In the interest of clarity, here is the full quote from Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos today.

"[The Rock Band and Dance Central franchises] are near and dear to our hearts and our minds. And we have grand plans to bring back both of them with guns blazing at some point in the coming console cycle."

The original story is below.

Today during a PAX East keynote address, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos teased that the Boston area studio has "grand plans" to bring the Rock Band and Dance Central franchises to the new generation of consoles, presumably the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and potentially Wii U.

He prefaced his talk this morning by saying he would not announce a Rock Band 4 or Dance Central 4 and he did not say if these games were in fact in development in any way. However, he stressed that both franchises are "near and dear" to Harmonix. He went on to say that the studio plans to bring these franchises to the "coming console cycle" "at some point" and with "guns blazing."

The comments today from Rigopulos are not terribly surprising. Last summer, he said that the Rock Band franchise will return "at the right point in time."

The most recent entry in the core Rock Band series was 2010's Rock Band 3, though the studio would ship a downloadable game, Rock Band Blitz, in 2012. Meanwhile, the last Dance Central game was 2012's Kinect-enabled Dance Central 3 for Xbox 360.

Harmonix is currently working on music game Fantasia: Music Evolved for Xbox 360 and Xbox One, as well as a free-to-play FPS called Chroma.

For its part, Activision has also suggested that the Guitar Hero series, put on hiatus in 2011, could come back some day.

Also during the keynote today, Rigopulos announced a new mobile game from Harmonix called Record Run. It's a music-inspired endless runner, but that's all we know about it right now.

What would you like to see from a "next-generation" Rock Band or Dance Central game? Let us know in the comments below!