“At this time, Konami will only be releasing ‘Rock Revolution’ with a drum peripheral; there are no plans for a guitar peripheral,” said Mondona Akhazan, an associate product manager at Konami. “Initially, when we started making the game, we designed it to be more of a drum-focused game. We have our competitors out there that created games that are focused more around the guitars, so with this we really wanted to pay homage to the drummer.”

However, Konami reiterated that competing titles’ guitars — namely those of Activision’s “Guitar Hero” and MTV’s “Rock Band” — will work with the game (at a demo today, I used a wireless Xbox 360 “Guitar Hero” guitar). The “Rock Revolution” drum set will also be compatible with the other games, even though it has six pads, while “Rock Band” has four and “Guitar Hero: World Tour” has five.

According to PR at the event, the “Rock Revolution” game will recognize which drum set you’re using and how many inputs the peripheral has. Then the game will reconfigure and scale the drum tracks to have the corresponding amount of playable notes depending on the drum peripheral being used.