'Rock Band 4' Announced For PlayStation 4 & Xbox One

In case you needed proof that you've been right all along and the world has been wrong, Harmonix — the original developers of the wildly successful Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games — has announced that a genre long thought dead has merely been sleeping with the news that they will be reviving their follow-up franchise for next-gen consoles.

That's right: we're getting Rock Band 4.

"Hey gang, For years you have been asking us the same question: 'When will Rock Band return?'," Harmonix said in a statement released on its website. "For years you have been unified in solidarity with one single demand: 'Give us a new Rock Band!' Well, today, my friends, is your day."

"You win. We’ll do it," the statement continued.

Harmonix goes on to explain that the new installation will be available (at least in the US) later this year, for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and will support all previously purchased downloadable content as they're released on next-gen consoles. Nice. All those hours you and your friends spent belting the shit out of plastic instruments weren't for nought!

“With Rock Band 4, we’re doubling down on the energy and excitement of playing music live with your friends,” Harmonix chief executive Steve Janiak said in a statement. “Focusing on the core experience that our fans have told us they love allows us to evolve established gameplay in meaningful ways that we can’t wait to share with everyone later this year.”

For the next-gen edition of Rock Band, Harmonix have teamed up with industry manufacturer Mad Catz to provide a whole new line of hardware/instruments, which is probably beneficial since, if you're anything like us, your old peripherals are either buried under five years of other crap you're trying to forget or they're sitting in a Woolworths car park somewhere because you'd carried them around in your boot for months with the intention of dropping them off at a charity place but kept forgetting and eventually needed that space for groceries (...too specific?).

Rock Band 4 will support more than 2000 tracks released since Rock Band's original 2007 launch, canvassing somewhere in the vicinity of 500 artists - but that's somewhere down the line once the existing library has been adapted for next-gen consoles. As it stands, the launch library is likely to number in the hundreds.

“Since the beginning, we’ve called Rock Band a music platform. Players responded by downloading hundreds of their favorite tracks, and building a massive library of playable music,” Rock Band 4 product manager Daniel Sussman said in a statement.

“It’s important for us to respect those purchases and enable our fans to bring that content over to the Rock Band platform on new generation consoles.”

There's no concrete release date for the music-video-game revival yet, but you can go behind the scenes at Harmonix with this enlightening video in the interim, and start flexing those fingers for plastic combat once more.