happen?
Eran Egozy: Dhani Harrison (George Harrison’s son) was a fan of Guitar Hero. At a dinner with Alex Rigopulos and Van Toffler (Head of MTV), they cooked up the idea.
It took years to negotiate, but Alex met with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and Olivia Harrison. We recreated the Beatles’ entire career visually and musically.
Yoko Ono visited our studio to review John Lennon’s animations. At first she said, “That’s not him, he didn’t move like that!” Our artists re-animated him based on her feedback to make his movement authentic.
Keith Cline: You and Alex were named to the Time 100 list of most influential people. When did the magnitude of your impact hit you?
Eran Egozy: When I got the Time 100 email, I almost deleted it thinking it was spam!
It really hit home years later when I became a Professor of the Practice in Music Technology at MIT. Students told me, “That game changed my life.” It gave people who weren’t musicians the courage to pick up a real guitar or start a band.
Post Malone explicitly credits Guitar Hero as the reason he got into playing music and guitar. Hearing personal stories from parents and kids about how the games bonded families and inspired real musical journeys made it truly real to me.
Keith Cline: Who owns Harmonix today?
Eran Egozy: In 2021, Epic Games (creators of Fortnite) acquired Harmonix to power their in-game music experiences and virtual concerts. If you experience music features inside Fortnite today, that’s Harmonix technology.
I left Harmonix in 2016 to transition full-time to MIT.
Keith Cline: What are you focused on at MIT today?
Eran Egozy: I run a new master’s degree program in Music Technology at MIT. We just graduated our first cohort.
We brought together engineering and music into a unified graduate program. Graduates go on to work at music tech companies like Suno, Spotify, Apple Music, Adobe, and iZotope, or pursue PhD research. Learning to bridge technical engineering with human artistic expression makes for incredible product designers.
Keith Cline: How do you see AI impacting the music industry?
Eran Egozy: AI allows anyone to generate a song from a text prompt, which is wild, but it’s essentially deep remixing of training data.
Background “production music” (elevator music, hold music, simple background tracks) will likely shift entirely to AI. But for music people truly care about, human connection is irreplaceable. People want to see human performance, emotion, and storytelling. Streaming shrank record royalties, yet live touring exploded—people pay thousands to see artists like Taylor Swift live because human connection can’t be replicated.
Keith Cline: What three apps can’t you live without?
Eran Egozy:
- News Apps: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe.
- Cursor: An AI code editor that makes software development 100x faster.
- I don’t use social media, and I’m happily married, so that eliminates most other apps!
Keith Cline: Do you have a book recommendation for entrepreneurs?
Eran Egozy: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (from the Harvard Negotiation Project). It’s a management book about resolving human conflict, navigating flat organization dynamics, and getting aligned. Every founder should read it.
Keith Cline: Do you still perform music?
Eran Egozy: Yes! I perform regularly on clarinet with Radius Ensemble. We play four concerts a year at MIT’s new concert hall.
Keith Cline: Eran, thank you so much for taking the extra time to walk us through this incredible Boston tech story. It was an absolute blast.
Eran Egozy: It was a huge pleasure, Keith! Thanks for having me.
