What happened to Guitar Hero? | Version History

Name: What happened to Guitar Hero? | Version History
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T20:10:03+00:00
Duration: 1 h 12 min 47 s
Channel: The Verge

The Verge

3 weeks ago

Millions of basements have fake plastic guitars in them thanks to the 2005 smash hit Guitar Hero. Chris Grant and Ash Parrish join David Pierce to rock out with a game created over a matter of months by a niche developer and a peripheral manufacturer, fueled by word-of-mouth and viral videos on a nascent YouTube. You probably don’t play Guitar Hero anymore, but you might still find it in surprising places. #

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00:00:00Would you like to be a rock star? Here's the deal. You don't need any skills. You don't need to know

00:00:04how to play a musical instrument. You don't even need to be willing to get up on stage in front of

00:00:09people and do something. All you need is $70, PlayStation 2, and probably a whole bunch of

00:00:15time on your hands. Because there's this game you might have heard of called Guitar Hero that is

00:00:19going to, if not make you a rock star, at least make you feel a lot more like one. From The Verge

00:00:25and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most

00:00:30interesting products in the history of technology. I'm David Pierce, and today it's time to talk about

00:00:36what is almost certainly the most important guitar in video game history. Welcome back. It's Version

00:00:51history. It's Guitar Hero. Let's do this. Ash Parrish is here. Hi, Ash. Hi. All the way from

00:00:57Ohio. Yes. Came to do this with us. I'm so excited. Chris Grant, also here. Hello. Not from as far away,

00:01:02but that's okay. That's all right. We're making it work. So before we get into Guitar Hero,

00:01:06here's what I want to know. I want you both to describe your peak Guitar Hero era. How good

00:01:12were you? When was it? How do you feel about it now? Ash, you go first. Peak Ash. Peak Ash.

00:01:19This was shortly after the first Guitar Hero came out. It was a big deal that I got the game at all.

00:01:25You had the first one? Yes. Okay. Because gaming was not a thing, a not allowed thing in my house

00:01:30for the most part. My consoles had to be bought by my dad, and my dad would give me money, and he

00:01:35would send me to the mall like, hey, you're a kid. Go have fun or whatever. And that was a substitute

00:01:39for parenting me. And it was a big deal to get Guitar Hero because it was so expensive, and it was

00:01:44like this big, clunky piece of plastic. And my mother is very neat and very clean, and she doesn't

00:01:48like, first of all, she doesn't like the idea of like a console, because back in those days of 2000,

00:01:54the console was on the floor, like hooked up to wires. Like it wasn't a thing where a console was

00:01:59connected to your TV at all times. You took it out, you played with it, you put it away. So the idea of

00:02:03having this console and then this other big piece of plastic on top of that was like a non-starter.

00:02:07So the fact that I had it was like a big deal. And then I just played it over and over and over

00:02:12again. And the cool thing about Guitar Hero for me is that I was a very nerdy child. So I grew up

00:02:19listening to jazz music. Nice. Yeah. Like I played saxophone when I was a kid, and my saxophone

00:02:25teacher, she told my mom to get me like Dave Brubeck CDs and like Stan Getz CDs, and that's

00:02:30what I listened to, and that's what I liked. Did not endear me at all to my peers.

00:02:35You get in the car, you're like, yo, guys, Dave Brubeck? And they're like, it's time to go.

00:02:39And then I got to play Guitar Hero, and I got to get exposed to Incubus. And like,

00:02:46even Jimi Hendrix, like this, I was not like a rock and roll household. So like, I heard Jimi

00:02:51Hendrix for the first time, Ozzy Osbourne for the first time, and I like loved these songs. And

00:02:55that like continues to today. That's awesome. Yeah.

00:02:57Do you have a song that you remember as like, the track you would tread on?

00:03:01Yes. So it was Spanish Castle Magic, which was the Jimi Hendrix experience, and then

00:03:06Bark at the Moon. Nice. Yes. I would just do it over and over and over again.

00:03:11Okay. Yeah. That's awesome. Chris, what about you?

00:03:14I don't know when I was best at it, because I can't remember that far back.

00:03:18It was 20 years ago. I know. Two decades. I'll say this, we loaded up Guitar Hero

00:03:23one here on my PlayStation with my 8 megabyte memory card, and it had a save file on it, which

00:03:29I had, in my wisdom, at the age of 25, titled God, as the username. So I don't remember doing

00:03:37this. I did unlock all the tracks on that profile, though. So I'm going to go ahead and say that

00:03:41that's probably when I was best, based on the arrogance of that name.

00:03:43I did enjoy the thing we got to the end of one of the rounds, and it pops up like the

00:03:46newspaper showing the headline of how you did. And it was like, solid set from God.

00:03:50Hell yeah. At no point do I ever feel like I excelled at it. And I think that the secret

00:03:56of Guitar Hero, for me, I didn't play an instrument at all. I don't feel like a musical person.

00:04:01But I could play Guitar Hero well enough that I felt competent in my living room alone or

00:04:06with my partner. I would go to press events and see people playing Guitar Hero, other press

00:04:11members, and just shredding on an expert level and being like, well, that's not for me.

00:04:15I still felt good doing it at home. So I think that's part of the magic of the game.

00:04:20But I would say I'm consistently a C player.

00:04:24Okay. That's about where I landed too. And my memory of it is my friend group went straight

00:04:30from all playing N64 Mario games, which I was good at, to playing Guitar Hero, to playing

00:04:37Halo, which I was trash at. And I would lose like 50 to negative three in Halo because I

00:04:42would run off the side and die a few times. And that wasn't fun at all. Guitar Hero, I was

00:04:47the worst at all of my friends, but was still like fun to play, which was like a magical

00:04:51thing about Guitar Hero is that it's like accommodated being lots of different ways at

00:04:56the game. But then I had a bunch of friends who were like actual musicians and guitar players

00:04:59who got really good at it and really annoying about it. You know who you are if you're watching

00:05:03this.

00:05:03My musician friends hated it because they're like, oh, this is wrong. Like this doesn't,

00:05:07like if you know how guitar feels, you're playing it.

00:05:10Yeah. All those people who are like, this doesn't feel enough like a real guitar.

00:05:13Didn't matter.

00:05:13Very cool.

00:05:14Yeah. Congratulations to you on all of your accomplishments.

00:05:17And your big muscles.

00:05:18Exactly. So let me just, I have a lot of notes here on like the story of Guitar Hero a bit. So

00:05:24we're talking about the very first Guitar Hero. And I'm just, I'm going to walk through the

00:05:29history as I have come to understand it. You both know a lot about this too. So together,

00:05:33we're going to, we're going to try to explain where Guitar Hero come from. Does that sound

00:05:36good?

00:05:36Sounds good.

00:05:37Okay. So the story starts in 2004, which is actually substantially later than I would

00:05:42have guessed, which is sort of fascinating. And there's two companies, Harmonix and Red

00:05:46Octane. We should probably talk about Harmonix first. And I'm curious for you in particular,

00:05:52you had been like sort of in the, in the gaming world professionally around this time.

00:05:55Were you aware of Harmonix, like in the, in the early aughts?

00:05:59Harmonix had, um, uh,

00:06:02the company existed before this and they had some flops, um, to say the least. Um, but

00:06:10they, they did strike some magic with their earlier PlayStation two games, um, uh, frequency

00:06:17and amplitude, I think in that order. Um, both great games, critically acclaimed.

00:06:22Oh, actually while we're talking about frequency, let me just play you this, this clip we have

00:06:26a frequency.

00:06:26The gameplay in frequency is like Tempest meets Dance, Dance Revolution, where you're

00:06:32actually traveling down a ton of music.

00:06:33I love that description.

00:06:34That's actually great.

00:06:35And you choose a particular track to play, which is a particular instrument, like drum,

00:06:40bass, voice.

00:06:40It looks a lot like Guitar Hero.

00:06:42Like Guitar Hero in a octagon. Okay.

00:06:45So you got the two games right, but you missed one thing that Harmonix did that I would very

00:06:48much like to tell you about, which is called The Axe. Uh, and I just have, I have this clip

00:06:52that I want to play for you, uh, in which Harmonix describes what The Axe is. This is the first

00:06:57thing they ever made as a company.

00:06:59Harmonix is an interactive music software company created by two guys from MIT's Media Lab.

00:07:04And they've spent the past five years developing this technology, which is going to be the hottest

00:07:08thing to hit the music world in the last decade. And it's called The Axe.

00:07:11You pick your song, you pick your instrument, and you pick your interactive music video,

00:07:17which graphically shows you what you're playing. You hit the play button and you're off. You're

00:07:21making music. I just love the way the nineties look. You control the sounds and playing style

00:07:26of the instrument with either a joystick or mouse. I really love The Axe. It was like with no

00:07:33practice, I could pick up a guitar and play along with James Brown. First of all, there's just no

00:07:39way that's true. The flight stick also is great. That's my favorite part of that whole clip. He's

00:07:44like describing how it works. And it's this insane looking like onscreen control center.

00:07:47And then he just picks up a joystick and it's like, and now I'm ready to play guitar.

00:07:51Yeah. For folks that are listening, this is a 1990 style, like sidewinder flight stick. Um,

00:07:57just some real nineties PC energy. It's very good. But there were like that, that's a bunch of the

00:08:01ideas that ended up being Guitar Hero, right? Like it's a physical object. You get to have a thing that,

00:08:06you know, moves around, you get to sort of control the instrument lots of different ways. Like,

00:08:10and then frequency and amplitude were basically similar games. So this is also, uh, like right

00:08:15around the time, if I'm doing my history correctly, that DDR was like taking over the world. Were you

00:08:21guys DDR people? Yes. This actually makes perfect sense to me. This, I was like, I knew for sure you

00:08:26were going to say yes to this. Were you good at DDR? No. Were you, were you committed anyway? Yes. Okay.

