Harmonix previously developed the first two games in the Guitar Hero series, which popularized gameplay of rock music with guitar-shaped controllers.

The game allows up to four players to simulate the performance of popular rock songs by playing with controllers modeled after musical instruments.

[11] Rock Band has up to three tracks of vertically scrolling colored music notes, one section each for lead guitar, drums, and bass.

[11] For lead and bass guitar, players play their notes by holding down colored fret buttons on the guitar peripheral and pushing the controller's strum bar; for drums, players must strike the matching colored drumhead, or step on the pedal to simulate playing bass drum notes.

The pads have colored rings around the edges that correspond to the notes on-screen, representing the snare drum (red), hi-hat (yellow), tom-tom (blue), and crash cymbal (green).

Drummers can improvise in special "freestyle drum fill" sections of songs, indicated by the columns for each note turning a solid color.

Overdrive for drummers can be deployed by hitting the crash cymbal (green note for right-handed configuration) that appears directly after a freestyle drum fill.

Featured tracks include "Dani California" by Red Hot Chili Peppers, "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult, "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, "Here It Goes Again" by OK Go, "Highway Star" by Deep Purple, "Learn to Fly" by Foo Fighters, "Suffragette City" by David Bowie, "Wanted Dead or Alive" by Bon Jovi, and "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who.

As both the PlayStation 2 and Wii version lack downloadable content, Harmonix released a series of "Track Pack" standalone games that are sold in retail stores.

Instead, Neversoft, a subsidiary of Activision, would take over development; the company released Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on October 28, 2007.

[37] Development started around February 2006, working with industrial designers J. Hayes and contract manufacturer Canyon Creations for prototyping instruments.

This Cabal led to the introduction of saving failing teammates, unison bonuses, bass grooves, guitar and drum solos, and Big Rock Endings in the final game.

Large scale testing and debugging for their network and server capabilities was done by renting time on a supercomputer to simulate 100,000 simultaneous connections.

[39] They also consider songs that would help players come together socially, such as in The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", where they retained the long synthesizer solo such that the band members would all start playing again after it for a big finish.

[43] This led to several problems in bringing the newer coders on board without any technical plan, requiring the team to redesign several parts of the game, such as online matchmaking, several times to correct.

Had Harmonix chosen to pay the fee, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 bundles of Rock Band would have sold at different price points.

Harmonix also found during development that they jumped head-first into some technical approaches which initially seemed to work but failed on larger-scale tests; the online functionality went through several such iterations.

[40] Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos said in the announcement that Rock Band "takes the core premise of Guitar Hero and expands it tenfold.

The update included an in-game music store with preview and sorting options, revised microphone performance, and faster downloadable content loading.

[46] Many originally announced features, such as the ability for players to pose their avatars, take photo shoots and order T-shirts, bumper stickers, and figurines,[28] were eventually made available on the website for Rock Band 2.

[47] Several tour buses made stops at major American cities to set up demo stations and showcase playable versions of the game for fans.

[50] The United Kingdom release of the game took place in London, where a number of bands including The Automatic, The Whip, and The Courteeners performed short sets.

[53] MTV originally announced Rock Band would be released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on November 23, 2007, Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days in the United States.

Many complaints stemmed from the bass drum pedal snapping in two, the Stratocaster controller's strum bar being unresponsive, and it occasionally lagging when tilted to activate Overdrive.

[59] Other players discovered at the game's launch that the Gibson Les Paul guitar controller bundled with the PlayStation 3 version of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was initially not compatible with the PlayStation 3 version of Rock Band, despite Harmonix stating that any controllers that followed the open-controller standard would work.

[63] At a press conference at the 2008 E3 convention, Activision confirmed that the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero World Tour will be able to use Rock Band's instruments, adapting the note tracks to account for the smaller number of drum pads, and that this compatibility was patched into Guitar Hero: Aerosmith as a result of additional arrangements.

[77] The PlayStation 2 version of the game was well received, but was subject to criticism for the omission of the character customization features, as well as the stripped-down Band World Tour mode.

The Wii version is basically the same as its PlayStation 2 counterpart, but IGN criticized it for its late release and their effort in completing a full game.

However, IGN noted that the drum controller was an improvement over the original version, stating, "The pads are quieter and the kick pedal will withstand more abuse.

[87] Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, the founders of Harmonix, were together named in Time Magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of 2008 for their creation of Rock Band.