The Beatles: Rock Band follows the group’s career from Liverpool to the concert on the roof of Apple Corps in London in 1969, which marks the band’s end in the public imagination. The first half of the game recreates famous live performances; the second half weaves psychedelic “dreamscapes” around animations of the Beatles recording in Studio Two. By now it has become an almost mythical arc: when the Beatles rose to fame, rock ’n’ roll was a live medium. A rock album was essentially a take-home version of a concert. But the frenzy of Beatlemania overwhelmed the Beatles and their music. In response, the band refocused its talent and energy on studio recordings and created a new paradigm: lush, elaborately produced rock music that not only didn’t try to create an illusion of live performance but also couldn’t be played live at all, and that very pointedly sprung from the artists’ private space without the interference or involvement of fans. In a sense, the two phases of the band’s career are now being reconciled with an interactive game. The fan again becomes an active part of the process, but in the service of teasing out the intricacies of the studio productions.

IN 2006 GILES Martin worked alongside his father to produce a collection of Beatles remixes and mash-ups for “Love,” the Las Vegas revue by Cirque du Soleil. At the time he was mildly alarmed that the Beatles’ original master tapes, while meticulously catalogued and preserved, had never been backed up. Apple Corps’ most precious resources are stored in a vault on the lower level of Abbey Road behind a massive steel door marked only with a sign that reads, dubiously, “Danger: High Voltage.” Martin enlisted Abbey Road engineers to create pristine digital copies of every tape, a task that made his job on The Beatles: Rock Band easier.

To turn classic Beatles songs into the stages of a video game, each song needed to be separated into its several components, so that if the person playing the guitar misses a note, the guitar sound can drop out while the music made by the other instruments is unaffected. Because the Beatles mostly recorded on four-track and two-track equipment, with multiple instruments sharing a tape, Martin had to spend months using digital filters to eliminate sounds at certain frequencies and not others. This work was done at Abbey Road but not in Studio Two. Mainly Martin worked in the less-iconic Room 52 down the hall, next to the men’s room. Apple’s preoccupation with security meant that the high-quality audio “stems” he created never left Abbey Road. If the separated parts leaked out, every amateur D.J. would start lacing mixes with unauthorized Beatles samples. Instead, Martin created low-fidelity copies imprinted with static for the Harmonix team to take back to the States — in their carry-on luggage. They were just good enough to work with until the game coding could be brought back to Abbey Road and attached to the actual songs.

Sitting in front of his Mac in March, Martin explained that when choosing the 45 songs that come with the game, priority was given to the ones that would be most fun to play, rather than to the band’s most iconic numbers. He clicked the mouse and played a snatch of “Paperback Writer.” In the game, “Paperback Writer” comes toward the end of the live era — in a sequence inspired by, but not an exact simulation of, the Beatles’ concerts at Budokan. The 1966 Japan shows were recorded, but there was no thought of using the live versions in the game. Martin dragged in another file and clicked play. Compared with the familiar, crisp recording on the single,“Paperback Writer” at Budokan is a mess — faster but less energetic, as if the Beatles were just trying to get the song over with. The harmonies are off, and the drumming is sloppy. The screaming audience doesn’t help.

Martin stopped the playback. “If that was your version of ‘Paperback Writer’ in the game,” he said, “you probably wouldn’t be that happy.” Instead he took the studio version, layered on the crowd noises at a less-intrusive volume and grafted on the final chord of the live performance to replace the studio fade-out. Listening to it again now he decided that the drums sounded too “squashed” for an arena show. That compression, in which the loudest parts of a song are turned down while the quiet parts are untouched, results in an artificially even sound — an effect of Abbey Road’s 1950s equipment that is treasured by Beatlephiles. But Martin planned to rerun the original tracks through the compressors again — or rather, through software emulations — with the settings readjusted. He described his remixes as the opposite of what that word usually connotes. “My approach is actually to make things less processed,” he said, “so you hear the band playing as opposed to people in the studio working.”

Martin is one of the few people trusted with such artistic decisions. People who have professional dealings with Olivia Harrison, Yoko Ono and the two remaining Beatles refer to the foursome as “the shareholders.” Each one has veto power over any aspect of any project that goes out under the Beatles name. “They are deeply concerned about how they are perceived, and rightly so,” Martin said. “I think people’s perception is that they would go: ‘O.K., you want to do a video game of us? It’s going to cost you however many million dollars, yeah, fine.’ But with Apple it doesn’t work like that. They form a partnership. They go, ‘If you’re going to do this, we’re going to do it with you.’ ” McCartney told me that his role in the project was “executive tweaker,” but the better title might be watchdog. “It’s not open season on their music,” Martin said. “I can’t just go, ‘Well, I thought this would be cool.’ ”

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In many respects, Martin and the Harmonix developers obsessed over creating an accurate portrayal of the Beatles. (They were never without teacups in the studio!) But they also made changes that polish the Beatles’ mythology at the expense of realism. “Paperback Writer” live really was a mess. That’s not trivial, if you want to understand the Beatles’ legacy. Difficulty playing their material live is a reason that they stopped touring. But Martin is adamant that an accurate depiction of a mid-’60s Beatles concert would be a mistake. “This isn’t an archival project, it’s a game,” he said. “It’s entertainment. That’s what they were doing here in the first place. Later, people attached all sorts of significance to it, but they’d be the first to tell you that what they wanted most was to entertain people.”