00:08:31Because so, you know, I'm a girl and boys, like this is, you know, back in 2005, 2006, you know,

00:08:38that kind of like era of video game girls versus boys kind of culture. And the boys had like the

00:08:44shooter games that they would be really good at. And they would play like doom on ultra nightmare

00:08:47and stuff like that. And I wanted a game that I could be good at that. I could like, they would

00:08:53look to me like the same kind of prowess as we look at people that can do like those shooters

00:08:57games really well. And like rhythm games were that for me, but, uh, DDR is a way too intensive

00:09:02for the cardio even back then. So I focused on making guitar hero, my thing to varying levels

00:09:09of success. I'm a spaghetti man. Um, you can't see it. Uh, you know, listening right now, but

00:09:15I'm a very tall man and I have very, um, it's called inconsistent control of where different

00:09:22parts of my body are going. So DDR was particularly challenging for me. My feet are very

00:09:27far away from my head. And, um, I, so the, the, the brain signals just don't get there

00:09:32They take like a minute or two to get all the way down there. And so I'm not going to show

00:09:35you what that looks like, but you can imagine it in your head. It's not great. Um, similar

00:09:39to Ash guitar hero for me was some chance to sort of like see and enjoy that style of physicality

00:09:46from rhythm games, but in a way that my hands were closer to my brain and it only took a little

00:09:51bit of time to get there. It feels good when a game engages your entire body. Games don't

00:09:56really do that so much anymore. And that's why when you get games that do like take full

00:10:00faculties, like you have to like write notes or you get into it, like physically it feels

00:10:05good. And that's why guitar hero feels good to play, even though you get like really bad

00:10:09claw hand at the end of it. Yeah. Guitar hero, I think ended up being like right down the

00:10:14middle of that. Like it's, it's very physical and not too much work. But the reason I bring

00:10:19up DDR is because, uh, it came out in 1998 and it was mostly in like an arcade thing

00:10:25in Japan and it was this giant monster hit. Uh, and red octane first sort of made its money

00:10:33by making somewhere between like legit and bootleg DDR pads for people who just wanted to play

00:10:40the game. Fun fact, they actually first made their money as a video game rental service.

00:10:44That's right. Did they make any money though? Well, hold on. Well, they had one. They made

00:10:49something. Um, they, uh, this is before the.com bust. They busted on that. And, um, idea was

00:10:54good. I mean, I did came back later with other, with other services, gameplay. Um, but they

00:10:59pivoted to, yeah, physical pads. Yeah. And so they were, they were making these pads and

00:11:04selling them to people who had a PlayStation version of the game because you could get the

00:11:07game, but you couldn't get like the thing to dance on, which is sort of important in DDR.

00:11:11And basically what happens is red octane is like, okay, we want to do all this rhythm

00:11:18game stuff in the U S we want to make a like peripheral. We probably need to make a game.

00:11:23They don't know how to make a game. So they call harmonics, which like you said, has made

00:11:26these two games, frequency and amplitude that were rhythm style games this way, but they

00:11:32were like kind of wonky. They were like accomplished games, but people didn't like them that much.

00:11:37People who played them liked them. They won awards, but they didn't do very well.

00:11:40It did not. Um, the description of the game and seeing any footage of the game was not

00:11:44appealing to like, based on the sales numbers, anybody.

00:11:48Right. This is the thing I've heard about rhythm games over and over from people is that like

00:11:52one of the great challenges of these games was once you play it, you get it and it's really

00:11:56fun, but the description of it sounds awful. And even to watch like a video of what the

00:12:02game looks like on a screen is bad. You're like, it's just dots running at me. Why would I

00:12:07want to play that? It's not physical. And for folks who are familiar with what guitar

00:12:10looks like, frequency and amplitude look exactly like that. They look almost identical, but

00:12:14you're playing it with a PlayStation controller. Yeah. Just with your hands. And so it doesn't

00:12:17have any of that same sort of visual, um, appeal. Yeah. The harmonics folks did make one

00:12:23other game that I should just show you very quickly because a thing that I have discovered

00:12:26is that this game karaoke revolution also turned out to be very important in what would

00:12:31become guitar hero. So here's, here's what karaoke revolution was. The first and only

00:12:36karaoke video game for your PlayStation 2. Sing along to over 35 hit songs made famous

00:12:41by Avril Lavigne, Nickelback, R.E.M., Bare Naked Ladies and more. And as you rock the crowd,

00:12:48the game scores your performance. It's the ultimate party game for parties of one or 100.

00:12:54I miss commercials like that, right? Yeah. But there's a bunch of things happening in

00:12:59that video, right? There's, there's a game that you have to do something with other than

00:13:03press buttons on a controller. Uh, you get active feedback from the crowd. Uh, it, it gives

00:13:09you, you, you sort of improve and, and fail as you go. There is a thing that looks like

00:13:15a stage that you're on as you're performing, like add a guitar and karaoke revolution just

00:13:20is guitar hero. And the realization they all take out of this is like, Oh, people want to

00:13:23be rock stars. Like that's the thing. Put, put me in coach is like the vibe everybody has

00:13:27here. They want to be part of it. And I think in the way that like dancing very quickly and

00:13:32well is really hard, more people can stand in front of their TV and sing passively.

00:13:37And so that was like fun and people were into that. Uh, so these two companies, one that

00:13:41like knows how to make rhythm games, but can't figure out how to sell them to anybody. And

00:13:45one company that knows how to make really cool peripherals, but doesn't really know how

00:13:47to make games. It's like kind of a perfect match. Uh, so they find each other and they

00:13:52pretty quickly, as I understand it, decide they're going to make a game together. And

00:13:57uh, red octane from what I understand was super, super into guitar freaks, uh, which was big

00:14:03in Japan. They had been thinking about wanting to bring it to the U S. And so these two companies

00:14:06make a deal in early 2005 to make a game and they decide they want to ship it by the holiday

00:14:11season of 2005, which, uh, I don't, y'all both know a lot more about game development than

00:14:16I do, but that strikes me as insanity.

00:14:18It's unusual. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to the point where it's like, and they decided pretty quickly

00:14:24they wanted to make a controller. They, they loved guitar freaks. So they wanted to do something

00:14:28like that. Uh, the, the guitar hero controller, spoiler alert, looks an awful lot like the

00:14:33guitar freaks controller. They wanted to make it a little more complicated. They wanted to make it

00:14:36so that you could actually feel like you're playing a guitar and it's hard and it's work. So

00:14:40they, they added more buttons. They made it a little more complex, but this was just the thing

00:14:45that they wanted to do. And yeah, like you said, they, they took on this truly bonkers

00:14:49task of trying to do it in nine months. Uh, their other option I found out, by the way,

00:14:53I don't know anything about this, except that one of the developers said that their other

00:14:57option other than guitar hero was to make a DuckTales game. I have no more information,

00:15:01but I would desperately love to know what that game was.

00:15:04Red octane version of the peripheral would have been uncle Scrooge's cane and you would have

00:15:10on it. Yeah. Hell yeah. Uh, it's trademarked, by the way, Chris Grant, 2025. So nobody touched

00:15:19that. We're bringing back DuckTales, everybody. I'm mailing that to myself right now. Heard it

00:15:23here first. Can't touch it. Um, I think what's crazy about that timeline too, and I'm sure we'll

00:15:28get to this in your notes, but they made an E3 demo. It wasn't just that they got the game ready

00:15:33and packaged up for holidays. They had it ready for people to play just a few months after that.

00:15:38So I can do even better. They had a prototype of the game that they were playing in their office

00:15:42in like a couple of weeks. Uh, and it's because all this stuff is so tied together, right? There's,

00:15:47there actually is frequency technology in guitar hero and there's amplitude technology in guitar

00:15:52hero and harmonics had made all of these deals where it would make the games for other companies,

00:15:57but it would keep the sort of core technology for itself. And so it just poured all of that into

00:16:03this game. And it basically, the way they all described it as like without those deals that it had

00:16:07made, not thinking about guitar hero, none of this would have been possible. They couldn't

00:16:10have done it this fast. They couldn't have done it this way, but it was just all this,

00:16:13they had all this stuff sitting there and they were just able to like recompile it and have a game

00:16:17working really quickly. See how like development works when you let companies just like do shit

00:16:23that they're good at. See how that works. And they knock this out. And I would hate to see

00:16:29like that crunch condition was probably awful, but just the idea, like it's almost verboten now to

00:16:35hear about like, you know, a company taking stuff that they've done from other places and pouring it

00:16:41into this game and they can make this different version of those same ideas so quickly and have it

00:16:46be do so well. You just, it doesn't, that doesn't happen in modern video game development anymore,

00:16:53unless like you're a very big like indie studio or something like that. It just doesn't happen.

00:16:57It's not just the soundtrack and the haircuts that make this feel 20 years old, but maybe some of

00:17:00that deal structure also making it feel 20 years old. And then the thing that, well, okay,

00:17:05I won't say that. That's for another time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure guitar hero gets done quite the

00:17:09same way in 2025 as it did in 2005. But so anyway, so they get this done really fast. The other thing,

00:17:17it seems like this company had going for it was that it was like a company full of musicians. A thing I

00:17:22didn't know about guitar hero until I started researching for this episode is that a lot of the songs in the

00:17:26first guitar hero are from Harmonix employees and who are like legit bands. Yep. I had no idea.

00:17:32I remember their head of marketing publicity, John Drake, John Drake, played a show in Philly at some

00:17:40point. I went to go see him because he straight up was like a musician in a band playing shows. And

00:17:44yeah, I think that was true all the way down to the folks on the marketing side of the house.

00:17:47Yeah. Apparently like two thirds of the employees there were in some, some band or another. And a

00:17:52bunch of the songs in there are from them. Most of the songs are just like songs that they liked.

00:17:56Uh, they ended up, instead of getting the actual versions of a lot of the songs,

00:18:00paying this band to do covers, which was much cheaper for very unnecessary to go into licensing

00:18:09reasons. Uh, but they were able to get this list of songs that everybody knew, but that they

00:18:15definitely couldn't afford. Uh, what was funny is I went back and was doing a bunch of research on

00:18:18this and a surprising number of people on that team have no memory of the first songs in guitar

00:18:23hero. Everybody agreed that like walk this way by Aerosmith and uh, back in black by ACDC were like

00:18:28iconic ones, but then they would be like, oh yeah, what were your favorite songs from the first guitar

00:18:32hero? Or like, what were the first ones you guys decided on? And they were like, I don't know.

00:18:36And there would be people who like disagreed on which song was the first one to show up.

00:18:40Uh, but everybody said back in black was like the first like iconic guitar hero song.

00:18:45I don't even remember that song. I have no, I just completely skipped over that to go to

00:18:49Aussie house sport. It wasn't hard enough for you. I get it. Um, so then they get through all this.

00:18:58They're, they're cranking like crazy towards fall of 2005. Uh, and E3, like you were saying,

00:19:05Chris was like the coming out party for this game. Were you at E3 in 2005, 2005?

00:19:13I was not at E3. I have a lot of memories of the 2006 E3 showing for guitar hero, but 2005 E3

00:19:19was like a big deal E3. It was maybe one of the last like really major

00:19:24E3s. I mean, you can make a case ever. And one of the stories that to this day,

00:19:28you ask any games journalist about 2005 E3, the thing that will come to their mind first before any of

00:19:32that is Kencha hall in the basement with the weird carpet and the smell and guitar hero. Um,

00:19:39Kencha hall is the place where you put the international pavilions, your German game

00:19:44developers pavilion. There was a bar down there, which just gives you some of that energy of that

00:19:49place. Um, the weirdo controllers. Um, there's some that like, you know, the weird, uh, 3d mouse

00:19:57controllers stuff, like all this junk stuff all went to the basement, the, the, um, security

00:20:02networking software for the games industry in the basement and red octane with guitar hero.

