Guitar Hero | Code Like It's 198x

In November 2005 Guitar Hero was, as Edge put it five years later, “just a brilliant but impractical rhythm-action game with an experimental peripheral, so weird that it struggled to find investors”. It came with a three-quarter-size plastic guitar, it was made by a studio whose previous music games had hardly sold, and its songs were cover versions. Within a year 3,000 people were watching fans play it on a stage at the Download rock festival, Activision had paid $100 million for its publisher, and the music game, until then a Japanese arcade genre, was on its way to taking $1.9 billion in the United States in a single year.

Fast facts

Developer: Harmonix, of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Publisher: RedOctane, a peripherals company run by the Huang brothers; Activision bought RedOctane in 2006.
Released: PlayStation 2, North America, November 2005, at $70 with the guitar.
Controller: a three-quarter-size copy of a Gibson SG, with five coloured fret buttons, a strum bar, a whammy bar and a tilt sensor.
Songs: 30 cover versions of rock hits, plus unlockable songs by unsigned bands.
Series: Harmonix made Guitar Hero II (2006); Neversoft took over from Guitar Hero III (2007). Activision closed its Guitar Hero business in February 2011, and FreeStyleGames made Guitar Hero Live in 2015.

Konami’s guitar, a rock soundtrack

A game played on a plastic guitar was not new. Konami’s Guitar Freaks, one of its Bemani music games, had been in Japanese arcades since 1999 (see Beatmania), and Retro Gamer later called it the precursor of Guitar Hero. Its guitar had three buttons. According to Brian Bright, who later ran the series at Neversoft, the Huang brothers at RedOctane saw that “the guitar controller, which was being used in Konami’s games, when combined with popular rock’n’roll could make people feel like they were guitar gods on a stage”. Rhythm games before it, he told Edge, had used mostly Japanese pop.

Harmonix had the other half. Its PlayStation 2 games Frequency and Amplitude turned songs into streams of coloured notes, and critics admired them, but, as the co-founder Alex Rigopulos admitted, Frequency “sold barely any copies”. The games were “strange”, he said: “There was no easy narrative metaphor for people to grasp on to, no aspirational element.” A guitar and a rock soundtrack supplied both. It was not an easy sell to publishers. Edge reported that Acclaim turned down the chance to publish it and that the game was made possible only by “RedOctane’s tenacious fundraising”; Rigopulos said Harmonix built it “on a shoestring budget in a very short period of time”.

Playing it

The controller was the idea. RedOctane made a guitar about three-quarters the size of a Gibson SG, after approaching Gibson and agreeing an exclusive deal; “if you want to do an entire game with one brand, that’s it,” the project lead, Greg LoPiccolo, told Edge. Five coloured buttons sat on the neck and a two-way strum bar on the body. Coloured notes rolled down a fretboard on the screen, and the player held the matching buttons and strummed as each note arrived. Harder settings brought in more buttons, chord shapes and runs up and down the neck. Edge’s review found the peripheral “extremely familiar to players of Guitar Freaks” but better, with “five buttons, a two-way strum bar and a fully functional whammy”.

Two extras turned it into a performance. The whammy bar bent sustained notes. Star Power doubled the score multiplier or dragged a failing player back from the edge, and it was released by tipping the guitar’s neck up, so that, in Edge’s words, “falling to your knees and tilting the guitar vertically during the chorus of More Than A Feeling seems like the most natural action in the world”. Harmonix had planned freestyle sections in which players could improvise, but dropped them because they would not fit the controls. There were four difficulty levels, and the game had a competitive two-player mode from the start.

The 30 main songs were cover versions, recorded for the game, of hits by acts from Motörhead and Blue Öyster Cult to the Ramones and the band Boston, and extra songs by unsigned bands, some from Harmonix’s home town, could be unlocked. The review opened with a challenge to anyone who said games were not art: “Now that Guitar Hero exists, they’ll have to change their tune.” It was, Edge added, “a game that you can play sitting down, but you won’t”.

A slow-burning hit

Guitar Hero did not sell like other games. “Normally, games have their big sales spike just before Christmas, and then sales steadily taper off thereafter,” Rigopulos told Edge; Guitar Hero’s sales went on growing every month. He typed the name into YouTube and found hundreds of videos people had made of themselves playing it: “It was at that moment that I knew a phenomenon was starting to form.” In June 2006 fans played it on a stage at the Download festival at Donington, alongside the festival’s bands, and Edge reported that Harmonix was calling its games “superstar simulators”.

The success changed who owned it. In 2006 Activision bought RedOctane for $100 million. Harmonix did not own the Guitar Hero name, “and so found itself cut loose”. It finished Guitar Hero II, released on the PlayStation 2 for Christmas 2006, and then left to build Rock Band with MTV, adding drums and a microphone. Activision gave Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007) to Neversoft, the studio behind Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, where, Brian Bright remembered, the first Guitar Hero had been “the most popular game played in the studio”. It was not a simple handover. “Activision owned the IP and the company that made the guitars,” Bright told Wireframe, “but they did not own any code or patents – that all was still with Harmonix.” Neversoft rebuilt the game from scratch in its own engine, and brought in the guitarists Slash and Tom Morello. Edge judged the switch “as significant a moment in the evolution of the genre as any other”. The analysts at Screen Digest estimated that Guitar Hero III went on to sell more than ten million copies. Guitar Hero World Tour (2008) answered Rock Band with a full band of instruments, and by the time of Guitar Hero 5 in 2009 Edge counted ten games in the series, including spin-offs such as Guitar Hero: Metallica.

