Feb 102011
My gamer son told me this was coming: Guitar Hero is no more. I don’t know if this is really one more sign that rock ‘n roll is out of vogue or if they simply lost out to Rock Band, which my son says is much better. Let us take a moment of silence to honor a hero’s defeat and appreciate this quote from CNN.com’s report:
As rock struggled against rap music, video games like “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” were credited with creating a new appreciation for rock ‘n’ roll among the millennial generation born in the ’90s who didn’t know much about Aerosmith, Pat Benatar and other musicians of the ’70s and ’80s.
Thanks to Townsman plugdin2 for passing along this story.
Fine by me. The “Rock Band” franchise is still alive and kicking and is the music game of choice for me. Granted, that game’s developer Harmonix was recently sold by Viacom (and was bought by investment firm Columbus Nova, LLC), which also dissolved MTV Games.
I don’t think it’s the end of the plastic guitar games, however. Rock Band has been dishing out great DLC the past weeks, featuring David Bowie, the entirety of The Clash’s “London Calling” album, a twelve-pack of hits by Billy Joel (with more to follow next month), and plenty more, with this week’s DLC offering up Human League, Animotion, Meat Loaf, and some other groups for its Valentine’s Day special.
“Rock Band 3” was released last year…not perfectly, but it has introduced real peripherals such as the Squire, a keytar/keyboard, and pro drum add ons to try and seduce “real musicians” over into the fold. Me, I just have lots of fun with the great amount of tunes available for old farts my age. It’s definitely a fun game and a series that gets the original master recordings 99.8% of the time, something the Guitar Hero series often failed at, leaving their fans to rock out to re-recorded versions or crappy soundalike ones.
Does anyone really “know” the woman who is Pat Benatar? I do know her first hit was penned by one John Cougar Mellencamp
I have the whole Guitar Hero band set up and 3 game disks with about 150 songs. My wife and I play semi-regularly with our neighbors. We all learned at about them same time and it has been good fun but it has kind of run its course. It would seem that RockBand won with their deeper pockets and more focus on superstar band music. GuitarHero invented the game back before the full band mode and seemed a little stuck with metally, thrashy guitar rock.
There are moments when you are playing the game, the dot patterns fit the tune and you really get a sense of music. And it was memorable to see our 6 yr old niece belt out the Shirley Manson/Garbage tunes. Last Christmas they seemed to have moved on to motion games like The Michael Jackson Dance Experience.
I don’t think Rock music has been more out of the mainstream than it is right now. Does not bode well for the future.