Guitar Hero

• 1. Introduction

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  Guitar Hero is a series of rhythm games that handed players a plastic, guitar-shaped controller and challenged them to play along with rock songs. The first game appeared in 2005. Over its lifetime the series sold more than 25 million units worldwide and earned US$2 billion at retail. Then the numbers fell, studios closed, and a franchise that once rivaled the biggest names in games went quiet. Several journalists later named the first game one of the most influential products of its decade. How did a toy guitar get there so fast? Why did a hit with that much momentum burn out within a few years? And what can still be played today?

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• 2. A Plastic Guitar Is Born

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  RedOctane, a company that specialized in unusual game controllers, was already selling guitar-shaped controllers for imported copies of Konami's arcade game GuitarFreaks. GuitarFreaks was hugely popular in Japan but had seen little exposure in North America. RedOctane wanted a Western version, so it approached Harmonix, a studio that had made Frequency, Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution.

  The pitch was simple. Take the gameplay of Amplitude, pair it with the visuals of Karaoke Revolution, and build it around a brand-new guitar controller. The first game was made on a budget of US$1 million.

  The controller itself was modeled on a black Gibson SG. Four Harmonix staff members, Ryan Lesser, Rob Kay, Greg LoPiccolo and Alex Rigopulous, designed the original, and the Honeybee Corporation of China built it. After that first game, RedOctane developed its controllers in-house.

  The game reached the PlayStation 2 in November 2005 with 47 playable rock songs. Most were cover versions of tracks by artists from the 1960s through modern rock. Critics were enthusiastic, and the game collected awards for both its guitar and its soundtrack. It sold nearly 1.5 million copies and earned over US$45 million, a hit nobody had predicted.

  Its sequel, Guitar Hero II, arrived in 2006 with 64 songs and became the fifth best-selling video game of that year.

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• 3. The Note Highway

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  On screen, a guitar neck stretches vertically, and colored markers called gems slide down it toward the bottom. Players call this lane the note highway. Each gem matches one of the colored buttons on the controller, and the player holds the right button while hitting the strum bar as the gem arrives.

  A Rock Meter, split into red, yellow and green zones, tracks how the performance is going. If it drops below the red zone, the song ends and the virtual audience boos the player off the stage.

  Scoring works differently from Dance Dance Revolution. Each note has a window of time in which it can be hit, but hitting it early or late within that window earns the same points. A long streak of correct notes raises the score multiplier.

  Some phrases are marked with glowing notes outlined by stars. Hit them all, or use the whammy bar on sustained notes inside them, and the Star Power Meter fills. Once it is at least half full, tilting the guitar upright activates Star Power, which doubles the multiplier and lifts the Rock Meter faster.

  The games also borrow real guitar technique. Hammer-ons and pull-offs let players change fingering without strumming, and such notes are shown with a white outline.

  Four difficulty levels teach the player in stages. Easy uses only the first three buttons, Medium adds blue, and Hard adds the orange button that forces the fingers to travel along the neck. Expert adds more notes without adding buttons.

  Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock later layered a fantasy quest on top of this system, where transformed rockers could push a single song's total as high as forty stars.

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• 4. Activision Takes Over

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  In June 2006, Activision bought RedOctane and spent US$100 million to acquire the Guitar Hero franchise. That October it was announced that MTV Games would purchase Harmonix. The creators of the first two games could no longer make the series.

  The job went to Neversoft, an Activision subsidiary known for the Tony Hawk skateboarding games. The choice came from a confession. Neversoft founder Joel Jewett told RedOctane founders Kai and Charles Huang that his team on Tony Hawk's Project 8 had been coming in on weekends just to play Guitar Hero.

  Activision chief executive Bobby Kotick expected Neversoft to deliver great games. Looking back, he admitted that if Activision had explored keeping Harmonix, things "may have turned out differently".

  Harmonix soon proved the point. In 2007 it released Rock Band through rival publisher Electronic Arts. The game added drums and a microphone, so friends could play a song as a full band.

  Activision answered in 2008 with Guitar Hero World Tour, released on the 26th of October. It supported guitar, bass, drums and vocals, and could be bought with a drum set and microphone. It also let players write their own songs and share them online. Its setlist consisted entirely of master recordings, a break from the cover versions of the early games.

  When Guitar Hero 5 arrived, Activision hired the Pentagram design studio to redo the logo. The old lettering, with its sharp points, had been called "idiosyncratic with a vengeance" to suit the series' heavy metal image.

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• 5. Band Names and Cameos

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  Guitar Hero: Aerosmith was the first game in the series built around a single artist. Mostly Aerosmith songs filled the setlist, along with tracks by artists who had inspired or performed with the band, including Run-DMC.

  Not every spin-off was welcomed. Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s was the last game Harmonix made for the series, and the studio was contractually obligated to finish it. Reviewers criticized its small song selection, and one compared it with Lou Reed's album Metal Machine Music as a mere contractual obligation.

  Beyond the music, the games filled their stages with characters. Standbys included the metalhead Axel Steel, the thrash metalhead Lars Ümlaut, the punk Johnny Napalm and the gothic rocker Pandora. Real musicians appeared as caricatures too. Slash and Tom Morello performed motion capture for Guitar Hero III. Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne and Ted Nugent joined World Tour, Kurt Cobain appeared in Guitar Hero 5, and Taylor Swift and No Doubt starred in Band Hero.

