Still fresh from announcing Green Day: Rock Band, Harmonix has quietly tipped off SarcasticGamer.com on its future plans for band-related music games. Following the massive success of The Beatles: Rock Band and the red-hot-fury feverish reception to the announcement of the new game based on the American rock trio, the team took five minutes to talk to us about what the future of the series holds.

“Let’s be clear about this,” read the first email reply in a series of several, sent over the past few days following the announcement of Green Day: Rock Band. “There’s a reason why you’ve not heard anything about Rock Band 3 yet.”

That reason, it turns out, is because Rock Band 3 doesn’t exist, and never will. The future of the Rock Band series, it has been decided, is the newly-denoted Ameritrash: Rock Band saga. Releasing annually, each edition of the Ameritrash series of Rock Band titles will feature a different mainstream American rock band, picked seemingly out of the blue with proportionately little cultural impact on the music of their time, and will wrap a game around several anonymous performances that nobody remembers and a couple of Billboard 100 hits that everybody knows.

“The Beatles: Rock Band was a step too far for us,” confided our Harmonix source. “We realised that creating a video game on the platform of a hugely popular & successful franchise, and basing it on the world’s most popular musical act, and then producing a solid-selling game attractive to pretty much every gamer and non-gamer out there after all of that…that was just far too much for us. It didn’t add up.”

“Instead, we wrote out some names of some bands, threw them in a hat, then Big Joe at the office picked one out and it was Green Day. We figured this was a much better route to go down than actually looking for hugely inspiring and creative musical acts such as the Beatles. After all, transcending different types of rock music and combining world-famous live performances with iconic cartoon imagery just didn’t cut it, did it?”

This utterly undeniable opinion led to the creation of the Ameritrash: Rock Band umbrella, and will feature several other mainstream American bands that 1) have been around for a while and 2) nobody would have expected to have merited their own singular Rock Band title. These will include Blink-182: Rock Band, Sum 41: Rock Band and Papa Roach: Rock Band. Each one will contain a few mainstream hits, a ton of obscurities and – as exemplified by Green Day: Rock Band – several non-memorable gigs to warble through.

“A few years down the line we’ll probably give Limp Bizkit one too,” reasoned the source. “They did cover The Who after all, and it was alright.”

What then, pray tell, about the Rock Band Network, the new service which allows bands to release their songs on Rock Band by themselves? “Have you seen the DLC lately for Rock Band?” chuckled Mr Harmonix Source: “It’s all Green Day. Green Day Green Day Green Day. Green Day is the future.”

“Then when we run out of songs, we’ll move onto Blink-182. Full circle, baby…full circle.”