Summary
TheGuitar Heroseries died an undignified death, didn’t it?
Once the game that brought plastic instruments to the United States in earnest, the Guitar Hero brand lost some of its power almost immediately upon the release of Rock Band. So how do we get from there, to this past week when Guitar Hero was back in the headlines thanks to an easter egg in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 wherea parody box of the guitar seriesis sitting forgotten in a trash can?
In reality, the mid-to-late 00s was a time of change in the industry. Maybe there just wasn’t room for two games basically filling the same niche. Regardless, the final game in the series, Guitar Hero Live, came in 2015 and ended online service in December of 2018.
That’s the end of the story, right? Yes and no.
Activision and games with strong musical footprints seem to go hand-in-hand. Take Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, for example. It’s not an accident that the Guitar Hero franchise picked up the ‘rule of cool’ when it came to soundtracks from its skateboard-shredding sibling. THPS’s OG developer,Neversoft, was eventually pulled off the series and put onto Guitar Hero. Plenty of shared DNA.
Which makes the most recent news about the newly released and Iron Galaxy-developedTony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4all the more interesting. A potentially harmless but pointed joke at the expense of the dead Guitar Hero franchise brought me back to an opinion I’ve held dear for a decade.
Guitar Hero Livewas rad as hell and deserved far more than literally and figuratively ending up in a trash can.
Guitar Hero Live: Changing With The Times
The plastic guitar genre was in dire straits by the time the mid 2010s rolled around.Rock Bandwould hang around longer, but which series holds the crown is up for debate. The Rock Band games lived purely off of expensive and regular but middling DLC song content by this period and the Guitar Hero series was last seen in 2010 with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, developed by Neversoft, and still makes appearances in arcades such as Round1 and Dave & Busters.
Times change, seasons pass, but Guitar Hero would return for one last stab at fame.
So it goes, work began on a brand-new Guitar Hero as what would eventually feel like a last-ditch effort. With it came radical changes to everything one would expect from Guitar Hero, with even the plastic instrument itself changing in fundamental ways.
The Guitar Hero Live guitar was fully original and changed in a way that made it no longer compatible with its Rock Band counterpart – featuring a 2 × 3 button fret system. This new layout always felt more like playing guitar, with open frets and power chords now fully presented in a way that made far more sense to anyone that’s ever picked up an actual axe.
Despite my love for the Guitar Hero Live guitar, it was flimsy and cheap. Mine broke back in 2018.
But this wasn’t the only radical change. Other massive adjustments came in the form of a brand-new and surprisingly fun single-player mode. Perhaps the most interesting change was in how the game handled post-launch song DLC, opting to have a 24/7, constantly rolling online mode called ‘GHTV’. Both additions are what make Guitar Hero Live such a fascinating experiment – and my favorite entry in any Guitar Hero or Rock Band series ever.
It’s Time To Face Your Fears – And Real People
One of the things missing from the plastic instrument genre has always been the aura – and fear – of performing. Despite the fact that each game in the genre universally represented gameplay failure as making the crowd upset, it never came across in any meaningful way.
Enter Guitar Hero Live – emphasis on the ‘live’ part. The single-player mode drops a fledgling guitarist into a first-person, full-motion video world where you’re on the edge of the stage. The crowd is fully made up of actors that react both positively and negatively to your performances on a song-by-song basis. In addition, your bandmates will also either cheer or egg you on, all depending on if you’re nailing notes or not.
Hokey? Maybe. It definitely has a Sega CD, FMV game vibe to it. But… I also love it? There’s so much attention and care put into these songs that I find it hard not to respect the game. The crowd sings along to each unique song, your bandmates are playing the songs along with you, and it creates such an immaculate aura.
Sure, it’s cringe at times to see these dopey actors playing along with you and giving a thumbs-up or grinning like an idiot. It’s also endearing, however. And I’ll take that kind of authenticity over the cartoon hollowness of Rock Band and its create-a-wrestler-esque bands badly lip-synching to songs.
I’d also be remiss to not mention how fun it was to plop people who had never seen Guitar Hero Live in front of its single-player mode. Seeing friends react to the strangeness of live video as you played was prime party fun.
But this part of Guitar Hero Live wasn’t the big selling point. Let’s talk about GHTV.
The Streaming Service of Rhythm Games?
One of the worst parts about music-based games in our DLC day and age is buying songs à la carte. It gets expensive in a hurry and is a one-way trip to make parties a pain in the butt. I remember one specific time when our very drunk friends came over to play the PlayStation 4 karaoke game Singstar, and we racked up around $200 in DLC charges from buying songs.
Oh, and we never played it again. Feels bad.
Guitar Hero Live didn’t mess around with that nonsense. Instead, GHTV was a constantly rolling, 24/7 set of ‘live’ TV stations playing its various DLC songs at all times. Broken up by genre, special events, and even by bands, you could jump in and out of any channel lineup you wanted. Best yet, it was displayed in a very DirectTV-circa-2003-style television guide. This made it super simple to see what songs were coming up next.
But maybe you weren’t enjoying the randomness. Have no fear, for you could buy 24 hours of access to every song on the GHTV lineup for $5.99 (you could also earn access through special events.)
This was perfect for parties or on weekends when I felt a hankering to blaze through my favorites in the extensive GHTV lineup. And, yes, there’s a discussion to be had about the merits of paying a subscription fee versus actually ‘owning’ your DLC. But… Look, take my Singstar example. I never sang those DLC songs ever again…
… And I don’t own them anyway. Somewhere on my PSN account are 10 Billy Joel tracks that my friend Kyle insisted I absolutely had to have. Thanks, dude.
Not ‘owning’ those Guitar Hero Live songs bothered me none, and for good reason. It was the first time one of these games felt built for real life and the realities of playing with friends. Yes, Guitar Hero Live lacked the expansiveness of a whole band… But is that such a bad thing? Sometimes I just want to shred, bruv.
The End Of The Guitar Hero Era
Guitar Hero Live lasted three years, before the plug was finally pulled in late 2018. A number of factors most likely went into that decision. Activision was in a strange place as a company; The economy was up and down in the United States, and music games had lost a lot of their power as a genre.
It wouldn’t be until last year when Epic Games launched the Festival mode of Fortnite, which is basically Fortnite’s Rock Band – and is developed by Harmonix, to boot – that the genre really felt alive again. And that’s a shame, because Guitar Hero Live was a brave and fascinating stab at making drastic changes to a bread-stale style of gaming.
In my dreams, in that far-off place, I can still see my live-video bandmates. Maybe they’re still out there… Waiting for me. Waiting to see if I make my grand return to the stage and live out my guitar-shredding dreams once again.
Farewell, my friends. You deserve better than beingthe butt of a jokeinside a trash can.