  The animated story scenes in the Neversoft games came from Chris Prynoski and his studio Titmouse, which also made the show Metalocalypse. In the early games, songs were remade by WaveGroup Sound and labeled in the style of "Free Bird as made famous by Lynyrd Skynyrd".

  Portable versions went their own way. Guitar Hero: On Tour for the Nintendo DS shipped with a Guitar Grip that fit into the console's second slot and a guitar pick-shaped stylus for strumming the touchscreen.

  In late 2009, Courtney Love and the members of No Doubt took legal action against Activision, objecting to their in-game characters performing songs by other artists.

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• 6. Courtrooms and Patents

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  On the 7th of January 2008, Gibson Guitar Corporation told Activision it believed the Guitar Hero games infringed a Gibson patent. Gibson's guitars had appeared in the series from the first game through Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Activision responded by suing for a declaration that it was not in violation.

  Gibson then went after sellers. On the 17th of March 2008 it sued six retailers, among them GameStop, Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Target, Toys "R" Us and Kmart. Four days later it filed a suit against EA, MTV and Harmonix over Rock Band. A Harmonix spokesperson called those claims "completely without merit".

  Activision's lawyer Mary Tuck argued in court filings that Gibson sued because Activision was not interested in renewing its License and Marketing Support Agreement. In February 2009, a federal court in California ruled against Gibson. The judge held that the controllers were not musical instruments but "toys that represent other items". The two companies settled.

  Activision faced another challenge in February 2010, when the Patent Compliance Group accused it of marking games such as Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero with up to 10 patents that were not used in them. The group sought up to $500 per unit sold, but it withdrew the case by June 2010.

  The arcade version, Guitar Hero Arcade, drew scrutiny from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The society argued that playing the game in arcades amounted to a public performance and sought extra fees from operators.

  Practical hurdles also appeared. Early PlayStation 3 consoles could not use the PlayStation 2 guitar. A May 2007 system update fixed this for generic adapters.

  Activision sometimes sued as well. In 2007 it sent a cease and desist letter to Nicholas Piegdon, whose open source piano teaching program was called Piano Hero. He complied and renamed it Synthesia.

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• 7. Too Many Games

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  By 2008, the numbers were extraordinary. According to Activision, Guitar Hero III was the first single video game to sell more than US$1 billion at retail, with nearly 3.5 million copies sold in the first seven months of 2008. World Tour sold 3.4 million units in the United States during 2008. More than 60 million downloadable tracks had been purchased by February 2010, and Activision called the series the third largest game franchise of 2009, after Mario and Madden NFL.

  Then came the glut. In 2009, Activision tripled its offerings with Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Band Hero and DJ Hero, and the market did not respond. Rhythm games were a US$1.4 billion market in 2008 and fell to US$700 million in 2009, a 50% drop, even though more titles were on shelves.

  Brian Bright, a former Neversoft project director, said the studio shipped three games in 2009 while supporting two more. Total sales of all the 2009 Guitar Hero games added up to only about as much as World Tour alone had sold in 2008.

  Critics were blunt. Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, which reworked older songs for full-band play and added nothing new, was called "the definition of 'milking'". Kelly Sumner, a former RedOctane chief executive, said Activision "abused" the series. Kotick blamed DJ Hero for starving the core games of "nourishment and care".

  Activision cut from 25 SKUs in 2009 to 10 in 2010. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, with a quest narrated by Gene Simmons, came out on the 28th of September 2010. It was the last game from Neversoft's Guitar Hero division before that studio's closure.

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• 8. Hiatus and Reboot

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  In February 2011, Activision disbanded its Guitar Hero business unit and cancelled the planned 2011 game, citing "continued declines in the music genre". Vice president Dan Winters insisted the company was "just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus".

  The cancelled seventh game was reportedly a "disaster". It dropped other instruments, replaced the strum bar with a six-button design that proved too expensive to make and buy, and tried to build venues that reacted to each song. Activision president Eric Hirshber saw the project at the one-year mark of a two-year plan and shut it down. Another cancelled project, Hero World, was a browser-based online game linking Guitar Hero and DJ Hero.

  No new downloadable songs were made after February 2011. Activision later announced it would end all song sales for the series, a move Game Informer described as "the final nail in the series' coffins". Songs people had already bought stayed playable.

  In April 2015, Activision announced Guitar Hero Live, built by FreeStyleGames, which had made the DJ Hero games. The team had free rein and designed a guitar with two rows of three buttons to mimic real fingering. Its career mode used full-motion video shot from the lead guitarist's viewpoint. Its online mode, GHTV, streamed a rotating catalog of playable songs, with new ones added every week.

  Critics praised the reinvention, but the game sold below expectations, and Activision let go of about half of FreeStyleGames' developers. Ubisoft acquired the studio in January 2017. On the 1st of December 2018, GHTV shut down, cutting the playable catalog from almost 500 songs to the 42 on the disc.

  In 2020, online servers for all Guitar Hero games were shut down on PlayStation 3, leaving only Xbox 360 for online play. That same year, a free software clone called Clone Hero showed the series' appeal had not disappeared.

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