The SingStar Effect

Where to begin! Well, perhaps I should explain what SingStar is because I’m pretty sure a lot of you guys would have never heard of it before. SingStar is a competitive singing game where players score points according to the accuracy of their pitch and timing (picture it as karaoke with a point). The game is not intended to be played alone but rather in a large group (of up to 8 players) and thus has focused solely on the multiplayer aspect and functionality. SingStar first hit the shelves in May 2004 and since has released six more iterations to form one of the largest game franchises in the world. To date SingStar has had over 2 million sales and if you consider that it has only been released in Europe and Australia it makes these sales figures all that much more impressive.

The Birth of a Legend

The creation of SingStar is actually a pretty funny story. When game developers at Sony’s London Studios were raking their brains, trying to come up with new ideas for games, one of them had a breakthrough. “Why don’t we create a game that uses a microphone to detect pitch and timing to guide the player through the game?” It seemed like a good idea, so they started developing some game ideas around that thought.

The first games to come along were focused towards children. ‘Songlines,’ the first game to use what would become the SingStar microphones, was a third person adventure game that saw the player having to sing into the microphone to explore the different levels and unlock new areas through a series of mini-games. The second was called ‘SingAlong Safari,’ where kids could sing songs together with a number of different animals to complete missions.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it) neither of these two games ever saw the light of day. As the development team moved on, they decided that instead of creating a game where singing was used to guide a character through an elaborate world, they would make singing the main focus of the game. Thus the decision was made to create a game that would appeal to a mass market (not just kids), be popular but at the same time still retain singing as the main game mechanic. SingStar was born.

Our first look

Developers London Studios quickly made the decision to bring their dream to life on the PlayStation 2. They revealed their first prototype which showed some very basic interface, the scoring system, a few (unlicensed at the time) demo songs and most importantly the pitch detection using the microphones.
The way in which the pitch input drew a line on the screen as you sang was a big hit with the audience. Paulina Bozek, senior producer at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, described it as “an immediate visceral connection with the game.”

The game was first publicly presented at a forum that was held by SCEE in Paris. For the demonstration they had two girls and two guys battle it out on stage, the girls singing Destiny Child’s ‘Independent Woman,’ while the guys settled for a more laid back song, ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis.

The crowd was amazed with this new technology and dynamic gameplay and SingStar was soon on the lips of every game journalist throughout Europe.

Getting It Right

Before the game went on the shelves there were obviously a few creases that needed to be ironed out. At this point of development the project was given an official name, SingStar. Because the game was going to be focused on multiplayer aspects, it was decided that dedicated peripherals would need to be sold with the game which included a USB adaptor and two microphones (The original development version used the SOCOM headset and only catered for one microphone… eew!). The next important part was the song selection and also the licensing of this music. They wanted to keep the tracks funky, fun and fresh so that any person would feel comfortable with, at the very least, one of the songs.

Unfortunately Sony wanted to launch the game in May 2004, three months earlier than what was originally agreed upon between the distributor and the developer. Because of this the game wasn’t able to go through the initial test phase where the team would assess the public’s perception of the game through a number of market research sessions. In this sense Sony was kind of risking it all by releasing the game. None the less it was a huge sell out and the company could not keep up with the demand. Shortly after its release (and success) the second version, which included a brand new songlist, SingStar Party, went on sale in November.

Feedback

After SingStar Party was released Sony decided to do some market research to find out just who was playing this game of theirs. They were quite surprised, and so were we, to find out that there was an average of 49% male and 51% female players. Through this feedback they were also able to make some significant changes to the multiplayer side of the game, and also remove the single player “career” mode.The song selection was also assessed to find out which songs players liked and which ones they didn’t. An overall upgrade was done to the game, SingStar Pop (released in May 2005) was the first to come out with this newly spruced up look.

To date these are the SingStar versions that have been released:

SingStar (May 2004)
SingStar Party (November 2004)
SingStar Pop (May 2005)
SingStar 80’s (November 2005)
SingStar Rocks (May 2006)
SingStar Anthems (October 2006)
SingStar Legends (December 2006)

Make sure to catch the reviews on the site to get all the details about each of the titles, as well as the preview for SingStar on the PlayStation 3, due for release in March next year (2007).