Activision is a beast that needs to be stopped. They will continue to ruin franchises like my beloved Guitar Hero the day they become a hinderance and lose an iota of profitability.
First, some preface about my history with music and games. They were always the two things that could soothe me as an angry young youth. The lyrics to the music I loved said all the things I never could articulate as a teenager coming into his own. The music was always an escape and helped me work out emotion and frustration and most importantly feelings that I was just beginning to understand. Music was a medium I understood having been a percussionist myself for some time. Gaming was something I was exposed to from a very early age and seemed magical at first, then turned into an escape when I entered my teenage years. I was able to explore worlds no one had ever dreamed of. Able to help the hero be the person he had to be, and, in the case of my favorite series The Legend of Zelda, actually be able to groom Link, and watch him grow up and become the hero his world needed. This was an idea I was obsessive about as I was entering the stage where I would not only grow up physically the most but be old enough to notice the changes. The two mediums then began to intertwine. Because of the limited space games had at the time I used to substitute my own music by playing my boom box and muting the television, altering the experience the game designer had in mind to fit my own emotional needs. Then games moved to composition and voice acting making it impossible to hear the story and listen to the music of my choosing. For the majority of the 5th generation of consoles (Gamecube, Playstation 2, and Xbox) I was music-less. My special experience had been robbed and I prayed for the day that music and games would come together again in a worth while event.
There were a few attempts to mix the genres. The electronic game Simon being the first to match lights and sounds for a level above infant. Rez for the Dreamcast being the most memorable one as well as the first commercial failure to scorn the genre. Not to mention the wildly popular Dance Dance Revolution games as well as karaoke game like Karaoke Revolution and Sonly’s own SingStar series. Then a company emerged named Harmonix in ’95. They wanted to sell music game makers better equipment to make them sound better and therefore be a better experience. That didn’t work. The revelation they came to is best surmised from their Wikipedia Page.
“They came to a realization that games like karaoke were popular not due through personal expression, but because they encouraged players to try to accurately recreate the songs through their actions. These games also focused on bringing musical experiences to gamers through simple, understandable interfaces commonly found in games.”
Sound like any game you know? But they weren’t quite there yet as they had two test runs that would come close to but not perfect the formula before the spotlight would fall on their love child Guitar Hero. Those test runs, so to speak, were Frequency and Amplitude. The idea is also best summarized by the games Wikipedia page.
“In the game, a player portrays a virtual avatar called a "FreQ", and travels down an octagonal tunnel, with each wall containing a musical track. These tracks contain sequences of notes. As the player hits buttons corresponding to the note placement on the track, the "sonic energy" from within is released and the music plays.”
Now this is starting to sound a LOT like the game that caught fire and lit up the sales charts. Yes, the perfection of this gameplay mixed with the solid rock based soundtrack and love for music that the people at Harmonix had turned into the first Guitar Hero. The largest difference between this and any other music game that had come before it was that this was not controlled by any system on the market’s controller. This particular game shipped with a plastic replica guitar that had colored fret buttons that needed to be pressed and a strum bar that needed to be clicked at the same moment to produce music from the track.
This is where the history stops and I come back into the fold. I bought the first Guitar Hero being a fan of music and games. This game seemed like the godsend I had been asking for, for so many years. Finally I had a soundtrack (Albeit all covers well done with guitars by friend Marcus Henderson of Drist and Grim Ripper fame.) that I could rock out too and really escape into the idea that I was a rock star. The only problem was that I was the only person who knew of this game. I had to introduce this game to my friends. Soon there were weekly Guitar Hero parties held in my house where the arcade environment and multiplayer let us go toe to toe with scored and head on battles. This game could not get any better. Then... it DID. Guitar Hero II came out to rousing successes and wonderful sales. This brought great success to the company that had struggled to make this vision possible. Yet it also drew the attention of some powerful money men at Activision, a company who’s new business model favored easy development costs and high profit and the Guitar Hero franchise fit perfectly into that equation. The pinnacle in my mind was Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360. The Arcade format bred competitive nature, the game finally had online leaderboards so that you could boast to your buddies. The formula that Harmonix had set up in Frequency had been perfected and the game was competitive without breeding contempt for other players. Every game had the same, “it was just fun to play” feeling.
Then Activision took over and handed production to other developers. Developers who had thus far made excellent skateboarding games. Music was not their forte’ and yet to their credit they made what I would call the “tournament edition” of the game. Guitar hero 3 had a licensed soundtrack that made the music sing thanks to Activision’s money and Neversoft took the tried and true formula and cranked it up to 11. This was the game I played the most, but, to be fair, I worked at a game store and it was allowed. The subsequent 9 “main title” releases and 19 “expansion/ portable” games were poised to capitalize on the best selling and record breaking GH3 but the over saturation hit the casual market the wrong way.
I’m not going to get into the actual “death” of the franchise as a whole because that’s not what this article was about. Plus every other major game blog has already commented on the obvious reasons of why the series was axed. This was about how I waited half of my life for a game like these to come along and how I felt along the way; with a dash of history mixed in. The plain and simple of it is that these games ruled my life for 3 years straight. I am so unbelievably sad to see Activision simply stop trying because THEY let the games become unprofitable by not understanding the music game bubble and casual gamers. This franchise was there for me at a pivotal point in my life when I need it the most. I am happy Harmonix has found new life and perfected Guitar Hero for every instrument with Rock Band. Even better that they want to make us who still follow actual musicians. Harmonix will always live on I believe and through them the spirit of their first success will always stay as an inspiration for their future endeavors. I for one, can’t wait to see what they do next.
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