Microsoft Music Central April 25, 1996 "Playing Games With Queensryche: Mapping An Interactive Promised Land" by Wayne English

That there’s a significant community of cyberwarriors within the Queensryche fan base should surprise no one. Since the Seattle-based quintet formed in the early ‘80s, their interest in cutting edge technologies has shaped both content and delivery of their music, from the futurist themes of their songs to the burnished production details of their albums (especially the conceptual Operation: Mindcrime), ambitious videos and the multimedia sweep of their high-tech stage shows. Now the band has stepped into the interactive arena with a CD-ROM that expands upon the title concept behind their fifth album, 1994’s Promised Land. The CD-ROM version of Promised Land, just released, was developed as a multi-levelled game that would enable each of the band’s members — vocalist Geoff Tate, guitarists Chris DeGarmo and Michael Wilton, bassist Eddie Jackson and drummer Scott Rockenfield — to create their own, individual "world." Tate and Rockenfield were on hand for a recent instore at an Egghead Software outlet in suburban Issaquah, where a Music Central operative was stationed to grab some quick comments about this latest foray across technology’s brave new world

In its incarnation as a multimedia CD-ROM, Promised Land has five different "worlds," one for each member of the band. Did each of you get to develop that "world"?

TATE: Yeah, we each worked with an artist in developing the visuals for the game. And we worked with the producer of the game to sort of map out what we wanted to accomplish during our segment. It's quite involved. The movie took two years to make it. It's a long, long process.

Who did the sound effects?

TATE: The band and a guy named Reed Ridgeway.

Were you aware of the problem in using new technology while making reasonable trade-offs so the program could run on a wide array of machines? There've been some games that were engineered to the point that they could only run on the latest, fastest systems.

TATE: You still ought to try to avoid that because you're pigeonholing yourself into just people that can afford expensive computers. And it doesn't really do anybody any good.

It could have been tempting, given how you're right there at the cutting edge trying to see where the technology's headed.

TATE: But the tricky thing is when you're designing a product, you have to think of how to put it together so that a lot of people can use it. And if you're too far ahead of the technology... most people are a few years behind in the systems they buy. So, what do you do? We were all kind of wishing at the time that we did this one that there was more advancement in the sound area. You could get better sound, but you couldn't without sacrificing other things, like the amount of game time and that kind of thing. So it's all a series of compromises. It's kind of frustrating.

As produced, though, it's on two CDs. We understand it will run on mid-range machines.

TATE: That was a big consideration when we were putting it together. All of us wanted to be on the cutting edge.

The visuals include substantial documentary footage. Was that something that was done for the CD-ROM specifically or had you been planning on doing some sort of separate documentary video or film?

TATE: Well, we'd planned on doing a documentary but we didn't know what kind of format we were going to use. So I guess a month after we started [shooting] we got the idea that we should put this together like this.

ROCKENFIELD: We were talking when we started doing [the album of] Promised Land... We wrote the songs and we realized, hey, why don't we go and record this on our own in a place like a log cabin? It just turned out that we found the right place. It kept this nice organic feel to do things in a nice relaxed setting. And we thought we should film this whole thing just so we have it. It would be cool to have footage of the whole process, this idea of the CD-ROM that came about [after Promised Land]. But there's only 28 minutes full [in the disc]. You know, we recorded for five months. Three million hours...

A little hard to edit?

ROCKENFIELD: Well, it's a lot of sitting down and looking through the [video] tapes to figure out if you want to use it or not. It's possible that maybe in the future we could have a documentary to make it into a record or something. There's a lot of good stuff going but unfortunately we have [limited space] on a CD.

You probably didn't think about the editing when you first taped all that material.

ROCKENFIELD: We were making sure we were covering all our bases while making a record. Why don't we document the making of it just in case we need it? And we ended up going, wow, it's going to work perfect with the CD-ROM. So it was good that we covered our bases. This last tour we did for the Promised Land album, we recorded every show. It's just a habit. We have millions of tapes of that one, too, in a warehouse here in town just sitting. So we have them in case we ever need them. You can't ever go back and do it again.

You released The Making Of Empire as a video counterpart to the Empire album. Did you consider doing that for Promised Land?

TATE: That one was... just a collection of all our videos [from Empire] with us talking and explaining what's going on.

The Promised Land tour carried you well into 1995, didn't it?

ROCKENFIELD: It ended July 28th. We've been home ever since.

TATE: Take a few months off, kick back for Christmas, you know.

ROCKENFIELD: Now we're just working on new stuff, new material. It's that daily grind.

TATE: My wife and I had a baby six months ago. Scott's getting ready to have a baby here in June.

What's the timetable for your next tour and album?

TATE: Well, it's probably next spring, when we'll probably go out. We have a little time. We have about a year at home writing new material.

Will you record here in Seattle?

TATE: We don't know yet what we're going to do. We like to work here if we can.

There are some pretty good studios here.

TATE: Yeah, we've worked at a few of them. Bad Animals, which is owned by the girls from Heart. Actually Promised Land was mixed there. We recorded a lot of the material at our home studios, then took it in there to mix.

Meanwhile, will you continue developing this interactive side? Have you explored adapting the CD-ROM for other interactive systems like the Sony Play Station? You could allow multiple players in a single game.

ROCKENFIELD: I only saw that at [a] radio station recently. Somebody had a Play Station there, so I'm not really familiar with that.

TATE: It's a great idea.

ROCKENFIELD: From just the little I do know about it, it's cool.

Just keeping up with different formats can be pretty distracting.

TATE: [Especially when] you have all these people putting out hardware that doesn't talk to each other. In my opinion that's dinosaur thinking.

But that's how the computer industry has been since day one.

TATE: Yeah, but they don't need to any more. We've moved so much faster as a civilization. If everybody would just agree upon certain formats, then we could dispense with all the excess hardware because who needs it? We have so much junk right now in the environment anyway, who needs another piece of plastic? So why can't we just do software upgrades? Why can't they put their technology and their thinking in that direction? That's what's frustrating to me.

What about the explosion of online communication? With the stampede to the Internet, many people in both the computing and music camps are looking ahead to how electronic delivery will transform how we find music.

TATE: They're thinking that's really the way the record industry is going to go. Where there's nothing [forcing] you to produce... a [physical] disc any more. You'll just download it from some main library on your system and that will be your copy. You'll pay $11.00 to have the download and you'll own that download. You're just passing information rather than passing a piece of [software].

ROCKENFIELD: You can look at that in a couple of different ways. Not that I want to say anything bad against record companies or anything, but it would eventually alleviate [the need for] the middle guy. And so the capital side of things could be that the artist would make more money because you don't need the middle guy anymore, and we're talking about all these benefits... The hardest thing would be [if] you are a record company or a distributor that maybe you'll be out of a job.

TATE: ...Then you're getting into a whole different field... speaking of the evolution of humans... We realize now that we don't need to log... all the trees off the land anymore. So, it cuts back on the actual logger jobs. Well, it's the same with everything. Technology is always going to be improving and doing the work of what humans can do. So if you accept that and get on with it instead of trying to cling onto sort of the ideas of the past, where my grandfather did this job, my father did this job, and I should be able to do this job, too… no, you can't. It doesn't work that way any more. Some people seem to want to fight that all the time.