I thought I'd take a minute to talk about little details of what will soon be your drums. I apologize for the quality of the photos: the iPhone camera just isn't an SLR.

See these gaps? These are impact absorbers. They let some of the crazier players hit drums really, really hard and yet not cause the other drums around them to think they've been hit. Believe it or not, they work really well. You should see how hard a repressed housewife will wail on these things.

The drums have tiny rims. Hopefully you won't need to notice this little touch, but these rims are as small as we could possibly make them, in order to help reduce rim hits on the drum sets. We started with a realistic rim height and size, and pulled way back from there. Rim hits are as enjoyable on drums as de-tuned strings are on guitar. We're also generous and count rim hits. While we almost always went with the authentic musician experience, in this case less realism was just more enjoyable.

Slide-out stick holders. These push in, in case you don't need to use them. On stage people generally rock out with stick bags on their throne, but so many people were jamming sticks into the little hole in the middle that we added these.

Speaking of sticks, there are no cheap plastic chopsticks here. These are real wood drumsticks, and I'm not talking about particle board. Going with wood really does make a difference in the feel of the rebound. We wanted to keep things as affordable as possible, but we'd be damned if we were going to ship plastic sticks.

This is a little touch I'm personally fond of. These latches secure the top of the drum set tightly to the legs. Originally, these rotated down to latch shut, and rotated up to open. Unfortunately, when unnoticed people them left them down, and instead of gripping the tube securely in place the drum set would wobble precariously on top of the latches. Flipping these the other way ensures that the toggles default to open and lets the kit sit as deep as it can, with extra stability coming from securing things properly. It's not a big thing, but little touches like that can really make something a pleasure to use or a nightmare to fight with.

The pedal is textured and with an orange bar to match the orange kick gems. The pedal hooks over the feet of the kit to avoid sliding, with two positions for short or long legs. (In the picture the pen is going through the second position.) You'll also notice it sticks out just a little bit... there is a little platform for your heel that helps keep everything stationary.

We went through a lot of different switches before we found one that could reliably hold up under a massive pounding. We haven't had one break since. Similarly, we've repeatedly beefed up the pedal until it could take a constant beating without snapping in half or throwing an axle. These things shouldn't break unless you've got a couple of people jumping on them (please don't try).

If you've got a table near your screen, you'll want coffee-table mode. Just pull out the leg bars, and put the top array directly into the feet. Originally we were worried this might be a bit of a gimmick, but we quickly found that A: it plays well, and B: lots of people have tables in front of their TVs. Who knew? Plus, in tabletop form the kit fits nicely into closets.

The feet of the drum set are symmetrical. This is just one little touch that helps people get this thing assembled and working faster. We kept this simplicity mantra wherever possible; Nothing is worse than having something 3/4ths of the way assembled only to discover that a little plastic bit is flared the wrong way.

You'll also notice once you get these home that there really aren't many parts. Everything we could put together ahead of time, we did. Again, this keeps things simple and easy.

All of this is probably more info than you will ever need or use. And really, that's the point; We thought a lot about the details of the drum set so that you wouldn't have to. Hopefully your first hour will be spent jamming out, rather than sticking tab A into slot B. Once you've been playing for a while, take a moment to notice all the little touches to the hardware that makes it nice to use. We put a lot of sweat into every decision, and hopefully it shows.

BTW, if you're looking for credits to games, check out Mobygames.com. They're not perfect, but they're how us developer types get credit for our work. It's like digital IMDb. If you have a game that you really like, please take the time to add the credits to the database... this is really the way that us game developers get credit for our work. I think all of the Harmonix games are in there already, but other developers could use the recognition.