00:20:08Um, and it became in everything you write it, read about it. Um, people played it and would go

00:20:14tell everyone else to come play it. And then people would come and watch people play it.

00:20:18Yeah. So as I understand it, that was like, that was when that game became sort of real.

00:20:23That was the moment.

00:20:24Yeah. And it was like, because like we were saying with all these rhythm games that the thing is

00:20:29you can like describe to somebody, Oh, you stand and play guitar in front of your television and

00:20:33it does the buttons for you. It's like, it doesn't sound good. And, uh, they were apparently actually

00:20:38having trouble explaining to like possible buyers and distributors and whoever, how this game actually

00:20:44worked and why it was fun. Cause there was nothing like it, but then like you're saying at E3, it starts

00:20:49to, it starts to percolate. And it's like the thing everybody's talking about and it's the moment.

00:20:52And so all the harmonics folks and the red octane folks have, have long said that that was the

00:20:57moment that they were like, Oh my God, we have something like, we don't know what, but it's

00:21:00something and we, and we have it. And there was one other moment and it involves, um, I assume

00:21:05you're sworn enemy of games journalism, IGN, uh, I'm just kidding. Uh, one other thing that they've said

00:21:14is there was IGN made a video that year, uh, playing the game. And it was one of the first

00:21:19like public demos from a big name game publication showing the game and they loved it. And they had

00:21:26apparently been, they like sent them a guitar hero set unprompted and then like begged them to play

00:21:33it over and over and over again, which is an experience I suspect we've all had where somebody's

00:21:36like, please try my thing. You'll love it. And you're like, I have other things to do and I've never

00:21:40heard of you and what is this? And they're like, please, I beg you. I have to imagine at the time

00:21:43too, IGN along with GameSpot were the only two kind of huge major sites. There was UGO and there

00:21:50were some other ones at the same time, but like IGN and GameSpot at the time were massive. I think

00:21:54getting that coverage and that attention there in a pre-social media era was it. Like you, that's,

00:21:59you're not going to get it. Maybe a magazine later on a, on a slower publishing timeline.

00:22:03Totally. So let me, let me just play you a little bit of IGN's video, uh, in which they have an

00:22:08extremely. How much psychic damage is this going to do to me as a video games journalist?

00:22:12We're going to find out.

00:22:17Look, Tal. Wow.

00:22:20There's IGN's Tal Blevins shredding in a white cloak, a cape, called a cape, I guess.

00:22:26Let's see how they're doing.

00:22:29There are two people and one of them doesn't appear to be playing at all.

00:22:33They're busy shredding.

00:22:38Wow. It's very 2005.

00:22:42Yeah.

00:22:43And they're having a great time. It's the jam.

00:22:46Uh, but so that video, that extremely 2005 video, uh, a bunch of people who made Guitar Hero are like,

00:22:53that's the time we went from something a few people had heard of to like a game people were

00:22:58excited about. This was before the game was available. They got an early demo of it. It was,

00:23:01it was live. It was public. They were super excited about it. And they were like, all of a sudden

00:23:05that drops and everything changes. And they're like, people start taking their phone calls.

00:23:08People start caring. People start like actually wanting this game in their lives. Uh, which is

00:23:15nuts because that video is deeply hilarious.

00:23:17You gotta, you gotta channel it through your 2005 energy brain.

00:23:21I love it. I have no notes. We should wear more capes. We should all be wearing capes

00:23:24right now.

00:23:25We should.

00:23:25As we do this, honestly.

00:23:26I agree. Like unironically.

00:23:28Hey guys, uh, let's do some capes in post. All right. Thank you. Thanks.

00:23:31Yeah. We, this is why we green screen everything. This is totally fine.

00:23:34Uh, one other thing that I found, um, was that one of red octane's biggest worries with this

00:23:40game. And one of the things that they were struggling with at the very beginning was that

00:23:42the game was humongous. Like I have this, I have the controller here behind me. It's like,

00:23:46it's a big guitar.

00:23:47Well, the good news is retailers love huge boxes and they love making shelf space.

00:23:51So this is, this is what seems they were like genuinely worried about it. It was expensive.

00:23:56Uh, it was 70 bucks for the whole kit, which now sounds just adorable.

00:24:01It was a big deal that I was able to get this. And my dad who had like the super high powered

00:24:07six figure job, he was the one who bought it for me because he was the only one who could afford

00:24:11something, a $70 video game. Are you high?

00:24:13Yeah. Back then that was, that was nuts.

00:24:15You got the game and the controller for 70 bucks. You got the game and the control.

00:24:21Just thinking about that now in 2025 brain, it's just like mind blowing.

00:24:25That's a dozen eggs today.

00:24:30Uh, so, but this was, this was their big worry and they had trouble

00:24:33getting people to buy it. Cause they're like, well, we can either stock your game,

00:24:36which no one's ever heard of and maybe nobody wants, or we can put like 20 discs

00:24:41of other things on the shelf. And they ended up just getting Best Buy. And in particular,

00:24:46like one buyer at Best Buy was super into it. They said, yes, they set up demo stations in the stores.

00:24:52And they were, this was like, this was the thing that they were like, we're going to get people

00:24:55to try it and buy it. And they're going to love it. Uh, and spoiler alert, they did.

00:25:00But before we get into that, we should take a really quick break. And then we're going to talk

00:25:03about what happened when it launched and then what happened afterwards. We'll be right back.

00:25:11Okay. We're back. So you guys would remember this more than I would. I was, you know,

00:25:17I was way too cool to play video games in 2005. Uh, but what were you doing in 2005?

00:25:21What was I doing in 2005? Let's get into it. Uh, I was the fourth best player on my JV volleyball

00:25:28team right about when this launched. So that was cool. Yeah. No time. People really liked that.

00:25:33I was also very into American Idol at the time. This was like peak David American Idol season.

00:25:38Uh, it was great. It was as good as it got. How were your outfits? Good.

00:25:42Well, uh, that might've been right after the double popped polo phase, but it wasn't,

00:25:48it wasn't, it wasn't, oh, I was, I was right there, but it wasn't, this was well after pukas.

00:25:52Okay. Oh, but not far enough. Okay. You know what I mean?

00:25:56Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was doing great.

00:25:58I'm just trying to get a mental picture for the listeners at home.

00:26:00I'm trying to, you know, Oh yeah. Put us in a place.

00:26:02You missed like the big JNCO pants because you weren't in high school at this time. No,

00:26:07no. Some of the skate kids had that in the nineties, but I was, um, 2005 for me, it was,

00:26:13it was a pair of Carhartts and a, and a white t-shirt. That was it. That was the uniform.

00:26:17That's the dream. And that would work today.

00:26:19I was going to say, it turns out you had it going. Uh, so this game drops Christmas season, 2005.

00:26:25And, uh, at least from what I can tell, looking back, it was a pretty much a giant hit right away.

00:26:30Do you guys remember when it came out? Like you got it pretty quickly. It seems like,

00:26:33I think I got mine. I had to have gotten it after, uh,

00:26:37my PlayStation two because that's what I played it on. And it was, I didn't get that at launch.

00:26:43It probably was around like 2007 because I bought it.

00:26:45I got a PlayStation two specifically for kingdom hearts. And I think that was 2006.

00:26:50So I didn't, I don't think I got a guitar here until like 2007.

00:26:52I love this as a way to remember the years of your life.

00:26:54I'm like, I got, I got game launches and that's, that's what I do.

00:26:57Yeah. Everything for me is like, Oh, that was the year that doom came out.

00:27:00So where was I? Okay. No, I got it. That's right.

00:27:02I can tell you the story about kingdom hearts too,

00:27:04because I was in college and I remember going down to the college games.

00:27:08Hold on. Hard mode. Can you tell us the story in kingdom hearts too?

00:27:12Yes. Because that's, Oh no, we don't have time for that in this podcast.

00:27:15I can tell you the story. Sicko mode. Let's do it. Listen, for a bonus episode,

00:27:20Ash is going to spend four hours explaining kingdom hearts two to you.

00:27:22Just, just two, not all of them. Just two. Um, I, um, I was,

00:27:28I was the nerd that was like watching that IGN video and like getting that pre-order in

00:27:32early and like picking it up. I, uh, I was, that was what I, you know,

00:27:36before I was doing it full time for a living. Um, that was my,

00:27:41those were my friends, just my PlayStation. I'm just kidding.

00:27:44I love this for you. They were my friends.

00:27:46Yeah. So the story is that the harmonics and red octane had made a hundred

00:27:51thousand of these and this thing immediately becomes like a phenomenon. Everybody wants it.

00:27:54They can't sell them fast enough. Everybody wants 10 times as many as they have.

00:27:57Uh, it ended up being the second best selling game of that holiday season, which for a game

00:28:03that never existed before is, and was that expensive at the time, just strikes me as nuts.

00:28:07What was the first?

00:28:08This was my trivia question. What do you think the number one game of the holiday season of 2005 was?

00:28:14Halo 2.

00:28:15She's going to go to, I'm going to say, this is like a video game version of price is right rules.

00:28:22I'm just going to say Madden. It was Madden. Yeah. Madden's kind of a boring answer.

00:28:27I know, but that's why it's like, well, you bet a dollar, you know,

00:28:29it's like a boring answer, but you get it right a lot of times.

00:28:31That's true. Madden, which I assume in 2005 was the exact same game that it is in 2025.

00:28:37I haven't changed it yet.

00:28:38No, that's just what we're doing here. Uh, so this game comes out, people really love it.

00:28:41Uh, I have a montage here of some of the reviews that I would like you to see because they are a delight.

00:28:48Have you ever secretly dreamed of being a rock star, wailing on your electric guitar to this sold out crowd?

00:28:54What's the game you've spent the most time playing this year?

00:28:57Guitar Hero.

00:28:57With one of the biggest controllers ever to grace the market.

00:29:00That's still a half foot long, plastic guitar.

00:29:03Guitar Hero stands out as one of the top PS2 games released in the past year.

00:29:07It's really addictive, really exciting, and I recommend it.

00:29:09Here's Jeff Grossman at GameSpot.

00:29:10Guitar Hero won't make you play a real guitar like a rock star.

00:29:14It certainly makes you feel like one for a five out of five.

00:29:18I'm just flexing by calling out people by name.

00:29:23Well, I'm just setting the, you know, for the old heads in the house who were watching all that same stuff when they were kids.

00:29:30See, guardsmen, you almost have to like salute.

