Hey there, welcome to
a three part homage to what I call The Rise and Fall of Guitar Hero. Today I’ll
talk about The Rise of Guitar Hero, going through the first part of its history.
I’ll talk about the series, the games, and my feelings on them as we go along.
Tomorrow, part 2, is going to about The Fall of Guitar Hero, where I talk of
its decline, as well as the games and my feelings that contributed to its
demise. Part 3 will be put up on Wednesday, where I’ll be posting a Mixtape of
songs that are my favourites to play from each game in the series.
The Guitar Hero series was one of my favourite game series
of all time and in its peak, was extremely popular and has revived interest in
many rock bands of the past. Activision claimed the third game in the series
was the first title in the history of video gaming to hit $1 billion in sales,
which shows you the power the game had at one time.
Guitar Hero first started off as a vision from a company
called RedOctane, who saw potential in an earlier game series called
GuitarFreaks, which had relative success in Japan. Seeing potential in the
series, they decided to create their own game with their own format, hoping for
success in the States. They asked Harmonix, a game development company who have
created other music games such as Amplitude and Frequency, to moderate success.
An agreement was made between the two to produce this game series.
The idea was to have a guitar controller to replace the
control pad. This guitar controller would, naturally, be in the shape of a
guitar. Where the frets of a genuine guitar would be, were five large plastic
buttons. These ‘frets’ were colour coded; green, red, yellow, blue, and orange.
On the base of the guitar was a strum bar that could be lifted up and down, and
a whammy bar. The concept of the gameplay was for the respective colours of the
frets would represent different notes in the sound of a guitar, and on the
television screen, when you would see your respective coloured fret, you would
hold down the colour of the fret, and strum in motion with the timing. Getting
the timing with ten notes in succession would then double all your points.
Getting twenty notes in succession tripled your points, and thirty notes
quadrupled your points. That is the basic concept of Guitar Hero, arguably much
easier than playing a guitar itself, which gave it access to many people of
varying skill levels.
There are other gameplay elements as well. If you had a long
note in a song (like, in the beginning of “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath), you
would simply hold down the respective coloured fret while the note is being
played. You could play chords, simply by holding two fret buttons at the same
time. Hammer ons and pull-offs were possible by pressing a series of frets in
quick succession to a certain section of a song. At particular segments in a song,
certain notes would have a white silhouette around them, and playing these
notes in succession gave you an ability called “star power”. Gathering large
amounts star power was fundamental in getting a high score in the game. To use
star power, you have to store enough of it first, and then, then you lift the
actual guitar controller ninety degrees upwards (or pressing the ‘select’
button on the controller itself), and all the notes would turn a glowing blue
colour. When star power is activated, all notes count for twice the score as
before. So if you hit over thirty notes in succession, you would have a
quadrupled points multiplier; but with star power, those points would be
doubled to eight times the original points. The whammy bar had its use too; if
you were in a series of notes contending for star power, if any of those notes
were long, you could use your whammy bar to start developing star power on the
cuff.
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| The original Guitar Hero controller. |
Naturally with star power and a points multiplier, this game
was very good at making it competitive to get the highest score. High scores in
video games took a turn by the mid-nineties, not many games used high score
boards, or used point systems. It wasn’t really until the mid naught, when
leaderboards on Xbox Live and the PS3 were developed to compare your score to
other people around the world when the point system gained a second wind. While
Guitar Hero was released just before
the seventh generation consoles became official, this really game did make it
competitive again to compare your scores with other friends. Another addition
is the rating of songs out of five stars, where successfully playing a song got
you three stars, but hitting more notes and getting multipliers gave you a
better chance of a four or five star rating.
As the original game didn’t have any licences to use master
copies of any songs, they created cover versions for all the songs on the game.
So with the guitar sorted, the gameplay elements created and the cover versions
developed, everything was rocking to get the game released. All that was left
really was to develop characters that the player could choose from. It was
important that these characters were varied, and covered many genres of rock
and metal, as there are so many subgenres of music that could be associated with
the game. For instance, for ‘metalheads’, Axel Steel was created, a very large
man with really big shoulders and long brown hair. In contrast, Johnny Napalm
was designed with punks in mind; he was a tall and slim topless man with a
Mohawk. One of the female characters was Pandora, a slim girl with dyed light
blue hair and was appealing for people into the gothic fashion, and genres
associated with that movement.
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| Johnny Napalm, the 'punk' character. |
The game came out in the states in November ’05 and I caught
wind of it around the turn of the year, when the game was starting to feature
in many award listings. I completely forgot about it though as it wasn’t released
in the UK yet. It wasn’t until around March time, when my local Game store had
a playable demo. I gave “I Love Rock and Roll” a go and absolutely fell in love
with the game. I HAD to have it. I found out when it was being released, which
was April 7th 2006, and got a copy not long after then. I was
hooked. It was one of the most amazing video game experiences I ever had.
Playing these awesome songs, learning new ones, getting better at playing the
game, it was ecstasy. I managed to beat it on Easy within days. “Easy” mode
only allows you to use the first three of the five frets. I went onto “Medium”,
which made you use four of the five. I remember going all the way with ease
again, until I got to the penultimate track, which was “Cowboys From Hell” by Pantera,
an excellent song, and found it too difficult. After a lot of practicing I
finally beat it, and moved onto “Hard” mode, which was the first time all five
frets were to be used. The rest is history now.
