By Rodney Brown

It was the latter last night, as the Mass Technology Leadership Council held the latest of its monthly Tech Tuesday events at Microsoft Corp.’s New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge, affectionately and appropriately known as NERD. The topic of the evening was the gaming sector in the Bay State, as MassTLC celebrated the official launch of its digital gaming cluster with a report on the local industry.

To help set the gaming mood, folks from Cambridge neighbor Harmonix Inc. set up a full set of its now ubiquitous fake instruments for attendees to try their hands at The Beatles: Rock Band. After a demonstration by Sean Baptiste, Harmonix’s manager of community development, who rocked out with other players from companies like GamerDNA Inc., game geeks from the crowd decided to step up and try their hand at being an erstwhile John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr or even George Harrison.

With the smell of pizza, beer and soda in the air, it could have been any basement in the Greater Boston area — if that basement was on the 11th floor of a building on the Charles River and could hold 200 people.