00:29:32So it was like people loved it.

00:29:34It was like overwhelmingly the thing where once people try it, they love it, continued to be a thing.

00:29:39Just like the other harmonics games, critical hit, but now also commercial hit, you know, some of that magic coming together.

00:29:47And it does seem like the biggest difference between a lot of that was just the guitar.

00:29:52And I think one of the things I thought was really interesting about the way that they made this controller

00:29:56was that they wanted to have a guitar that actually felt like playing guitar, which is like it did and it didn't work, you know what I mean?

00:30:04Like we were all just playing earlier and like I play that a lot better than I play guitar and I don't play that very well.

00:30:10But they based this thing on a Gibson SG, which means nothing to me, but it certainly will mean some things to other people.

00:30:18And the thing that they took from Guitar Freaks was the idea of like sort of the rough shape of the thing, but then they made it a lot more complicated.

00:30:24It has five buttons so you can play, I think it's three different power chords that actually feel like you're playing the power chords, which is basically all you need to be a rock star.

00:30:34They had the whammy bar, which, fun fact, I learned they added before they had any idea what it was going to be for.

00:30:39They were just like, this thing should have a whammy bar.

00:30:41And they're like, why? And they're like, I don't know. It's going to have a whammy bar.

00:30:45Let's take that energy into everything we do in life.

00:30:47Yeah, right? Like I just, where can we add a whammy bar?

00:30:48We're going to find news for it.

00:30:50Yeah, that's a good like newsroom question. Where's the whammy bar?

00:30:54And then they also, a thing I learned was they, in the name of making this feel like you're playing guitar, they had a freestyle mode for this,

00:31:01where you could just play guitar in the game and actually like make stuff creatively.

00:31:05Ended up not making it into the game, but it's like a very harmonics thing to do, where like all the way back to the axe that people just want to play.

00:31:12Um, but I wish they did that because one of the challenges or frustrations of guitar hero is when you're playing,

00:31:18especially if you're playing two player, you have friends over, et cetera, like having failing out is like a bummer when you're just trying to drink,

00:31:25play video games. And, um, and, uh, I think later they did add some of those modes back into future iterations of this game.

00:31:33But, um, yeah, it's interesting to hear that they did it, but you know, uh, it's too bad they didn't get to it.

00:31:38They had nine whole months, not quite sure why they didn't get to it.

00:31:41I know, seriously, it's plenty of time.

00:31:43I mean, the, the entire ethos, I guess, behind this game is that they wanted non-musicians to feel like a musician and you can get about as close as you can get without actually being a musician with like guitar hero.

00:31:56Like I play the saxophone, but I'm not like a guitar person, but I feel, it feels very good, even though it's not like, you know, as you were saying earlier, it's not exactly a one for one, uh, replication of actually playing a guitar.

00:32:07It's just close enough that I don't care. And it feels, feels good. It's like, it's a very tactile thing.

00:32:13I'm going to go ahead and say, as a non-guitar player, it feels a lot better than playing a guitar.

00:32:17It also is like, it's hard in a way that I think is really good and productive and instructive in a lot of these games, right?

00:32:24Like, I think one of the things that you encounter with a lot of these games is you sort of max out at how actually complicated the mechanic is.

00:32:32And then you have to invent new ways. You're like, okay, I'm going to do it at weird speeds or I'm going to do it with my eyes closed or whatever.

00:32:36This game is like the runway for how much better you could get at it was super, super long.

00:32:41Well, interestingly, another thing launched in 2005, which has a very close alignment to Guitar Hero's success, which is YouTube and people being able to record themselves and put up these crazy high scores, these crazy stunt videos.

00:32:56You know, as a video game blogger in 2005, 2006, et cetera, like crazy Guitar Hero videos was a staple of the genre, staple of the form.

00:33:05Like just somebody doing something sick, you know, in the same way you'd post a video of somebody getting a high score on Geometry Wars.

00:33:10It was just novel seeing human beings do things that are hard.

00:33:14And a lot of video games are, you see this later in like e-sports and stuff, it's hard to communicate excellence in a video game.

00:33:21It's hard to communicate excellence in League of Legends.

00:33:23Like, what are they doing?

00:33:24I'm not, that went down that lane?

00:33:26I'm sure.

00:33:27Okay.

00:33:28It's like why a lay person doesn't watch competitive chess and have a good time.

00:33:32It's hard.

00:33:33You can watch Guitar Hero and just be like, ah, shit, that's good.

00:33:36That's really hard.

00:33:36It's going very fast and they're hitting all the buttons.

00:33:38Yeah, all the buttons on time.

00:33:40So the physicality of it, in the same way a slam dunk looks impressive.

00:33:44I cannot do that.

00:33:45He jumped good.

00:33:46And like seeing somebody play Guitar Hero good is just impressive to watch as a human.

00:33:53And I think a lot about that sense of like the game itself encourages you, the player, to improve.

00:33:58And you know when you have.

00:34:00It's like very clear when you've improved enough.

00:34:03And not all games do that.

00:34:04A lot of games do improve when your character levels up and that is how you get better.

00:34:08Because you've played long enough.

00:34:10But there's a real meaningful, tangible reward to playing more Guitar Hero.

00:34:15And the interesting and the very cool thing about that is that you can look at those videos of these high-level players.

00:34:22And you're impressed.

00:34:23But you can also, there's a very clear way that you yourself can do that.

00:34:28That was when I was playing Guitar Hero and I was trying to make it my thing.

00:34:31You know, I would graduate.

00:34:33Like I can't do the pinky with the orange button.

00:34:35And like part of like my training, like that I developed this training course for me.

00:34:40It was like learning how to like slide my hand up and down.

00:34:42You can't see me.

00:34:43I'm like sliding my hand up and down the fret.

00:34:45You also can't see if she's got like a Rocky style montage outfit on.

00:34:48She's actually playing guitar right now.

00:34:50I don't know how that's even possible.

00:34:51To slide, you know, your pinky finger, your hand down so your pinky can get at that button.

00:34:55And then when I was able to do that like reliably, like you feel like God, like, oh, okay.

00:35:00There's a gulf between, you know, looking at someone play Halo at a very high level and think, I could do that.

00:35:06And it's not the same.

00:35:07And I could look at that of Guitar Hero and I was like, oh, I can actually do that.

00:35:12And that was like part of why Guitar Hero was so big for me personally.

00:35:16And like why it is so fun, even all these years later, just to watch.

00:35:20Presumably also why I named my profile on that memory card God.

00:35:24Because it made you feel like God.

00:35:26You feel like God.

00:35:26I got real good at it.

00:35:29So they made this first game in nine months.

00:35:31And then all of a sudden, the next year in 2006, everything goes insane.

00:35:35And Chris, I want you to explain this to me because I spent a lot of time researching how.

00:35:39So Harmonix sells to Viacom in 2006.

00:35:42Red Octane sells to Activision, also in 2006.

00:35:45And this whole thing just sets off like a house on fire.

00:35:49This is, in some ways, like early Activision dealmaking.

00:35:52Activision, you know, is a relatively, I don't want to say small, but more humble publisher than the one that you think of today in that earlier period.

00:36:01They had a bunch of hits.

00:36:02They had Tony Hawk on PlayStation, et cetera.

00:36:05But they published Guitar Hero along with Red Octane and had like this licensing arrangement.

00:36:09But they bought Red Octane.

00:36:11So they bought the peripheral.

00:36:12They bought the hardware company and they bought the brand name, Guitar Hero.

00:36:16Like we mentioned before, Harmonix owns the software.

00:36:22They own the game.

00:36:23And so Harmonix gets purchased by Viacom or more specifically a new imprint called MTV Games.

00:36:29Shout out to Stephen to tell, though.

00:36:30And this is, I remember there was an ethical question over whether Stephen, for example, at MTV News, like, how do you cover the game?

00:36:36It's MTV.

00:36:37And he's like, it's different.

00:36:38It's like not the same.

00:36:38It's a big company.

00:36:40But the alignment there was kind of wild.

00:36:43And the timeline that we're talking about, again, 2005, Guitar Hero 1 comes out.

00:36:46Boom.

00:36:472006, Guitar Hero 2 comes out.

00:36:49It comes out for PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360.

00:36:54And then 2007, Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 come out.

00:37:00And so by 2007.

00:37:01The pace of that is just bonkers.

00:37:05Like both of these companies sell.

00:37:06And like I'm used to a lot of acquisitions where like a company sort of disappears and languishes and everything falls apart.

00:37:10But it seems like basically both of these companies showed up to work at their new giant corporate parents.

00:37:15And they were like, you have a new game due in 12 minutes.

00:37:17So you have the originators of the gameplay, Harmonix, making Rock Band, Critical Hit.

00:37:23That was the one that I think, you know, the nerds really appreciated.

00:37:26It brought everything together.

00:37:27But then you had Guitar Hero, which had the brand name.

00:37:29It had, at this point, the marketing muscle behind it.

00:37:32And it went on to be a massive sales hit.

00:37:35And I think that was the first retail game in history to crack 1B.

00:37:41That's what we call in the biz $1 billion.

00:37:42That's what we call it in the biz, by the way.

00:37:45And so you had these like two competitors.

00:37:47One, you know, that still had the brand name and still had the sort of retail weight.

00:37:50And then you had the Critical Darling.

00:37:52And it set up a really great competitive set.

00:37:54And I refused, on principle, to play Rock Band because I had like Guitar Hero loyalty.

00:38:00And Rock Band was like the knockoff.

00:38:01And now knowing what I know, it's actually the exact opposite.

00:38:04The soul of Guitar Hero lived on in Rock Band.

00:38:07I had no brand loyalty at that point.

00:38:10That was purely a commercial decision.

00:38:12Like, oh, you want me to spend however much money to buy like this entire kit?

00:38:17Absolutely not.

00:38:18We're just going to stick with our PlayStation 2 and our three Rock Band games.

00:38:21I was a snob.

00:38:23I went to, in 2007, I mentioned E3 changed.

00:38:272006 was the last like E3 of that kind.

00:38:30In 2007, they downsized.

00:38:31They went to this smaller media-only event in Santa Monica, where you went from like hotel to hotel.

00:38:37That was the year.

00:38:38It was terrible.

00:38:39And Rock Band debuted at a like invite-only hotel event.

00:38:45And I remember just being so excited to go in.

00:38:47And we went in.

00:38:48I still remember to this day, Nick Chester, who at the time was editor at Destructoid, another publication, later went on to work with Harmonix.

00:38:54Now he's at Annapurna, I think.

00:38:56Nick, where are you?

00:38:57Annapurna.

00:38:58He crushed at it.

00:39:00He was really, like, he's good.

