in 2017 Harmonix, the rock band/guitar hero/frequency/amplitude studio, made DropMix, a game i had a lot of fun with. you could create mashups on the fly, whenever you wanted, splitting songs into component parts and exchanging them. it would automatically change the songs you played's keys so no matter what you did it sounded good- or at least okay. it required a big plastic thing, and an app, and then was a collectible card game on top of that. okay, so it wasn't all that great. but the potential was there.
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| DropMix. notice the phone app you need to have to make it work. bad idea imo! |
i simply saw DropMix as something that seemed cool but was too rich for my blood until 2018, when Toys R Us closed its doors and every location had massive closeout sales. suddenly all of my friends had deeply discounted Fuser sets, as did i. i would buy as many booster packs as i could- packs that weren't random, so at the very least you always knew what you were getting. it was fun! i spent a little time playing it but much more time thinking about it. it was obviously a financial fiasco. no one wanted to pay as much money as it cost for it, and the people who bought it certainly weren't running around buying booster packs at full price. i loved the thing and even i never did that.
DropMix was a financial failure- its last cards came out in 2018, and the app was delisted in 2022, making the entire thing a paperweight now. but the idea, and Harmonix's technical aptitude, was still strong. DropMix was dead, but it was just the beginning- an even bigger successor was on its way. a successor that would, uh, also fail and be delisted. such is life.
