New chapters added

Dear backer

Thank you for your continued patience while waiting for The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom. Production has been steadily progressing, and the pages are beginning to fill out with more and more exciting stories and interviews. We wanted to share a snippet from the new chapters, which is one of author Blake Hester’s favourite pieces from all the interviews, featuring Harmonix’s former COO Michael Dornbrook:

It turns out, apparently, we were using like, over half the world’s supply of drumsticks. I mean, we were more than doubling the world’s needs for drumsticks. You know, we had a fairly specific initial requirement for what the wood was. I can’t remember for sure what it was, if it was hickory or ash or something. Something [with] very hard hardwood. And then we had to start widening and widening, like, "Okay, you can use maple. Okay, you can use this. Okay, you can use that." And then we still weren’t able to get enough. So we started shipping the boxes over unsealed because drumsticks are light, and we could fly them over and get them ahead of the boxes that were coming over that didn’t have drumsticks in them. 

We started getting on the phone [with] every drumstick manufacturer we could find. I remember being on the phone with one American manufacturer and asking them how many they could do. And I forgot the exact number he said, but it’s like 10,000 or something. I said, "A week?" He said, "No, a year! What are you talking about?!" He said, "How many do you need?!" And I said, "Well, we’re going through 280,000 pairs a week." And he was totally blown away. He couldn’t even believe it. So we were using way more drumsticks than the world could supply.

So Andy started going to furniture companies in China and saying, "You’ve got the equipment to make this. You’ve got the ability to make spindles and all that. Can you just make drumsticks?" And so they started making drumsticks for us. But then the other guy said, "You don’t understand. The problem is the wood. Now they’re taking the wood we need to make drumsticks." And so in China, you can’t use wood that’s sourced in China, it has to be brought in from elsewhere because they don’t want all their forests cut down, and they were having a problem getting enough of the woods that were needed to make the drumsticks. It was really crazy.

As always, thank you for your support.

Read-Only Memory
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