00:39:01And every other, for years, when there was a lot of Rock Band events, you'd go and see Nick at them, and he'd shred, and you're like, okay.

00:39:08That's such a weird party trick.

00:39:10I love that.

00:39:11It's a great party.

00:39:12It is so specific.

00:39:14Like, you know, what is the worst superpower that you can have?

00:39:17Like, that is a fantastic party trick.

00:39:19Like, it really is.

00:39:20He was like a Rock Band influencer.

00:39:21He knew how to play the game.

00:39:23He was good at it.

00:39:23But I remember just, like, seeing that performance, walking into that room.

00:39:27I remember exactly what it looked like.

00:39:28I walked into the dimly lit living room.

00:39:31No, this is the suite.

00:39:33It's a fancy suite at a hotel in Santa Monica, and they had the drum set up, and they had a TV in front of them, and there's just, like, 20 people just watching these journos play Rock Band.

00:39:45And it was, like, one of these really indelible memories for me of, like, a big shift, right?

00:39:50The competitive audacity to launch Rock Band against Guitar Hero 3 from the original developers with a full set, with singing, karaoke revolution style.

00:40:01They had all the pieces.

00:40:03A quite literal mic drop.

00:40:05Yep.

00:40:05And they had another fun thing about Rock Band is they had the masters.

00:40:08It wasn't just covers.

00:40:10They had this MTV relationship, and they were able to leverage that.

00:40:14And so, you know, Guitar Hero 3 outsold it because it was cheaper, and it was the brand name, but there was this new, really intense, and very well-earned competitive landscape that just didn't exist before.

00:40:28And it made that launch in 2007, everything that came after that, just, like, really exciting.

00:40:34It was its own little console war, if you will.

00:40:36Yeah, it just continues to be wild to me how quickly all of that happened.

00:40:40And then they start making, like, several of them a year.

00:40:43These things just started coming out in, like, crazy, absurd, rapid succession.

00:40:47And to your point about the masters, one of the things I thought was really interesting was that these games wound up being sort of crushed by their own success, in a way.

00:40:55Because, like, at the very beginning, either nobody cared about Guitar Hero and didn't want their stuff because they just didn't want to, like, negotiate the deal for the song.

00:41:05Or they were able to get it pretty cheap because artists were like, well, whatever, who is this game?

00:41:09We'll take some money.

00:41:10Sure.

00:41:10The amount of money you made off of video game licensing before that was nothing, so.

00:41:14Right.

00:41:14Exactly.

00:41:15But then, as it gets bigger, all of a sudden, getting in a Guitar Hero game becomes a huge win for you as an artist.

00:41:23In the same way that it's, like, the modern equivalent is probably, like, the Fleetwood Mac song blowing up on TikTok, right?

00:41:29And it's, like, all of a sudden, these songs from 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago are zooming up the charts because of this one very specific property.

00:41:37And for a long time, it was Guitar Hero that was, like, if you were there, like, you and your cool jazz music, right?

00:41:42Like, people were picking up Guitar Hero and being exposed to completely new kinds of music that they then, like, cared about for a long time.

00:41:50So then, all of a sudden, it's like, okay, well, A, we want to be on this game very badly.

00:41:55But B, we would like a piece, right?

00:41:58Especially as Guitar Hero 3 comes out and sells a billion dollars and becomes huge.

00:42:01They're like, well, a huge part of the appeal of this is our songs.

00:42:04This doesn't work without the music that everybody likes, which I think is an interesting, like, it would have been interesting to see them go all the way down the road of, this is music no one knows.

00:42:15Would the game still have worked?

00:42:16I don't know.

00:42:17But then it, like, becomes a problem because they have to spend all of this money on their songs.

00:42:24Eventually, like, the image and likeness of the people that they wanted to have.

00:42:27And so the bigger the game gets, the more expensive the game gets.

00:42:29And it starts to sort of collapse on itself in a certain way, especially as the game starts to get a little less popular, which happened really fast.

00:42:38Like, the whole Guitar Hero era was, like, five years, which is bonkers to me.

00:42:42They split into two companies.

00:42:43They made a thousand more games.

00:42:45And ran it into the ground.

00:42:46Five years.

00:42:47Yeah, five years.

00:42:48Five years.

00:42:48Like, by 2010, they've both, Guitar Hero, let's see, the number I have is by the end of 2010, Guitar Hero had sold $2.47 billion worth of games.

00:42:57And Rock Band was $1.2 billion.

00:43:00This is by 2010.

00:43:01Meanwhile, at this point, Call of Duty is doing a billion dollars a year.

00:43:04So do that what you will.

00:43:05But these games are, like, huge.

00:43:06And then it just fell off a cliff.

00:43:08Because people, everybody who wanted Guitar Hero, I guess, had it.

00:43:11Like, it was very funny playing the first one again today.

00:43:14Because I'm like, oh, this game still rips.

00:43:17Like, I don't play this one, and I'm like, you know what I want now is Guitar Hero 2.

00:43:19It's just like, oh, no, I have Guitar Hero now.

00:43:22Like, I'm good.

00:43:23It reminds me of the Wii and Wii Fit to some degree.

00:43:26Guitar Hero was very, very popular with people who are not video game players.

00:43:30My partner, to this day, I live in a house.

00:43:33Anyone that's seen me on a meet call, I live in a house with a home office full of video games and video game junk.

00:43:39My partner plays one game.

00:43:41It's Guitar Hero.

00:43:42Guitar Hero or Slash Rock Band.

00:43:44That's it.

00:43:44And I would break it out.

00:43:47We broke it out recently, a few months ago, and prepped for this.

00:43:50And my son has friends over, and they play Beatles Rock Band, and they have a great time.

00:43:53Like, it's just universally appealing.

00:43:55You can put it in front of anyone, and they enjoy it.

00:43:57And they get it.

00:43:58And they get it.

00:43:59They get it right away.

00:43:59And the game was a big hit with people that weren't gamers.

00:44:01But it also means it's easy to put down.

00:44:03This is not the thing you keep coming back to.

00:44:04It's big.

00:44:05It's in your living room.

00:44:06They used to sell furniture to keep your rock band kit in.

00:44:09An ottoman that flipped up that you could store all your stuff in.

00:44:12And everything was so big.

00:44:13Folks in the chat, hit me up with that link to that piece of furniture.

00:44:17That's got to be on Facebook Marketplace somewhere.

00:44:20Well, even then, there was a time when getting a whole rock band kit was on pre-Facebook Marketplace

00:44:26Craigslist for a dollar.

00:44:28People were just getting rid of this stuff, and it was so easy to get.

00:44:30And then five years later, you're like, oh, shit, I need that.

00:44:33Oh, it's expensive now.

00:44:34And it's hard to get.

00:44:35I used to work at FYE, which, for you younger kids, used to be a CD store.

00:44:42Sorry, a coming in what store?

00:44:44FYE, exactly.

00:44:45And we sold video games.

00:44:47We're one of the rare FYEs that sold video games.

00:44:49This is in Tower City in Cleveland.

00:44:51And to your point about the Wii and this crossover appeal is we had Guitar Hero controllers.

00:44:57And the number one Guitar Hero controller that people would ask for whenever they would come and buy stuff

00:45:02was the one for the Wii because that's what they wanted.

00:45:05We would get them in, and they would disappear like that because that's what people want.

00:45:10Even now, you go to, I don't know if they have that around here, but the Exchange,

00:45:15which is one of those secondhand places, they always have a Guitar Hero controller.

00:45:20People are always buying them.

00:45:21They're always there.

00:45:22They're always more than what you would expect to pay for them.

00:45:25And one of the things that we wanted to do for our wedding, we got married in our backyard,

00:45:29was we tried to put together a rock band set.

00:45:31And that would be like wedding entertainment for people to just pick up.

00:45:34That's such a good idea.

00:45:34Yeah, we weren't able to make it work.

00:45:36But for months and months and months up to the lead-up,

00:45:39my husband would go down to the basement and hook up his PlayStation 3,

00:45:42and you can hear him tapping on the drums for rock band because,

00:45:48A, it's excellent cardio, and B, it's fun.

00:45:50It still works.

00:45:51It's very hard to find a game like that that's still, like,

00:45:55you can just put it down in front of anybody, and they immediately get it,

00:45:57and it still feels the way that it did 20 years ago.

00:46:00My rock band drum set, still the same one I got in 2007.

00:46:04I have a piece of diamond-plated metal cut to the foot pedal,

00:46:09because the foot pedal used to snap in half.

00:46:10I got that fixed.

00:46:12And then I put, they sold these sound dampening pads that you'd put on the pads,

00:46:17because it was actually very loud when you didn't play it.

00:46:19And so I put those on to make it quiet.

00:46:22And then I still use, at one point, my proudest moments,

00:46:26I caught a drumstick from Questlove from The Roots,

00:46:29and it has, like, a little signature on it.

00:46:31So I have two drumsticks, but one of them is my little Questlove drumstick.

00:46:34Still my drumstick I use for rock band.

00:46:36That's awesome.

00:46:37Yeah.

00:46:38It's good.

00:46:38It's a good setup.

00:46:39Come hang out.

00:46:39Questlove, if you're watching, I know you are.

00:46:42Get at us.

00:46:43We know he's a gamer, too.

00:46:44Hit me up.

00:46:44I'm a silly Questlove.

00:46:45We'll hang out.

00:46:47Love this.

00:46:47So we're basically at the end of the Guitar Hero story now, which is kind of wild.

00:46:52Harmonix went on to make a game called Dance Central, which is a Kinect game,

00:46:56because Harmonix can't help itself.

00:46:58But some part of this is also the physicality that's going on here, right?

00:47:01Right.

00:47:01It's the Wii, and the physicality of Wii Sports.

00:47:03It's Guitar Hero, and the physicality of Guitar Hero.

00:47:05And then Microsoft's like, ooh, physicality.

00:47:07Kinect.

00:47:08We need some of that.

00:47:09We'll do Kinect, and that didn't, that wasn't, it didn't quite go how they thought.

00:47:12And then they went all in on Xbox One, and that's all she wrote.

00:47:16But yeah, Dance Central.

00:47:17Dance Central, by most accounts, too, wasn't my cup of tea, but it did okay, and people

00:47:21liked it.

00:47:22It was, again, critically acclaimed.

00:47:23Yeah.

00:47:24Yeah.

00:47:24And then Rock Band lived on a while, got onto some next-gen consoles.

00:47:29Guitar Hero, everybody kind of soured on after a while.

00:47:32I think it became such an obvious money grab that everybody just kind of gave up.

00:47:35They gave up.

00:47:37The thing I didn't know is the coda to this story is Harmonix got acquired by Epic Games and

00:47:40is now part of Fortnite, which is actually like a perfect ending that I had no idea had

00:47:45ever happened.

