Guitar Hero: An Eulogy

As many of you should know by now, Activision has announced that it is shuttering its Guitar Hero Licensing division and will cease development of all further games and DLC for Guitar Hero and it's sister game DJ Hero. Guitar Hero was a game very dear to me and I would urge all readers to post their memories as I will also do this below.




I first played the original Guitar Hero in late 2006 when a friend of a friend brought over the original one to a party and I only got a chance to play it once, and that was doing horribly to Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out. It felt pretty alien to use my hand eye coordination in time to the beat of the song, but it was fun. I could see the concept of it being addictive, but having no PS2 at the time, and costing a fair amount of money for one game I held out. Until Guitar Hero II on the Xbox 360.

I was utterly addicted to Guitar Hero II, and it introduced me to some great music, bands like Rush, Heart and the guitar playing of Johnny Winter. I can still remember playing (and getting annoyed at) Nirvana's Heart Shaped Box as I tried to move up difficulty levels. Even today when I hear Cherry Pie I go back to when I was playing it in guitar hero and a big smile always crosses my face.

But during this time, Activision bought RedOctane, the guitar controller manufacturer, Harmonix was bought by Viacom/MTV Games and Guitar Hero 3 came out. Guitar Hero 3 was developed by long time Tony Hawk Pro Skater makers Neversoft and brought a lot of licensed music to the table. Gone were the shoddy covers that plagued previous games, like that of Killing in the Name in Guitar Hero II. There was a greater mix of recent and old tracks, with AFI's Miss Murder and Priestess' Lay Down bringing the modern rock, but there was still classic rock from The Who and The Rolling Stones. The main difference from Neversoft and Harmonix and their charting styles was that Neversoft definitely added a lot more notes that made the game harder, but not specifically accurate for the song. Well that and hammer-ons were now a million times easieras you didn't have to "hammer" in time.

Harmonix on the other hand were busy making their new game which expanded the guitar experience to drums and vocals so that four people could play at once. It came out a month after Guitar Hero 3 in the US, but took a few months to come out in Europe. Guitar Hero meanwhile released the first band-centric game in the series based around Aerosmith. This seemed to be a creative and critical mistake as the game itself was very bland and and only really for fans of the band, though sales of Guitar Hero Aerosmith sold in excess of 3.6 million units.

The release of Guitar Hero World Tour was where the wheels truly started to fall off. By expanding the guitar gameplay to a full band instead of just focusing on just the guitar, a few of the tracks were dull for certain instruments. Add in to the fact that vocals were pretty broken and near impossible to 100% a track unless you sounded EXACTLY like the original vocalist for the whole song. It was entirely possible to get all the phrases in a song, but not get 100% accuracy. One thing I personally hated was that the animations were stiff, cheesy (seriously, why does the vocalist moonwalk on the Michael Jackson track?), and at the end of the track praised the instrument you were playing as if you were playing solo, which totally ruined the feeling of being in a band.

The Guitar Hero games kept coming with Guitar Hero Metallica and Guitar Hero Greatest Hits (Guitar Hero Smash Hits outside of Europe). With both games coming out in a relatively short time, and in under a month in Europe, why Greatest Hits came out as a full priced game instead of DLC for the Guitar Hero games was questioned, especially as all the tracks in Greatest Hits were all just remakes of tracks that had appeared in previous games.

For me this is when I stopped playing Guitar Hero, the exports were weak, the support for DLC and integration into the games was shaky at best. Sales for both Guitar Hero and Rock Band are down, and it seems like the rhythm game fad is over, and it remains to be seen if it will continue at all at it's present pace. For the fans of Guitar Hero, my condolences. It was a great ride when it lasted, but the show is over, and there's no encore in sight.