The Beatles: Rock Band devs were “sweating bullets” when they showed their version of John Lennon to Yoko Ono – “She’s like, ‘That looks stupid. He doesn’t act like that'”

The Beatles: Rock Band might have been the peak of the plastic instrument boom – a lavish passion project built in tribute to arguably the most influential rock and roll group of all time. The developers at Harmonix were serious about getting it right, and that meant enduring meetings with Yoko Ono where she’d tell them just how much their in-development depiction of John Lennon sucked.

“I would have meetings where it’s like, ‘OK, Yoko, here is our depiction of your dead husband singing this super impassioned song … What do you think?'” studio creative director Josh Randall recalls as part of The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom, a new book by journalist Blake Hester. An excerpt from that book, in part running down Harmonix’s experience working with Ono, was recently published by Design Room.