00:47:46It's kind of like a very good Happily Ever After, kind of.

00:47:49Yeah, it kind of is.

00:47:50Because that game still lives on, and you can still play it, and you can still get new controllers

00:47:55that work with your computer and play it.

00:47:57Can you still buy a guitar for Fortnite Festival?

00:47:59Yes.

00:48:00They do exist?

00:48:00Oh, that makes me happy.

00:48:02Riffmaster.

00:48:02My favorite part of Fortnite Festival is I can now get Sabrina Carpenter to play music

00:48:06in Fortnite Festival, where I can also have her kill fools in Battle Royale, and that's

00:48:12just dope.

00:48:13I got Hakuna Mitsu killing fools.

00:48:14I got Sabrina Carpenter killing fools.

00:48:16I feel like if you've ever wanted a perfect encapsulation of where games have gone in 20

00:48:20years, it's that sentence that you just said.

00:48:22Sabrina Carpenter killing fools?

00:48:24Yeah.

00:48:24Sabrina Carpenter shredding and killing fools.

00:48:27Yeah.

00:48:27In 2025.

00:48:28I got Billy Iash, Hakuna Mitsu, and Sabrina Carpenter on my squad.

00:48:31We're going to roll out on you.

00:48:33With Ariana Grande and LeBron James.

00:48:35Watch out!

00:48:35First of all, that's a sick rock band lineup.

00:48:38Mm-hmm.

00:48:39Yeah.

00:48:39Second of all, it's good stuff.

00:48:41All right.

00:48:42We need to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, and we have the version

00:48:45history questions.

00:48:49All right.

00:48:50We're back.

00:48:51So, in every episode, we have eight questions that we try to answer about every single product

00:48:55that we talk about on this show.

00:48:57The first question is, what was the best thing about the very first Guitar Hero?

00:49:01Chris, what do you think?

00:49:02I'm going to go ahead and say the thing that was true before Guitar Hero, and the thing

00:49:06that was true to some degree after Guitar Hero, which was the game itself, right?

00:49:10Just the rhythm gameplay itself was adaptable.

00:49:13It worked in these different formats.

00:49:14It worked with different instruments.

00:49:15The guitar is the thing that got people to pick it up.

00:49:17But when people played Frequency and Amplitude, they liked them.

00:49:21They just didn't pick them up.

00:49:22And so, the guitar got them to pick it up, but the game itself was the best thing there.

00:49:26Okay.

00:49:27I like the physicalness of it.

00:49:31I like the different kinds of genres of music.

00:49:34It encapsulates across several decades.

00:49:38It's like, you've got, I don't know, I can't even think of a cellist off the top of my head.

00:49:43But just that smattering of different music tracks from different genres definitely opened

00:49:50my eyes to the possibilities, and I really appreciate that.

00:49:53I like it.

00:49:54I'm going to go more niche, which is that I think the real-time audience feedback was amazing

00:50:00and is still an underrated thing that you don't get enough of in video games anymore.

00:50:05People are booing at you.

00:50:05When it boos, it feels bad.

00:50:08Yeah.

00:50:08It is genuinely upsetting when you're playing poorly and the crowd starts booing.

00:50:12I'm just used to people booing at me all the time anyway, so I'm just used to it.

00:50:14Walking down the street getting booed at.

00:50:15It's just your day-to-day.

00:50:16I love them feeling it.

00:50:17It's all right.

00:50:18All right.

00:50:19Question number two.

00:50:19What was the worst thing about the first Guitar Hero?

00:50:24Well, I was going to say the worst thing about Guitar Hero was when Activision came in

00:50:28and bought Red Octane, which I guess technically works.

00:50:33I guess that's true.

00:50:34That was technically in the life cycle of the first Guitar Hero.

00:50:37All right.

00:50:37I wasn't going to allow it, but I'll allow it.

00:50:40I'm going to go ahead and say, I can't remember 2005 and what it felt like.

00:50:45A time of limitless opportunity and possibility.

00:50:48The future was bright and wide open.

00:50:50We probably had a lot of positive feelings about the world.

00:50:52Oh, can you imagine?

00:50:53That was the year I graduated high school.

00:50:55So yeah, that was all of that.

00:50:56It was in my commencement speech.

00:50:57And then 2008 happens.

00:51:00Imagine what a commencement speech is like today.

00:51:02Everyone's like, good luck out there.

00:51:03See ya.

00:51:04Bye.

00:51:06Bye crypto.

00:51:09So I'm going to go ahead and say the price tag.

00:51:12I think, again, in the limitless pocketbooks of 2005, we all apparently had money and interest

00:51:17rates were low, I guess.

00:51:18I don't know.

00:51:18But that price tag, I'm sure it was an impediment.

00:51:23And for the people who could afford it, you know, could have been less.

00:51:28Hindsight 2020.

00:51:29I know, I know, I know.

00:51:29But $70 and you got the controller and the gate.

00:51:33I know.

00:51:33Yeah, but gas was 50 cents or something.

00:51:35I don't know.

00:51:36No, but it's not.

00:51:37You buy a Coke for a nickel.

00:51:39You scamp, get out of here.

00:51:40No, that's what's fun.

00:51:41I think both of those things are true.

00:51:43Right?

00:51:43And in retrospect, it was very expensive and it was a big swing to be as expensive as

00:51:46it was.

00:51:47But we also look back and it's like, aw, weren't they adorable for thinking that was expensive?

00:51:51I know.

00:51:52This is, bless their hearts.

00:51:53I think the worst thing, and this is somewhat controversial, and I might get in trouble for

00:51:58saying this, but the music library on the first one was not for me, especially because, again,

00:52:05this is American Idol watching, recently Puka wearing David Pierce in 2005.

00:52:11Big ACDC fan.

00:52:12This was not nearly poppy enough for my taste.

00:52:15This was like the music that I listened to when my friends were in the car because I wanted

00:52:19to impress them.

00:52:20This was not the music that I listened to by myself in the car, which was like, did I

00:52:26know all five parts to the NSYNC song, Tearing Up My Heart, and could sing any of the harmonies

00:52:30on demand?

00:52:31I did, and I could.

00:52:33That's the music I wanted to make as a guitar hero.

00:52:35And I will, ladies and gentlemen, David Pierce.

00:52:36And I eventually got some of that stuff, right?

00:52:38And I was like, the thing I liked, actually, I think I might have been the only person who

00:52:42liked the artist-specific ones that came out eventually, because some of those were just

00:52:46sort of closer to my zone.

00:52:49This was just, I wasn't cool enough to rock music enough to really get into this game.

00:52:54Have you talked to your therapist about that?

00:52:56No, honestly, that felt really good to say a lot.

00:52:57I'm not going to lie to you.

00:52:58I appreciate you guys being here for this.

00:53:00My claim to fame is, at some later point when DLC happened in Rock Band, the theme song

00:53:05for the podcast I used to host, the Joystick Podcast, made its way to the DLC.

00:53:09That's cool, too.

00:53:10Yeah, RIP Joystick Podcast.

00:53:11That's a claim to fame right there.

00:53:13I like that.

00:53:14All right, question number three.

00:53:15Would it have been a bigger hit if Apple made it?

00:53:17No.

00:53:18Part of the reason why Guitar Hero occupies the space that it does is because it's really grimy.

00:53:24It's not polished.

00:53:26Apple would have over-engineered the hell out of this.

00:53:28It would have, we've got, would have gotten like all white, seriously heavy guitars that

00:53:33you could not like lift.

00:53:34It would have been so expensive.

00:53:35Yeah.

00:53:35You think 70 bucks is expensive.

00:53:37Ridiculously expensive.

00:53:37It would have been one button because, you know, it's too many buttons.

00:53:41It just says guitar and you just press the button.

00:53:43That pared down, stripped down, like funkiness of it, like still works.

00:53:48Like it's, it's good to have like an older game that with all the, you can see the edges

00:53:52of it and the edges are actually really good.

00:53:55I totally agree.

00:53:55And especially the first one is like, it's, it's such a weird sort of bizarre game.

00:54:00And like all the names are inside jokes.

00:54:02There's a human footprint or fingerprint in that game that would have been completely

00:54:06erased if Apple had done it because nobody human works at Apple.

00:54:10I'm sorry.

00:54:11All right.

00:54:11Next question.

00:54:12What feature of this thing should every current version have?

00:54:15Oh, okay.

00:54:16So the thing that would go back in time and, and change about this is I would steer Bobby

00:54:20Kotick away and like tell him to go do more money ball stuff and be like a baseball

00:54:25financier instead of getting into video games.

00:54:27I had a feeling that was going to be the answer.

00:54:29Do you think that there was like a much longer life for something like Guitar Hero otherwise?

00:54:36Absolutely.

00:54:37You think?

00:54:37Cause my, my only counter to that would be the like, I already own Guitar Hero.

00:54:41Maybe I don't need it.

00:54:42Like maybe there just was a ceiling in the same way that like everybody who was going

00:54:45to buy a Peloton already bought a Peloton and that kind of screwed Peloton.

00:54:48Like.

00:54:49I think we could have gotten more out of it if we didn't oversaturate the market as fast

00:54:52as we did.

00:54:53That's probably true.

00:54:53Um, you know, you've got all these different versions like Beatles rock band and like Guitar

00:54:58Hero Aerosmith and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

00:55:00Like we didn't need all that.

00:55:02Like give them time to space it out.

00:55:04Maybe develop more innovations for their controller or do something like give them time to cook

00:55:09a little bit instead of just like serving meal after meal after meal after meal and then

00:55:13eventually we're full and we can't eat anymore.

00:55:14Um, yeah, I think time and not saturated work, it would have saved this game a little bit

00:55:22and we would have had it for a little bit longer.

00:55:24I don't think it would have maybe become like a Call of Duty kind of deal where, you know,

00:55:30we need one every year or we need one so often, but, and it's, and it's okay to let video

00:55:35games like die essentially.

00:55:37Like we had a good run.

00:55:38I think five years was too short for this run.

00:55:40That's fair.

00:55:41I'll give you that.

00:55:41I'm going to argue a counterpoint to that and then I'll give you my reason.

00:55:43But I think that to some degree they had this window just like the Wii where a bunch

00:55:46of people bought it.

00:55:47They bought the big controllers, the big drum sets, and there's a limited period of time

00:55:51before they put that on Craigslist or they put it in a garage sale.

00:55:54And so you've got, you know, your aunt Linda has the whole setup and she liked it when you're

00:56:00like, it's, she's not going to keep it forever.

00:56:01It's not going to go in the basement.

00:56:03Um, and when I break out my set, the number of people who are like, oh man, I used to have

00:56:06that.

00:56:07Like nobody has it anymore.