The original Guitar Hero had some excellent cover versions
in the game, as there was no rights to any master copies, you have to give a
lot of credit to the team who made these songs their own. Some of the songs are
a bit off, like the person doing Lemmy in “Ace of Spades” by Motorhead, but
some of them are pretty damn good. The original “Guitar Hero” will always have
a place in my heart, the makers of the Guitar Hero series have improved certain
elements of the gameplay as the series has gone on but the original has
developed a certain charm to it, and it’s a game that I’ll always stick on once
in a while. If I were to review the original Guitar Hero it would get ****1/2
stars from me, as there were things that could have been improved, and were.
Let’s move on.
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| Guitar Hero I has a charm no other game in the series has. |
Anyway, Guitar Hero II picked up from what Guitar Hero
started. In this game it was possible to play songs on bass guitar, and you
could play co-op with a guitar and a bass player. One of the most important yet
subtle changes to the game were the hammer ons and pull offs being much easier
to do this time around. I’m not sure why it was difficult to do it in the
original, but the change was thoroughly appreciated universally. Some new
characters were added this time round, like Lars Umlaut, a Nordic death metal
player, and Izzy Sparks, who represented the hair metal movement of the
eighties. There were also three note chords, which were simply strummed by
holding three of the five frets. Guitar Hero II’s soundtrack wasn’t as good as
the original Guitar Hero’s, I mean there were some great additions like “Beast
and the Harlot” by Avenged Sevenfold, “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd and “War
Pigs” by Black Sabbath but on the whole there were a lot of songs that just
didn’t feel belong, or weren’t as fun to play as others. In the original game
there were songs that I wasn’t too fussed about, but they were fun to play and
you could understand their inclusion into the game. Guitar Hero II didn’t
always have songs that felt that way. Still, it was a solid effort, one I rate
at ****1/4 stars.
The seventh generation consoles were starting to become the
main force around this point, and if Guitar Hero was to keep remaining relevant
they had to move onto the new consoles. Their first venture was to move Guitar
Hero II to the Xbox 360, and they did this in April 2007. The PS3 and Wii don’t
have this title in their collection. To mark this occasion, the makers made a
special guitar controller for the Xbox 360 version, which was shaped like the
Gibson Explorer, which was used by the likes of Clapton again, The Edge again,
Billy Gibbons and Paul Stanley. This controller however was criticised as the
base model was smaller than that of the PS2 controller, and was harder to hold
therefore.
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| The Guitar Hero II controller, modelled after the Gibson Explorer. |
Some time between the release of “Guitar Hero II” and “Rocks
the 80s”, Activision gained acquisition of RedOctane, and MTV Games bought
Harmonix. They decided to release another sequel, and sought out Neversoft to
develop it. The Guitar Hero series was an incredible mainstream machine by this
point, and was on a high never experienced before. With the muscle of MTV, they
were able to finally start using master recordings when available. With
Neversoft they had an experienced and valued developer, who had given the world
the Tony Hawks series. They built “Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock” from
scratch, with their own designs and ideas behind the game.
The game was released in October in the US, and on November
23rd, 2007 here in the UK. With a massive 73 playable tracks, it was
a huge collection of songs. They had some great tracks on the set, and many of
them were master recordings, like “One” by Metallica, “The Number of the Beast”
by Iron Maiden and “Paint it Black” by The Rolling Stones. The game was a huge
project, much bigger than the other two games, and it had the feeling of a
gaming giant about it. Playing “Guitar Hero III” and “Guitar Hero” were similar
experiences, naturally, but there was a different feeling this time round.
Playing “Guitar Hero” back was like going back to an old house you moved away
from, which was smaller than your current house. “Guitar Hero III” had many
pros and many cons. On the whole, I’d say this is probably my favourite title
in the series, just because there are so many excellent songs on the track
listing. At this point I was able to play many songs on “Expert” and the third
in the series is most certainly the most difficult game. They really put all
their efforts to testing the hardcore Guitar Hero gamers to the max, “One”,
“Number of the Beast” were incredibly difficult songs to play. But it was one
of the additional features that made the game so difficult.
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| Slash makes an appearance in the 3rd game, he also featured heavily in the games marketing and artwork |
So, one of the pros for the game is that it has a huge
selection of great tracks. Another pro is that the design of the game and its
characters was definitely an improvement. The cons? Well, I said there were
many great tracks to play, but this title definitely has many duds as well.
Because there are a total of 73 tracks, there are definitely songs on the game
that haven’t really got much justice to be on there. None more so than “When
You Were Young” by The Killers. I’m not saying it’s a bad song, but when this
game is called “Guitar Hero”, and the entirety of the first verse has NO guitar
in it at all, it shouldn’t be in this game. You’re just sitting (or standing
there), for an entire verse, with no game play at all. It’s stupid. A similar
experience also occurs in “Miss Murder” by AFI. These songs just shouldn’t be
on this game. Another con was the difficulty of the game, as I said earlier,
the game was definitely aimed at the more skilled Guitar Hero fans but they
didn’t really make the game that accessible to new players. The beautiful
learning curve of the original Guitar Hero was definitely gone by now. But the
biggest con in this game is all the plugging and advertisement in the game. It
takes about 90 seconds in the beginning of the game for all the companies, and
there is a lot in the game too, none less than the stupid “bom chicka wow wow”
girls. Nevertheless, this was a solid entry, and the pros definitely outweighed
the cons, and I’d give the game ****1/2 stars again, as I said, I usually play
this entry over any other.
I
call this part The Rise of Guitar Hero. Tomorrow I’ll be back with The Fall of
Guitar Hero. I hope you’ve enjoyed this half of the story and I hope you come
back tomorrow with the second part. On Wednesday I’ll be putting up my
favourite songs to play. I hope to see you back here tomorrow pronto! Have a
good night.
Here's part two of "The Rise and Fall of Guitar Hero"!
Here's part two of "The Rise and Fall of Guitar Hero"!
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