Games
Freestyle Games hope that its new TV mode will redefine the way players find exciting new songs.
How do you discover new music? In the old days, you’d have to listen to Radio 1 and buy NME on a Wednesday, but now we have so many options. From Soundcloud to Spotify, BBC 1Xtra to 6Music, YouTube to MTV, there are more ways than ever to find that new song that you love. Guitar Hero Live offers another, possibly even more exciting, way to find new tunes. For not only will the game's Guitar Hero TV help you discover new tracks, but you can play along to them.
This is how Guitar Hero could become the music game in everyone’s home again. It will have competition, though. For the first time in half a decade, Guitar Hero and Rock Band are returning to once go head-to-head in the battle of the rhythm action games. This time around though, each game looks set to offer something very different to its rival.
Rock Band 4 will be an evolution of previous games in the series, offering support for past instruments and any DLC songs players bought in the past. It's sticking with the tried and tested formula in the hope that absence has made our hearts grow fonder.
Meanwhile, Guitar Hero Live – the seventh game in the series – will completely revolutionise things. It'll include a brand new guitar, first-person video sequences while you play, and that new music discovery service: Guitar Hero TV.
As Guitar Hero Live’s creative director Jamie Jackson told us, Guitar Hero Live will make you feel like a rock star when it's released in the autumn..
It's been five years since the last Guitar Hero game. Why are you reviving it now?
We’ve always said that we would bring Guitar Hero back when we figured out the right innovations to usher the franchise into the new generation of gaming. We believe that with Guitar Hero Live and Guitar Hero TV, we’re creating an unprecedented level of innovation that we hope will redefine how players both interact with the music they love, as well as discover new music they may have never heard before.
What do you think it was that led to the eventual death of 'plastic instrument' games (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, DJ Hero) last generation: over-saturation or something else?
Activision tried its best to meet the demands of its millions of fans across the globe by catering to different musical tastes with different products. Back then, the best way to give people new content was to ship a new disc. Other factors like a declining economy played a larger role in the category’s decline [those plastic instruments weren’t cheap].
The music rhythm genre lived on with dance-focused games, and there have been fans that have continued to engage with the Guitar Hero brand through social media and by playing the old games, which really speaks to the affection people have for the series.
Guitar Hero Live is not envisioned as an annualised franchise. Given the model of the game, especially GHTV, we see the benefit of consistently adding content to the game on an ongoing basis instead, which is really exciting.
The new guitar controller is interesting. What was the reasoning behind ditching the trademark five coloured buttons and trying something completely different?
One of our UI developers suggested we lose the colours and move to just black and white. We thought he was mad. No way. It would never work. But the more we looked into it, the more it made sense – by losing the colours you remove one of the steps your brain needs to process when you’re playing, so it actually makes everything more intuitive.
The new button configuration also allows the player to maintain their hand position throughout the song, as opposed to old Guitar Hero games where players needed to stretch to hit the fifth button. But having six buttons means we can actually make more complex chord shapes and patterns – so for veteran players it brings a whole new challenge.
This means the new guitar controller is as easy to play, but it’s actually more difficult to master compared to the original so fans of Guitar Hero and new players alike should adapt easily to the all-new guitar controller design.
It's a bold move to replace the polygonal environments of past Guitar Hero games with dynamically changing video-based sequences. How do you feel this changes the tone of the game?
It makes you feel like a rock star. We’ve been lucky enough to stand on the side of the stage and get a glimpse of what bands go through, and we wanted to bring that experience to your living room. By turning the camera around and changing your point of view, we’re delivering a live-action experience that takes you on the emotional rollercoaster of getting up on stage – whether that’s in front of a hundred people or a hundred thousand.
FreeStyleGames was responsible for the fantastic DJ Hero games. Has your time spent working on those games had an impact on the way you're reimagining Guitar Hero?
We loved DJ Hero. It was our first real baby! What you have to consider is that DJ Hero and Guitar Hero are music rhythm games at their hearts, so yes, it did definitely help us in our approach.
Probably the biggest way was that we did a lot of things in DJ Hero that hadn’t really happened and we were not precious about breaking some rule sets. For example, ditching 'fail' in the game was a big success. So when we came to Guitar Hero we had a few rules at the start: don’t use the old logo in documents and no barbed wire or flames. We basically came at it with huge respect for the brand, but no preconceived ideas about how it should play, look or grow.
The original Guitar Hero games were responsible for introducing players to a whole new world of music: many became fans of the likes of Dragonforce, Freezepop and various '70s rock bands after discovering their songs in the games. How can Guitar Hero TV help new music in a similar way?
GHTV adds an entirely new dimension to Guitar Hero, giving players the chance to play along with a massive collection of their favorite songs and videos, but we also want it to be a place where people discover new music. With two channels available at launch, it’s a living, breathing platform that we hope will become a source for new music discovery, and we hope fans will jump in and play music they may not have heard before.
So will it consist of carefully selected playlists or will players be able to choose songs on demand like a sort of Guitar Hero version of Spotify?
GHTV is a destination where gamers can see some of the newest music first and play along with it, but it’s not a subscription-based music platform. Rather it is an always on, 24 hour music channel that players jump into and jam along to official music videos - we like to look at it as the world’s first playable real music video network and it provides a continually updated pipeline of official playable music videos that will add fresh new content well beyond launch. That said, there will be an on demand option so you can play your favourite track right away if you want to.
Harmonix also recently announced a revival of, Rock Band with a promise to support previously bought DLC and instruments. Do you feel having a new instrument starts you at a disadvantage, or with Guitar Hero Live's new direction do you no longer consider Rock Band to be a rival?
We are really excited to see the rhythm music genre come back to life. It speaks volumes to the demand for the category, especially as more people flock to the latest generation of gaming consoles. The music and gaming landscape has evolved a lot in the past five years, so all I can say is that we’re really excited about the innovation we’re bringing to the category.
Did you discover music through Guitar Hero? Tell
about your favourite Guitar Hero tracks.