00:56:08Everyone got rid of it.

00:56:08Nobody keeps it in the basement.

00:56:09I'm just a sicko.

00:56:11First, if I'm going back in time and I can redo it all.

00:56:14I'm going to buy a lot of tickets.

00:56:17I'm going to, I'm going to bring back a sports book and just put a dollar in the high yield

00:56:22savings account, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

00:56:23So I'm going to do all that first.

00:56:24Sure.

00:56:24That's good.

00:56:25Put some money on a Panama account too.

00:56:28Uh, if I'm, so am I red octane or harmonics?

00:56:31Who am I?

00:56:32Uh, interesting.

00:56:33You're, I'm going to, you're, you're the CEO of harmonics.

00:56:35Okay.

00:56:35No, this is a true your own adventure.

00:56:37This is the walking dead.

00:56:38So you have to, you get a branching path.

00:56:40Asher's right.

00:56:41If I'm red octane.

00:56:42Dropping you in 2005, you get to choose.

00:56:43If I'm red octane, I buy harmonics.

00:56:45Hmm.

00:56:46Okay.

00:56:46That was a big boo boo.

00:56:47Yeah.

00:56:48That's a little bit of a mistake.

00:56:49To split up.

00:56:49Don't split the party.

00:56:50I buy harmonics.

00:56:52I make them, you know, I buy merge, right?

00:56:54Like just straight up, uh, some structure in which that those two things stay together.

00:56:58Just make it one thing.

00:56:59And then in terms of like the saturation, you have a little bit less of a saturation problem

00:57:03with one major product that is sort of excellent instead of two excellent products.

00:57:07Um, if I'm harmonics, hmm, that's a little trickier.

00:57:12I mean, maybe I would, maybe same answer, but I would propose a merger.

00:57:14I would propose some kind of, you know, don't just pay us to do this contract work for hire.

00:57:18Give us a piece of the pudding, uh, and we'll keep doing it with you and see how that works out.

00:57:24Okay.

00:57:24So you also think that in theory, there could have been a bigger, longer guitar hero history than we got.

00:57:29I think that part of that history has to account for having a second marketplace player

00:57:36that was in its own right, excellent, making a clearly duplicative product.

00:57:41And right, that sense that there wasn't just one product that was saturated in the market, but two,

00:57:45um, that's pretty hard to, to unwind.

00:57:48And who's to say that, you know, this harmonics red octane merger would continue to make rhythm games

00:57:54as like straight up simulation stuff.

00:57:56Also true.

00:57:56We're starting to see now a lot of people incorporate rhythm games into other kinds of,

00:58:01uh, games.

00:58:02You got Crypt of the Necro, Necrodancer specifically, those kinds of games.

00:58:06We could have seen something like that come out of them much earlier than what we're getting now.

00:58:11And I think giving them the opportunity to have that runway and not just be ground down in the dirt

00:58:15would have been potentially, you know, good for gaming as a whole.

00:58:20It is an interesting sort of parallel universe in which you have, like, mainstream interest in rhythm games

00:58:26in the United States and a company with theoretically tons of resources that only cares about making rhythm games.

00:58:32Uh, that, like, it is probably true that is hugely unexplored territory.

00:58:37I mean, I even think about, like, dumb examples like Supernatural, the, the fitness game for VR.

00:58:42It's like, that game was, was huge and fun.

00:58:45It was a completely different use of that same mechanic.

00:58:48Like, there's probably a lot of places you could point that thing.

00:58:50Yeah.

00:58:51Beat Saber has some of the same make-your-own-song mechanics.

00:58:53Somebody made, there's mods on the PC version.

00:58:56Somebody made an incredible version.

00:58:57You can check it out at home for the Outer Wilds soundtrack.

00:59:01Oh, cool.

00:59:01Beat Saber.

00:59:02Oh, that's incredible.

00:59:03But, uh, I was thinking about another thing, and just to give Activision some credit here,

00:59:08they did try and, you know, find new parts of that market when the guitar and rock music part of the market died off.

00:59:15DJ Hero?

00:59:16DJ Hero.

00:59:17Oh, okay.

00:59:17DJ Hero.

00:59:18You're serious.

00:59:18I'm serious.

00:59:19No, DJ Hero's great.

00:59:21Freestyle games.

00:59:21Yeah, you both said that word, but you said it very differently.

00:59:24She's like, DJ Hero?

00:59:24I'm like, DJ Hero!

00:59:25DJ Hero.

00:59:26I got two DJ Hero turntables in my office.

00:59:29It's a good game.

00:59:30DJ Hero 2 is good, too.

00:59:31The tracks are great.

00:59:33These great mashups.

00:59:34They brought in great DJs.

00:59:36They did, I think, really good work.

00:59:38That game was, again, a critical hit.

00:59:39Did not sell great.

00:59:42And I think there was some attempt to, like, try and keep that party going, and it didn't quite work out.

00:59:47And they rebooted it.

00:59:48Freestyle games, again, rebooted Guitar Hero Live, it was called, I think.

00:59:52Same developer, but...

00:59:53Your office must be enormous.

00:59:54You've described so many, like, 20-year-old peripherals that no one cares about that I'm like, at some point, you just have a, you know, a six-story office going on here full of video games.

01:00:03I got a virtual boy.

01:00:04I got it all.

01:00:07Here's the thing.

01:00:07It's not huge, but it's very dense.

01:00:10I'll give you a tour one day.

01:00:11It's great.

01:00:11All right, next question.

01:00:13What feature of this thing should every current version have?

01:00:15And I will rephrase this one slightly for Guitar Hero, which is, if you could borrow one either piece of the game or mechanic or idea about Guitar Hero and shove it back into mainstream gaming in 2025, what would it be?

01:00:31Star Power.

01:00:31So, we haven't talked about this through this entire podcast, but, like, part of Guitar Hero, if you've never played it, you can build up, like, a resource like Star Power, and then you can deploy it to get, like, super high scores or whatever.

01:00:44You can also use it to come in and save you when you're failing.

01:00:46So, I think modern games could do a lot with, I know there's this whole, like, thing about get good and, you know, Dark Souls is a game for adults or whatever.

01:00:55Wrong.

01:00:56Exactly.

01:00:56And having some kind of mechanic, like, you are clearly sucking at this, and instead of, like, getting these pithy, like, would you like to switch to a lower difficulty, like any of those patronizing messages, like, there's something that you can deploy to save you, to make you better, or to get you through, like, this difficult part.

01:01:11So, it's like, you're bad, but you did one sick thing, so you're back.

01:01:14Yeah, exactly.

01:01:15I love that.

01:01:16That's the dream.

01:01:17That's life.

01:01:18You just do one sick thing, we're so back.

01:01:20I'm waiting.

01:01:21It hasn't hit me yet any day now.

01:01:23It'll happen.

01:01:24Also, Star Power, the fact that you could do it by tilting up the guitar.

01:01:27It's so cool.

01:01:28Very cool.

01:01:29Very well played.

01:01:30Chris, what do you think?

01:01:31This is tricky, but I think the thing for me that was really transformative about it, again, something about the timeline with YouTube.

01:01:37I think there's still something here with live streaming and games and watching people beat Dark Souls bosses using Guitar Hero controllers and all this stuff.

01:01:46The idea of performance.

01:01:47That the video game itself is performance.

01:01:50The tools that you use to play it are performance.

01:01:52I think a lot about an essay that we published on Polygon and about Spelunky and live streaming and how Spelunky's challenges were only solved by a community playing in parallel with each other.

01:02:05That they could only sort of understand the complexity of the game by building upon what other people had already done.

01:02:11And so this idea of games that exist and augmented by distribution channels that are not the game.

01:02:18YouTube or Twitch or whatever.

01:02:21And the physicality of it.

01:02:23That sense that you can see, actually tell when somebody's better and that you can share that.

01:02:29And that is not the game.

01:02:30It is this different asset.

01:02:31This different thing.

01:02:32And in a world where everything's connected through streaming and channels and distribution mechanics.

01:02:39It's strange that more games don't specifically build themselves to travel that way.

01:02:46So that would be my thought.

01:02:47I like that.

01:02:48Mine is just physical controllers.

01:02:50I just want more game-specific items to hold.

01:02:54You say that, but you really don't.

01:02:56You really don't.

01:02:57My only reason for thinking that I do is playing Mario Kart with the actual wheel.

01:03:02Yeah, no, you're right.

01:03:04Is a delight.

01:03:05It is a delight.

01:03:05I don't know how far this idea goes.

01:03:08It's possible it goes right to there and nowhere else.

01:03:11And I also understand that what I'm asking is for a lot of expensive things that I want.

01:03:15I have this illness.

01:03:17I have the Taito Drum Master set for Switch.

01:03:19I have...

01:03:20I have...

01:03:21The office just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

01:03:22I know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

01:03:24To my partner who's not listening to this at all, I'm sorry.

01:03:29I've got the maracas up there from Samba Di Amigo.

01:03:32I've got all the dumb...

01:03:34If they make a dumb thing that hooks up to a video game, I'm like, well, I guess I have to have it.

01:03:39I can't not have it.

01:03:40I'm down.

01:03:41Just reboot Duck Hunt in 2025 and I will buy the thing again.

01:03:45I'm just saying.

01:03:46All right, next question.

01:03:47Is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful?

01:03:51And I think, I suspect the answer is the alternate timeline of these companies do not get acquired and blame.

01:03:58They acquire each other and get to have that long life, longer life, hopefully.

01:04:04I would have just really liked to have seen them iterate on the idea of applying rhythm game fundamentals to different kinds of games.

01:04:11I think that's a really fun thing that we're doing now and I wish we had more of that.

01:04:17So, game developers, please, incorporate rhythm stuff into your games because that's how you get me.

01:04:23I like it.

01:04:23Chris, anything else?

01:04:24I don't know.

01:04:26I think that the time it launched was really unique.

01:04:29Maybe a couple years earlier, it wouldn't have had the same opportunity a couple years later.

01:04:32I was going to ask about this, too.

01:04:33It launched on the PlayStation 2, which is launched at the tail end, right?

01:04:38Again, new console generation coming out.

01:04:40So, it launched on a console that had a higher install base than any home console ever made before.

01:04:45And it just had a lot of things going for it.

01:04:48It really was like a little bit of, you know, the right people, the right place, the right time, and then a little bit of serendipity and cosmic kismet there.

01:04:56I can think of a lot of ways it would have gone worse, right?

01:04:58Like, the size of that hit is hard to imagine.

01:05:01It's hard to replicate, and it really hasn't happened again in that way.

01:05:05So, I kind of am going to say that, you know, maybe, again, sort of these counterfactuals of mergers, et cetera, that didn't happen, I think they really nailed it.

