For one hour tonight, QVC tried to sell the Beatles: Rock Band to its audience of parents and grandparents desperate to look cool to their offspring (and grandoffspring). Some key quotes from the hosts to give you an idea of the inanity.

• "It's the ultimate Beatles Christmas Gift."
• "If you want it, you can get it right now." [Ed. Note: Not true. It ships 9/9/09]
  
• "Think of when these great games come out, by the time Christmas comes around you can't find it."
• "You can play Paul McCartney's violin bass, and you don't even have to play left handed!"
• "That's Ringo's drum kit, isn't it?"
• "I think it's going to be great to realize that Ringo really was a great drummer."
• "So what I'm hearing is The Beatles. I'm hearing The Beatles. This is not a cover group!"
• "I never got to the Candle Club, but with this, I guess you can."

• "By the way, the Wii is by far the most popular, so it's the most limited in this set."
• "This is John's Rickenbacher. Check this out. How cool is this?"
• "Beatles Rock Band, arguably the most anticipated release of any game... ever!"
• "I know my family is picking this up right now."
• "By the way, the graphics is this and the look on the guys, all signed off by the Beatles."
• "When it comes to the complete bundle, 150 people have already dialed in." (23 minutes into the hour-long show)
• "You're literally following along with the bass parts. I mean you're playing Paul's bass. The greastest bass player of all time!"
  
• "This may be your best chance to sound like the Beatles ever."
• "In the next ten minutes, we're going to convince you to be a part of this. Beatle-mania is taking over QVC."

• (After the host jumped in to sing literally ten notes of "I Saw Her Standing There") "I think I hit it!"
• "When you jump into this and you really start playing it, you want to be good. You want to do well."
  
• "My ten-year-old son is a rock band FANTATIC. He LOVES it. And my eight-year-old is the drummer. You get scored and if you don't do well you get booed... or you fail."
• "It's really a phenomenal idea and it's uniting families, apparently."
• "I can't believe I've been kicked out of my son's band."
• "If you have a Wii, pick up the phone now, because the Wii is going to sell out."
• "Some of the songs are announced, some are unannounced, but dare I say they all... are legendary."

My girlfriend says it's sad that Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney are here at E3 presenting The Beatles: Rock Band. They've gone from being stars to being star presenters of a game in which they're featured. Note the name: "The Beatles" come before "Rock Band," an acknowledgment that they are the bigger franchise. What I've heard about the game is that the Beatles essence isn't only in the music and the avatars; it's also in the myriad period locales that blossom in the background as you play each song. Extending the Beatles from music and image to environment would be the logical conclusion of music and karaoke games.

Idol worship now takes the form of embodiment -- aided by technology, you're able to inhabit and reanimate the bodies of

[This blog interrupted to observe the fat guy with a crew cut rolling languorously through the expo floor on a Segway.]

your heroes, fictional or real. The Beatles always had an almost sacred image and mythology; now, these are all food for play-acting, through three-part harmonies with your friends if you have the mics.

So it isn't just that the aging Beatles are "featured" in this game. They've become sublimated into the game, into data designed to elicit a Beatles-themed physical and perhaps emotional feedback from the masses. You'll play and sing the right notes at the right times, directed painstakingly by the color cues. Everyone playing this game will become a sort of echo of one of the Beatles, as they were known in public. It's such a videogame way of creating memory -- forcefully, through spectacle and technology.