Toy manufacturer Hasbro has teamed up with music gaming icons Harmonix to make DropMix. This game/music creation device is an impressive piece of technology, and will likely have many uses outside of playing games.
In terms of hardware, DropMix is a simple black rectangle with five different card slots on it. A phone gets mounted into a dock on one end and players line up along the long sides, one on either side of the device. It’s not terribly impressive to look at, but the real magic happens once the game gets going.
During the demo, I had the opportunity to play a head-to-head game mode. Both sides got a number of NFC-enabled cards, broken up into different categories. These cards all are songs, divided up by track. For example, the yellow cards are all vocal tracks. Other colors are for bass lines, percussion tracks and more.
Players then take turns putting down cards, or replacing cards that have already been played with new ones. Once a card gets placed down on the board, the music track on that card immediately gets added to the music mix represented by the cards on the board. This means that every time you play through a game of DropMix, you and your opponent are creating a unique music mashup.
This may sound kind of confusing, so I’ll talk through a few rounds. The board may start with the vocals from Bruno Mars’ 24K Magic, the drum line from All About That Bass, and a loop from House Party by Sam Hunt. Within a few card plays, the vocals my get swapped out for Fall Out Boy and a bass line from The Chainsmokers get added to the mix. All of these cards have their own system of points, and once a team scores 21 points, they win.
The crazy thing about DropMix is how fast the song mix gets changed with a new card, and how much all of it just works. You’d think swapping vocals on a song would take time to craft a new mix, but DropMix has a new, decently made mix ready within a second.
DropMix will be available this September for $99.99, and will come packed with 60 different music cards. Additional cards, with new songs and new parts of songs, will be available for an additional purchase. Ultimately, there will be 300 cards released by the end of the year.
So what do you think? Are you interested in making your own music mixes with DropMix? What songs do you hope get announced for the game in the future? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