01:05:13They did 100% expert play on hard mode using their feet.

01:05:20They definitely had that vision and they executed on it.

01:05:23We want to make non-musicians feel like a musician and feel like a rock star.

01:05:27And they nailed that really good.

01:05:28They really did.

01:05:29And it's really hard and really rare to have, like, such a clear vision executed so perfectly.

01:05:36Yeah.

01:05:36Yeah, which brings me to the next question.

01:05:37Especially in video games.

01:05:39Could you reboot it now?

01:05:40Could we bring back Guitar Hero in 2025, and would it work?

01:05:43We do that.

01:05:44Like, that thing exists.

01:05:45That's what Fortnite Festival is.

01:05:46It hasn't, like...

01:05:47Does that count?

01:05:48Like, I genuinely, like, I guess the pro case for that would be that Fortnite is,

01:05:53so huge that something inside of Fortnite is sufficiently huge to work.

01:05:57But I feel like a feature of Fortnite is just never going to be the thing that Guitar Hero was.

01:06:04I think if you think about Fortnite, and I'm going to channel my Tim Sweeney for you here.

01:06:08Okay.

01:06:08Okay, desktop, Google, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:06:10But Fortnite is a platform at this point.

01:06:13So if Fortnite's a platform, if Roblox is a platform, and if you think of it more as a platform,

01:06:18and what they're trying to do is incubate different games inside of this platform,

01:06:22there is Battle Royale, and that's our shorthand for where Fortnite is.

01:06:24But I think what Epic would really want you to believe is that Rocket Racing is a part of that platform,

01:06:29and that Fortnite Festival is, it's not reflected in the player accounts,

01:06:34which are still playing Battle Royale.

01:06:36But I think there's a world in which, like, are they on to something?

01:06:38Is there some future there?

01:06:39Is music and culture a part of Battle Royale?

01:06:41It is.

01:06:42And so how do you actually get the music and culture part out in gameplay

01:06:45that isn't about shooting people?

01:06:47That's where Festival comes in.

01:06:48Have they nailed it?

01:06:49I think you could probably make a strong case they have not nailed it.

01:06:52But I do think there is something there.

01:06:53I also think, and Ash, you could tell us about Clone Hero,

01:06:55like, the community taking on games like this and making some of this themselves

01:07:00in a way that is not tied up with the vagaries of music licensing

01:07:04and the distribution platforms and channels.

01:07:06We have the music.

01:07:07We have our Spotify accounts.

01:07:08Like, how do you just, like, hook up a guitar controller and play?

01:07:12And I think that's what's so cool about video games in general

01:07:16is that when the corporations step out, the communities step in,

01:07:20and the community for Guitar Hero has stepped up in a big way

01:07:23where you have Clone Hero,

01:07:23which is this game that you can download for free,

01:07:26you can get all kinds of tracks for it,

01:07:28like, tons and tons and tons and tons of tracks.

01:07:30You can make your own tracks for it.

01:07:32It plays on your computer.

01:07:33It will work with any kind of, you know, controller,

01:07:36as long as you have an adapter and hook it up to your computer.

01:07:38And one of the things that I really like to do is I follow, you know,

01:07:41music creators and music game creators

01:07:43and watch them, like, do these super hard,

01:07:46like, this is not musical at all.

01:07:48It just exists to be as difficult as possible

01:07:50and just watching them do that, it's just fun.

01:07:53It's fun.

01:07:54I downloaded Clone Hero 2 for myself

01:07:56because there was a moment, like, a couple years ago,

01:07:58I think this was, like, on the tail end of, like,

01:08:00social distancing where we're all in lockdown.

01:08:02Like, okay, I'm going to make Clone Hero my thing,

01:08:04like I tried to do with Guitar Hero,

01:08:05and just play it and I don't have to worry about, like,

01:08:08I don't know, DLC or getting my PlayStation 3 to work

01:08:11or anything like that.

01:08:12It's just there on my computer and I did that for a little bit.

01:08:15And my husband will tell you, like, every day for, like,

01:08:17you know, a couple weeks I would go

01:08:19and I would play the same, like, six songs over and over

01:08:21trying to, like, relearn that muscle memory

01:08:23and it was good for a bit.

01:08:25What I've realized after playing this game today

01:08:27was that, like, I kind of don't want

01:08:28a 2025 version of Guitar Hero.

01:08:31I just want, like, that Guitar Hero again,

01:08:33or I guess, like, a Guitar Hero with the songs

01:08:35that I like more.

01:08:36But it did make me realize, like,

01:08:37I don't know that I want more from this game.

01:08:39I just kind of want the game back in my life again.

01:08:42I don't know if I am going to be one of those people

01:08:44who forever regret selling it on Craigslist,

01:08:46but playing it again, I kind of regret selling it on Craigslist.

01:08:48What if it was an NSYNC edition?

01:08:50I mean, I would never have sold it on Craigslist.

01:08:53For me, one of the appeals of retro games especially,

01:08:55and it gets complicated with 360,

01:08:56and if you bought games,

01:08:57you have to, like, restore your licenses to stuff.

01:09:00It's, like, a little janky,

01:09:00but when you go back to a PS2 and earlier,

01:09:02like, the complexity of even just talking about Fortnite

01:09:05as a platform, like, the simplicity of playing a game

01:09:08that just exists.

01:09:09You have it physically, it's on the disc,

01:09:11you hook it up to a TV, and it works.

01:09:12It is kind of wild in 2025 to have that experience

01:09:14where you're like, I plugged the thing

01:09:15and I haven't used it in a long time.

01:09:17And it works.

01:09:17Right.

01:09:18I don't have to update it.

01:09:19I don't have to download new things.

01:09:21I don't have to pay a subscription.

01:09:22I don't have to, like, remember a password.

01:09:24I just turn on the damn game and it plays.

01:09:27We're all old.

01:09:28Right?

01:09:28We're all old.

01:09:29I'm sorry.

01:09:29My caveat on that is two things.

01:09:31One.

01:09:31Kids don't know.

01:09:33Sometimes it doesn't work

01:09:34because you've got the input latency problem.

01:09:35You have some other challenges.

01:09:36Fair.

01:09:36Two.

01:09:37I brought my PlayStation Slim here,

01:09:39too slim because my PS2 fat,

01:09:41the disc drive doesn't work.

01:09:42It's temperamental.

01:09:43It works sometimes.

01:09:44You've got to...

01:09:45It was not going to work

01:09:46if I brought it on the train

01:09:46and bumped it the whole way.

01:09:47You've got to blow on it and put it back in.

01:09:48Yeah.

01:09:48So, like, those old consoles

01:09:49oftentimes just need a lot of attention.

01:09:52Yeah.

01:09:52They aren't...

01:09:53They will not last forever

01:09:55without maintenance and support.

01:09:56And the folks who do that maintenance and support,

01:09:57God bless you if you're out there.

01:09:59It's not easy to find these folks.

01:10:01And so the internet community,

01:10:02to Ash's point,

01:10:03takes over and starts to support this stuff.

01:10:04But we do have a video game preservation problem.

01:10:07You can't go to your library

01:10:08and get this stuff easily

01:10:09to play an old game.

01:10:11It really is hard to access.

01:10:13Which is sad.

01:10:15And so I think that, you know,

01:10:16part of my enthusiasm

01:10:17for having a home office full of this bullshit...

01:10:20Can I say bullshit on the podcast?

01:10:22Is that I know I can't just go get it somewhere else

01:10:25if I don't keep it.

01:10:27Yeah.

01:10:27I like that.

01:10:28So, all right.

01:10:29Last version history question.

01:10:30Does Guitar Hero belong

01:10:31in the Version History Hall of Fame?

01:10:33The rules for the Hall of Fame

01:10:34still in flux.

01:10:36But I would say the general rubric is,

01:10:38was this thing at least unusually important

01:10:42in the history of technology?

01:10:45Like, did this matter in some meaningful,

01:10:48specific way?

01:10:50And it has to...

01:10:52It doesn't even have to be good.

01:10:53It just has to matter.

01:10:54Does this thing matter enough

01:10:55to belong in the Hall of Fame?

01:10:56Yeah, I think...

01:10:57I mean, there's only going to be so many games

01:10:58that have this real confluence

01:10:59of like hardware, software, culture,

01:11:01big moments, events, mergers,

01:11:04like all those things

01:11:06that are part of the tech industry

01:11:08that are part of that sort of,

01:11:09you know, amplified growth.

01:11:12It hits that in a way

01:11:14that breaks out of the normal niches

01:11:16of just video games

01:11:18and sort of transcends

01:11:19to some other larger cultural context.

01:11:22But it's also frivolous and silly

01:11:25and it doesn't matter.

01:11:27And it is just fun.

01:11:28And it didn't change the world

01:11:30in that same way.

01:11:32It's not an iPhone or whatever.

01:11:34It is a tricky one.

01:11:35It like, it was so big

01:11:36and it burned so bright

01:11:37and then it died.

01:11:38And that's like what I would find

01:11:40like beautiful about it.

01:11:41Like that's the beauty.

01:11:42It doesn't have to be transformative

01:11:44in that other way.

01:11:46It just has to have been like fun

01:11:48and pleasant

01:11:49and I don't know,

01:11:51like well-intentioned.

01:11:52Yeah.

01:11:53I'm inclined to put it in

01:11:54just because I think

01:11:55it has like a damn near 100%

01:11:58approval rating as a thing.

01:12:00And I don't think

01:12:00there are that many things like that.

01:12:01I think it gets in for that reason.

01:12:04Yeah, I'm into it.

01:12:05All right.

01:12:05It's official.

01:12:06So this controller behind us,

01:12:07we're going to like hang

01:12:07in the rafters or something

01:12:08until it all comes crashing down.

01:12:12All right.

01:12:12That is it for the show.

01:12:14Ash and Chris, thank you.

01:12:15This was so much fun.

01:12:16Yes, it was fun.

01:12:16Appreciate you guys doing this with me.

01:12:17I appreciate the invite.

01:12:18As always,

01:12:19you can watch all of our episodes

01:12:20on YouTube.

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01:12:21wherever you get podcasts.

01:12:23And if you want to support

01:12:24all of this and everything,

01:12:26the best thing you can do

01:12:27is subscribe to The Verge,

01:12:28theverge.com.

01:12:29It's a good website.

01:12:29We have journalism and websites

01:12:31and newsletters and podcasts

01:12:33like this one.

01:12:34Thank you for being here.

01:12:35We'll see you next time.

01:12:36We'll see you next time.

01:12:38Bye-bye.

01:12:45Bye-bye.

01:12:50Bye-bye.

01:13:04Bye-bye.

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What happened to Guitar Hero? | Version History

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