Harmonix announces mobile runner Record Run

Harmonix is moving into the mobile market, and its first foray when it comes to games is a music-based runner called Record Run, studio head Alex Rigopulos announced during his talk at PAX East 2014 today.

It's not Harmonix's first-ever mobile project; the studio released VidRhythm, a free iOS app that allowed players to create brief music videos, in 2011.

Rigopulos began with an explanation of some new technology at Harmonix that allows games to import a song from a player's personal collection and turn it into gameplay. "If you really love the music in the game, you enjoy the game more," he noted.

Record Run takes your favorite songs and uses them as its soundtrack, Rigopulos explained. It's a free-to-play title with gameplay that he compared to Gaijin Games' Bit.Trip Runner series. He showed a quick clip of footage in which a character jogged down a two-lane sidewalk to the beat of a song, sliding under and jumping over obstacles as it collected vinyl records.

Rigopulos did not specify a release date or platforms for Record Run, which will be a free-to-play title, but said Harmonix plans to release it soon. In addition, said Rigopulos, Harmonix has "lots of other irons in the fire on mobile, most of them very different" from Record Run. He then showed a brief video that consisted of 13 clips of prototypes that Harmonix is working on for mobile platforms, all playing in small windows simultaneously.

"There's some crazy shit in there," he said.