According to the mathmatically talented folks over at Scorehero.com and their calculations, the song “Seven” by Vagiant in Rock Band is technically impossible to drum your way to a Gold Star score.  “Seven” as well as several other songs in the game have been identified as either impossible to Gold Star on drums and/or on guitar so we spoke with Helen McWilliams, lead singer/guitarist for Vagiant, as well as Harmonix Spokesperson-With-The-Most-Flair for the scoop.

According to the QA department at Harmonix, several songs actually did slip through testing and were never initially identified as having this Gold Star “bug”. 

To Gold Star a song on a single instrument, your overall score (on expert difficulty) must be approximately one and a half times the minimum score needed to receive a 5-star rating (see the chart for exact numbers on RockGamer.com or over at Scorehero.com).  Pictured (right) is a Gold Star rating for a three-person band, all playing on Expert (which is not calculated using the same cutoffs). 

Apparently, the testers didn’t have a systematic check system in place for the score threshholds, and a few songs slipped through that didn’t have enough notes to reach that high of a score.  Helen’s tongue-in-cheek explanation for her song’s glitch:

“It turns out (I actually didn’t even know this before, ha!) that Seven is NOT gold star-able on guitar. Crazy, right? Apparently the QA kids just thought my guitar playing was too impossible to ever gold star, whereas in reality, it was a bug. Silly QA kids. My guitar playing is, however, awesome. So yeah, feel free to let them know that it’s a f**k-up and that we are very sorry!”

After further investigation, we did find good news is coming on the Gold Star front in the form of Rock Band 2 - the game’s much anticipated sequel, hitting stores next month.  Since the QA team was previously aware of this little glitch, they’ve taken measures to fix this discrepancy in the new game, so all songs in Rock Band 2 will be able to be Gold-Starred. 

And, if that’s not enough, here’s the even better news: since you can import your songs from the original Rock Band game into the new game and play all songs in the same place, the glitch will be automatically corrected for these songs in Rock Band 2!!  That’s right - any buggy song from the disc of the original game that you import over to Rock Band 2 will have a new score threshhold that allows for a Gold Star rating.

For all you competetive players out there, this should be great news and a new challenge for songs you may have moved on from (in disgust) months ago with all hope lost of getting your Gold.  You can get it soon baby - hang in there!