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Harmonix Music Systems, Inc., doing business as Harmonix, is an American video game developer company based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company was established in May 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy. Harmonix is perhaps best known as being the developer of music video games series Dance Central and Rock Band, as well as being the original developer and creator of the Guitar Hero series before development moved to Neversoft and Vicarious Visions. Harmonix was founded on May 10, 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, who met while attending MIT. Egozy was an electrical/computer engineer with an interest in music, while Rigopulos was a music composition major with an interest in programming; both met while working in the MIT Media Lab. After building a computer music generation system that could algorithmically create music on the fly, the two considered how one could use a joystick to control the system, and set up a demonstration of the unit for the Lab, which gained interest from others in the Lab. The two realized that after graduation that they probably couldn't pursue such ideas working at any existing companies, so they chose to start their own. The company was built on the premise that the experience of performing music could become accessible to those who would otherwise have trouble learning a traditional instrument. The company was initially funded with about US$100,000, and for the first five years, had nearly zero revenue. The company's earliest product was The Axe on PC CD-ROM. The Axe enabled consumers to easily perform unique instrumental solos by using a PC joystick. This product only sold about 300 copies, with Rigopulos and Egozy realizing that people, while initially entranced by the game, lost interest after 15 minutes of playing with it. Harmonix then designed "CamJam", which performed similar functions, this time using simple body gestures to trigger music sequences. CamJam was utilized at Disney theme parks.

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Harmonix