Why Green Day’s older material isn’t on Rock Band
With Green Day’s Rock Band game coming to shelves this summer, many die hard fans are wondering why the band’s older material was left off the game in favor of songs from newer albums like American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown.
Drummer Tré Cool spoke to Gameinformer about why tracks from their albums Kerplunk! and 1,039 Smoothed Out Slappy Hour didn’t make the cut.
“We wanted to get stuff from 39/Smooth and Kerplunk! on there, too, but the tapes are really old. I don’t know if you know about analog tapes, but to transfer them you need to play them. They are kind of stuck together right now.
“You have to “bake” them, and then you have one chance to run it over the machine to transfer it to make stems. Once it hits the head, it comes off the other side shredded. We’re making sure we have the right dudes to do it. We’re actually booking it; there’s one place in Burbank that still does it. We’re going to bite the bullet and shred our old tapes and put it to digital.”
So even though the songs won’t be on the game by the time it comes out on June 8th, it’s possible they may be released as downloadable material. As to when that’ll happen, Cool can only say, “Whenever’s clever, baby.”