The slump

The boom ended quickly. Figures from the research firm NPD, reported in Edge, showed American spending on music games falling by 46 per cent, from about $1.9 billion in 2008 to a little over $1 billion in 2009. Piers Harding-Rolls of Screen Digest put it down to “four or five versions of Rock Band and Guitar Hero” released in a short time, each followed by downloadable songs, and to the cost of the instruments: bundled kits sold for £70 to £120, and players who already owned a plastic guitar needed a strong reason to buy another. By late 2010 he was writing that new instalments of both series were “selling in the low thousands at launch”, against the “multimillions” of Guitar Hero III and the first Rock Band.

On 9 February 2011 Activision announced that, “due to continued declines in the music genre”, it would disband its Guitar Hero business unit and cancel the game planned for that year. Rigopulos did not blame Activision alone. “You often hear people saying Activision killed the category by over-saturating it with too many releases,” he told Edge in 2012. “Maybe that’s part of the story, but I certainly don’t think that’s the entire story.” He pointed to the recession, to gameplay that had barely changed, and to casual players who were “easily lured away to the next bubble”.

Guitar Hero Live

Activision brought the series back once. Guitar Hero Live, made by FreeStyleGames and released in October 2015, used a new controller with six buttons, filmed its career mode as full-motion video, and streamed extra songs through an online channel called GHTV. It did not revive the market. Activision switched GHTV off on 1 December 2018, leaving only the songs on the disc, and there has been no new Guitar Hero game since. The music games entry follows the genre after the slump, from Rock Band 4 to Fortnite Festival.

Sources

Edge issue 156, December 2005, p. 58: preview (Harmonix and RedOctane; release in November 2005 in the US; Greg LoPiccolo on the Gibson licence).
Edge issue 157, Christmas 2005, p. 90: review (price with the guitar; the 30 cover versions and the unlockable songs; the controller compared with Guitar Freaks; four difficulty levels; “a game that you can play sitting down, but you won’t”).
Edge issue 165, August 2006, p. 17: Guitar Hero at the Download festival at Donington, June 2006 (3,000 people; “superstar simulators”).
Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006, p. 74: review of Guitar Hero II.
Edge issue 172, February 2007, p. 10: the PlayStation 2-only Guitar Hero II selling well in the US in November 2006.
Retro Gamer issue 54, 2008, p. 50: Konami feature (Guitar Freaks, from 1999, as a precursor of Guitar Hero).
Edge issue 211, February 2010, pp. 71–74, feature on music games: Guitar Freaks’ three-button guitar; Brian Bright on RedOctane and the Huang brothers; Alex Rigopulos on Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero’s sales and YouTube; the move to Neversoft; World Tour; Guitar Hero 5 as the tenth game in the series.
Edge issue 211, February 2010, p. 11: Piers Harding-Rolls of Screen Digest on the decline in 2009.
Edge issue 212, March 2010, p. 24: Screen Digest column (NPD figures for US music-game sales in 2008 and 2009).
Edge issue 222, Christmas 2010, pp. 24–25: Piers Harding-Rolls, “Music games shift focus” (launch sales of the latest instalments; bundled kit prices; Screen Digest’s estimate of more than ten million sales for Guitar Hero III).
Edge issue 223, January 2011, pp. 105–107, “Time Extend: Guitar Hero”: Acclaim and RedOctane’s fundraising; the SG controller; Guitar Freaks’ three buttons; the whammy bar, Star Power and the tilt sensor; the dropped freestyle sections; the two-player mode.
Edge issue 239, April 2012, pp. 145–147, “The making of Rock Band”: the $100 million purchase of RedOctane and Harmonix “cut loose”; Guitar Hero’s “shoestring budget”; Rigopulos on the collapse.
Wireframe issue 70, 2023, pp. 73–74, developer profile of Brian Bright: Guitar Hero at Neversoft; Activision owning the name and RedOctane but not Harmonix’s code; the new engine; Slash and Tom Morello.
Activision Blizzard, press release, 9 February 2011, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (web): the Guitar Hero business unit disbanded. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000718877/000110465911005944/a11-5488_1ex99d1.htm
Activision Support, “Guitar Hero Live – GHTV Sunset” (web, the publisher’s own notice): GHTV closed on 1 December 2018. https://support.activision.com/articles/guitar-hero-live-ghtv-sunset
Wikipedia, “Guitar Hero” (web, secondary): Harmonix as developer of Guitar Hero II; Guitar Hero Live’s release in October 2015, its six-button controller and FreeStyleGames; the series dormant since 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero