Version History: Guitar Hero

23:56Wow, it's very 2005. Yeah. And they're having a great time. It's the jam. But so that video, that extremely 2005 video, a bunch of people who made Guitar Hero are like, that's the time we went from something a few people had heard of to like a game people were excited about. This is before the game was available. They got an early demo of it. It was live. It was public. They were super excited about it. And they were like, all of a sudden, that drops and everything changes. And they're like, people start taking their phone calls. People start caring. People start, like, actually wanting this game in their lives, which is nuts because that video is deeply hilarious.

24:32You got to channel it through your 2005 energy brain. I love it. I have no notes. We should wear more capes. We should all be wearing capes right now as we do this, honestly. I agree, like, unironically. Hey, guys, let's do some capes in post. All right, thank you. Thanks. Yeah, this is why we green screen everything. This is totally fine. One other thing that I found was that one of Red Octane's biggest worries with this game and one of the things that they were struggling with at the very beginning was that the game was humongous. Like, I have this, I have the controller here behind me. It's like, it's a big guitar.

25:02Well, the good news is retailers love huge boxes and they love making shelf space. So this is, this is what seems, they were like genuinely worried about it. It was expensive. It was 70 bucks for the whole kit, which now sounds just adorable. It was a big deal that I was able to get this. And my dad, who had like the super high-powered six-figure job, he was the one who bought it for me because he was the only one who could afford something. A$70 video game? Are you high? Yeah, back then that was nuts. You got the game and the controller for$70. You got the game and the controller. That's what I'm saying.

25:36Just thinking about that now in 2025 brain is just like mind-blowing. The concept of loan would be$200. That's a dozen eggs today. So, but this was their big worry, and they had trouble getting people to buy it because they're like, well, we can either stock your game, which no one's ever heard of and maybe nobody wants, or we can put like 20 discs of other things on the shelf. And they ended up just getting Best Buy. And in particular, like one buyer at Best Buy was super into it. They said yes. They set up demo stations in the stores, and this was like, this was the thing that they were like, we're going to get people to try it and buy it, and they're going to love it.

26:13and spoiler alert, they did. But before we get into that, we should take a really quick break and then we're going to talk about what happened when it launched and then what happened afterwards. We'll be right back.

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28:03Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you, like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Okay, we're back. So, you guys would remember this more than I would. I was, you know, I was way too cool to play video games in 2005. What were you doing in 2005?

28:44What was I doing in 2005? Let's get into it. I was the fourth best player on my JV volleyball team right about when this launched. Watch out. So that was cool. Yeah, no time for video games. People really liked that. I was also very into American Idol at the time. This was like peak David American Idol season. It was great. It was as good as it got. How were your outfits? Good? That might have been right after the double popped polo phase. But it wasn't. Oh, you were that kid. Oh, I was right there. Okay, good. But it wasn't. This was well after Pookas. Okay. Oh. But not far enough. Okay. You know what I mean?

29:19Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was doing great. I'm just trying to get a mental picture for the listeners at home. Trying to, you know, oh, yeah. Put us in a place. You would have missed, like, the big JNCO pants because you weren't in high school at this time. No, some of the skate kids had that in the 90s. But I was, 2005 for me was a pair of Carhartts and a white T-shirt. That was it. That was the uniform. That's the dream. And that would work today. I was going to say, it turns out you had it going. So this game drops, Christmas season, 2005. And at least from what I can tell looking back, it was pretty much a giant hit right away.

29:52Do you guys remember when it came out? You got it pretty quickly, it seems like. I think I got mine. I had to have gotten it after my PlayStation 2 because that's what I played it on. And it was, I didn't get that at launch. It probably was around like 2007. Because I bought it, I got a PlayStation 2 specifically for Kingdom Hearts. And I think that was 2006. So I don't think I got a Guitar Hero until like 2007. I love this as a way to remember the years of your life. I'm like, I got game launches and that's... That's what I do. Yeah. Everything for me is like, oh, that was the year that Doom came out.

30:22So where was I? Okay, no, I got it. That's right. I can tell you the story about Kingdom Hearts 2 because I was in college and I remember going down to the college games. Hold on. Hard mode. Can you tell us the story in Kingdom Hearts 2? Yes. Because that's, oh, no. We don't have time for that in this podcast. That's the only thing I can tell you the story for. Sicko mode. Let's do it. Listen, for a bonus episode, Ash is going to spend four hours explaining Kingdom Hearts 2 to you. Just two. Not all of them. Just Kingdom Hearts 2. I was the nerd that was like watching that IGN video and like getting that pre-order in early and like picking it up.

30:56I was, that was what I, you know, before I was doing it full time for a living. That was my, those were my friends. Just my PlayStation. I'm just kidding. I love this for you. They were my friends. Yeah. So the story is that the harmonics in red octane had made 100 ,000 of these. And this thing immediately becomes like a phenomenon. Everybody wants it. They can't sell them fast enough. Everybody wants 10 times as many as they have. It ended up being the second best-selling game of that holiday season, which for a game that never existed before and was that expensive at the time, just strikes me as nuts.

31:30What was the first? This was my trivia question. What do you think the number one game of the holiday season of 2005 was? Halo 2. Just going to Halo 2. I'm going to say this is like a video game version of Price is Right rules. I'm just going to say Madden. It was Madden. Yeah. Madden's kind of a boring answer. I know, but that's why it's like, well, you bet a dollar. You know, it's like a boring answer, but you get it right a lot of times. That's true. Madden, which I assume in 2005 was the exact same game that it is in 2025. I haven't changed it yet. No, that's just what we're doing here. So this game comes out.

32:03People really love it. I have a montage here of some of the reviews that I would like you to see because they are a delight. Have you ever secretly dreamed of being a rock star wailing on your electric guitar to this sold-out crowd. What's the game you've spent the most time playing this year? Guitar Hero. John Davison there. With one of the biggest controllers ever to grace the market. Still at IGN. A two-and-a-half-foot-long plastic guitar. Guitar Hero stands out as one of the top PS2 games released in the past year. It's really addictive, really exciting. There's Jeff Grossman at GameSpot. Guitar Hero won't make you play a real guitar like a rock star.

32:36It certainly makes you feel like one for a five out of five. Just flexing by calling out people by name. Well, I'm just setting the, you know, for the old heads in the house who were watching all that same stuff when they were kids. See, Gertzman, you almost have to like salute. So it was like people loved it. It was like overwhelmingly the thing where once people try it, they love it. Continued to be a thing. Just like the other harmonics games, critical hit. Yeah. But now also commercial hit. Right. You know, some of that magic coming together. And it does seem like the biggest difference between a lot of that was just the guitar.

33:14And I think one of the things I thought was really interesting about the way that they made this controller was that they wanted to have a guitar that actually felt like playing guitar, which is like it did and it didn't work. You know what I mean? Like we were all just playing earlier and like I play that a lot better than I play guitar and I don't play that very well. But they based this thing on a Gibson SG, which means nothing to me. Sure, guitar stuff. It certainly will mean some things to other people. and the thing that they took from Guitar Freaks was the idea of like sort of the rough shape of the thing but then they made it a lot more complicated it has five buttons so you can play I think it's three different power chords that actually feel like you're playing the power chords which is basically all you need to be a rock star they had the whammy bar which fun fact I learned they added before they had any idea what it was going to be for they were just like this thing should have a whammy bar and they're like why and they're like I don't know it's going to have a whammy bar let's take all let's take that energy into everything we do in life yeah right like I just where can we we're gonna find news for it yeah that's a good like newsroom question where's the whammy bar and then they also a thing I learned was they in the name of making this feel like you were playing guitar they had a freestyle mode for this where you could just play guitar in the game and actually like make stuff creatively ended up not making it into the game but it's like a very harmonics thing to do where like all the way back to the axe that like people just want to play but people left the controller I wish they did that because one of the challenges or frustrations of guitar here is when you're playing, especially if you're playing two-player, you have friends over, etc., like having, failing out is like a bummer when you're just trying to drink and play video games.

34:50And I think later they did add some of those modes back into future iterations of this game. But yeah, it's interesting to hear that they did it. But, you know, it's too bad they didn't get to it. They had nine whole months. I'm not quite sure why they didn't get to it. I know, seriously. It's plenty of time. I mean, the entire ethos, I guess, behind this game is that they wanted non-musicians to feel like a musician. And you can get about as close as you can get without actually being a musician with, like, Guitar Hero. Like, I play the saxophone, but I'm not, like, a guitar person, but I feel, it feels very good, even though it's not like, you know, as you were saying earlier, it's not exactly a one-for-one replication of actually playing a guitar.

35:30It's just close enough that I don't care. And it feels good. Like, it's a very tactile thing. I'm going to go ahead and say as a non-guitar player, it feels a lot better of them playing a guitar. It also is like, it's hard in a way that I think is really good and productive and instructive in a lot of these games, right? Like, I think one of the things that you encounter with a lot of these games is you sort of max out at how actually complicated the mechanic is. And then you have to invent new ways. You're like, okay, I'm going to do it at weird speeds or I'm going to do it with my eyes closed or whatever.

35:59This game is like, the runway for how much better you could get at it was super, super long. Well, interestingly, another thing launched in 2005, which has a very close alignment to guitar hero success which is youtube and people being able to record themselves and put up these crazy high scores these crazy stunt videos um you know as a video game blogger in 2005 6 etc like crazy guitar hero videos was a staple of the genre staple of the form like just somebody doing something sick you know in the same way you'd post a video of somebody getting a high score on geometry wars it was just novel seeing human beings do things that are hard.

36:37And a lot of video games are, you see this later in like eSports and stuff, it's hard to communicate excellence in a video game. It's hard to communicate excellence in League of Legends. Like, what are they doing? I'm not, that went down that lane? I'm sure, okay. It's like why a layperson doesn't watch competitive chess and have a good time. It's hard. You can watch guitar here and be like, ah, shit, that's good. That's really hard. It's going very fast and they're hitting all the buttons. All the buttons on time. So the physicality of it, in the same way a slam dunk looks impressive. I cannot do that.

37:08He jumped good. And like seeing somebody play Guitar Hero good is just impressive to watch as a human. And I think a lot about that sense of like the game itself encourages you, the player, to improve. And you know when you have. It's like very clear when you've improved enough. And not all games do that. A lot of games you improve when your character levels up. And that is how you get better because you've played long enough. But there's a real meaningful, tangible reward to playing more Guitar Hero. And the interesting and the very cool thing about that is that you can look at those videos of these high-level players, and you're impressed.

37:46But you can also, there's a very clear way that you yourself can do that. That was when I was playing Guitar Hero, and I was trying to make it my thing. you know, I would graduate. Like, I can't do, like, the pinky with the orange button. And, like, part of, like, my training, like, that I developed this training course for me was, like, learning how to, like, slide my hand up and down. You can't see me. I'm, like, sliding my hand up and down the front. You also can't see. She's got, like, a Rocky-style montage outfit on. She's actually playing guitar right now. I don't know how that's even possible.

38:13To slide, you know, your pinky finger, your hand down so your pinky can get at that button. And when I was able to do that, like, reliably, like, you feel like, God, like, oh, okay. There's a gulf between, you know, looking at someone play Halo at a very high level and think, I could do that. And it's not the same. And I could look at that of Guitar Hero and I'm like, oh, I can actually do that. And that was like part of why Guitar Hero was so big for me personally and like why it is so fun even all these years later just to watch. Presumably also why I named my profile on that memory card God.

38:47Because it made you feel like God. You feel like God. I got real good at it. So they made this first game in nine months, and then all of a sudden, the next year in 2006, everything goes insane. And Chris, I want you to explain this to me because I spent a lot of time researching how, so Harmonix sells to Viacom in 2006. Red Octane sells to Activision, also in 2006. And this whole thing just sets off like a house on fire. This is, in some ways, like early Activision deal-making. Activision, you know, is a relatively, I'll say small, but more humble publisher than the one that you think of today in that earlier period.

39:24They had a bunch of hits. They had Tony Hawk on PlayStation, et cetera, but they published Guitar Hero along with Red Octane and had like this licensing arrangement. But they bought Red Octane. So they bought the peripheral. They bought the hardware company and they bought the brand name Guitar Hero. Like we mentioned before, Harmonix owns the software. They own the game. And so Harmonix gets purchased by Viacom, or more specifically, a new imprint called MTV Games. Shout out to Steven Tattello. And this is, I remember there was an ethical question over whether Steven, for example, at MTV News, like, how do you cover the game?

39:58It's MTV. And he's like, it's different. It's like not the same. It's a big company. But the alignment there was kind of wild. And the timeline that we're talking about, again, 2005, Guitar Hero 1 comes out. Boom. 2006, Guitar Hero 2 comes out. It comes out for PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360. And then 2007, Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 come out. And so by 2007... The pace of that is just bonkers. Like both of these companies sell. And like I'm used to a lot of acquisitions where like a company sort of disappears and languishes and everything falls apart. But it seems like basically both of these companies showed up to work at their new giant corporate parents.

40:37And they were like, you have a new game due in 12 minutes. So you have the originators of the gameplay, Harmonix, Making Rock Band, Critical Hit. That was the one that I think, you know, the nerds really appreciated. It brought everything together. But then you had Guitar Hero, which had the brand name. It had, at this point, the marketing muscle behind it. And it went on to be a massive sales hit. And I think that was the first retail game in history to crack 1B. That's what we call in the biz$1 billion. That's what we call it in the biz, by the way. And so you had these, like, two competitors.

41:09There's one, you know, that still had the brand name and still had the sort of retail weight. And then the other critical darling and set up a really great competitive set. I refused on principle to play rock band because I had like guitar hero loyalty and rock band was like the knockoff. And now knowing what I know, it's actually the exact opposite. The soul of guitar hero lived on in rock band. I had no brand loyalty at that point. That was purely a commercial decision. and like, oh, you want me to spend however much money to buy like this entire kit? Absolutely not. We're just going to stick with our PlayStation 2 and our three Rock Band games.

41:44I was a snob. I went to, in 2007, I mentioned E3 changed. 2006 was the last like E3 of that kind. In 2007, they downsized. They went to this smaller media only event in Santa Monica where you went from like hotel to hotel. That was the year. It was terrible. And Rock Band debuted at an invite-only hotel event. And I remember just being so excited to go in. And we went in. I still remember to this day Nick Chester, who at the time was editor at Destructoid, another publication, later went on to work with Harmonix. Now he's at Annapurna, I think. Nick, where are you? Annapurna. He crushed at it.

42:22He was really, like, he's good. And every other, for years, when there was a lot of Rock Band events, you'd go and see Nick at them. And he'd shred. And you're like, okay. That's such a weird party trick. I love that. It's a great party. It is so specific. Like, you know, what is the worst superpower that you can have? Like, that is a fantastic party trick. Like, it really is. He was like a rock band influencer. He knew how to play the game. He was good at it. But I remember just like seeing that performance, walking into that room. I remember exactly what it looked like. I walked into the dimly lit.

42:52This is the basement. Living room. No, this is the suite. It's a fancy suite at a hotel in Santa Monica. and they had the drum set up and they had a TV in front of them and there's just like 20 people just watching these journos play rock band. And it was like one of these really indelible memories for me of like a big shift, right? The competitive audacity to launch rock band against Guitar Hero 3 from the original developers with a full set with singing karaoke revolution style. They had all the pieces. And they put it together. A quite literal mic drop. Yep. And they had another fun thing about Rock Band is they had the masters.

43:31It wasn't just covers. They had this MTV relationship and they were able to leverage that. And so, you know, Guitar Hero 3 outsold it because it was cheaper and it was the brand name. But there was this new, really intense and very well-earned competitive landscape that just didn't exist before. And it made that launch in 2007, everything that came after that, just like really exciting. It was its own little console war, if you will. Yeah, it just continues to be wild to me how quickly all of that happened. And then they start making, like, several of them a year. These things just started coming out in, like, crazy, absurd, rapid succession.

44:10And to your point about the Masters, one of the things I thought was really interesting was that these games wound up being sort of crushed by their own success, in a way. Because at the very beginning, either nobody cared about Guitar Hero and didn't want their stuff because they just didn't want to negotiate the deal for the song. Or they were able to get it pretty cheap because artists were like, well, whatever, who is this game? We'll take some money. Sure. The amount of money you made off of video game licensing before that was nothing. Right. Exactly. But then as it gets bigger, all of a sudden, getting in a Guitar Hero game becomes a huge win for you as an artist.

44:45in the same way that it's like the modern equivalent is probably like the Fleetwood Mac song blowing up on TikTok, right? And it's like all of a sudden these songs from 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago are zooming up the charts because of this one very specific property. And for a long time, it was Guitar Hero. That was like, if you were there, like you and your cool jazz music, right? People were picking up Guitar Hero and being exposed to completely new kinds of music that they then like cared about for a long time. so then all of a sudden it's like okay well A we want to be on this game very badly but B we would like a piece right especially as Guitar Hero 3 comes out and sells a billion dollars and becomes huge they're like well a huge part of the appeal of this is our songs this doesn't work without the music that everybody likes which I think is an interesting like it would have been interesting to see them go all the way down the road of this is music no one knows would the game still have worked I don't know but then it like becomes a problem because they have to spend all of this money on their songs, eventually like the image and likeness of the people that they wanted to have.

45:49And so the bigger the game gets, the more expensive the game gets. And it starts to sort of collapse on itself in a certain way, especially as the game starts to get a little less popular, which happened really fast. Like the whole Guitar Hero era was like five years, which is bonkers to me. They split into two companies. They made a thousand more games. And ran it into the ground. Five years. Yeah. Five years. Like, by 2010, they've both, Guitar Hero, let's see, the number I have is by the end of 2010, Guitar Hero had sold$2.47 billion worth of games. And Rock Band was$1.2 billion. This is by 2010.

46:24Meanwhile, at this point, Call of Duty is doing a billion dollars a year. So, do with that what you will. But these games are, like, huge. And then it just fell off a cliff. Because people, everybody who wanted Guitar Hero, I guess, had it. Like, it was very funny playing the first one again today. Because I'm like, oh, this game still rips. Like, I don't play this one. and I'm like, you know what I want now is Guitar Hero 2. It's just like, oh no, I have Guitar Hero now. Like, I'm good. It reminds me of the Wii and Wii Fit to some degree. Guitar Hero was very, very popular with people who are not video game players.

46:52My partner, to this day, I live in a house, anyone that's seen me on a meet call, I live in a house with a home office full of video games and video game junk. My partner plays one game. It's Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero or Slash Rock Band. That's it. And I would break it out. We broke it out recently, a few months ago, and prepped for this. And my son has friends over, and they play Beatles rock band, and they have a great time. It's just universally appealing. You can put it in front of anyone, and they enjoy it. And they get it. And they get it. They get it right away. And the game was a big hit with people that weren't gamers, but it also means it's easy to put down.

47:25This is not the thing you keep coming back to. It's big. It's in your living room. They used to sell furniture to keep your rock band kit in, an ottoman that flipped up that you could store all your stuff in. Everything was so big. Folks in the chat, hit me up with that link to that piece of furniture. That's got to be on Facebook Marketplace somewhere. Well, even then, like, there was a time when getting a whole rock band kit was on, you know, pre-Facebook Marketplace Craigslist for a dollar. Like, people were just getting rid of this stuff, and it was so easy to get. And then five years later, you're like, oh, shit, I need that.

47:55Yeah. Oh, it's expensive now. And it's hard to get. I used to work at FYE, which, for you younger kids, used to be a CD store. Sorry, a coming in what store? FYE, exactly. Exactly. And we sold video games. We're one of the rare FYEs that sold video games. This is in Tower City in Cleveland. And to your point about the Wii and this crossover appeal is we had Guitar Hero controllers. And the number one Guitar Hero controller that people would ask for whenever they would come and buy stuff was the one for the Wii. Because that's what they wanted. We would get them in and they would disappear like that because that's what people want.

48:32But even now, you go to like, I don't know if they have that around here, but like the Exchange, which is one of those like secondhand places, they always have a Guitar Hero controller. People are always buying them. They're always there. They're always like more than what you would expect to pay for them. One of the things that we wanted to do for our wedding, we got married in our backyard. It was we tried to put together a rock band set. And that would be like wedding entertainment for people to just like pick up. That's such a good idea. Yeah, we weren't able to make it work. But like for months and months and months up to the lead up, like my husband would go down to the basement and hook up his PlayStation 3 and you can hear him tapping on the drums for Rock Band because A, it's excellent cardio and B, it's fun.

49:12It still works. It's very hard to find a game like that that's still like you can just put it down in front of anybody and they immediately get it and it still feels the way that it did 20 years ago. My Rock Band drum set, still the same one I got in 2007. I have a piece of diamond plated metal cut to the foot pedal because the foot pedal used to snap in half. I got that fixed. And then I put, they sold these sound dampening pads that you'd put on the pads because it was actually very loud when you didn't play it. And so I put those on to make it quiet. And then I still use, at one point, my proudest moments, I caught a drumstick from Questlove, from the roots.

49:51And it has like a little signature on it. So I have two drumsticks, but one of them is my little Questlove drumstick. Still my drumstick I use for rock band. That's awesome. Yeah. It's good. It's a good setup. Come hang out. Questlove, if you're watching, I know you are. Get at us. We know he's a gamer too. Hit me up. I'm a silly Questlove. We'll hang out. Love this. So we're basically at the end of the Guitar Hero story now which is kind of wild. Harmonix went on to make a game called Dance Central which is a Kinect game because Harmonix can't help itself. But some part of this is also the physicality that's going on here, right?

50:23Right. It's the Wii and the physicality of Wii Sports. It's Guitar Hero and the physicality of Guitar Hero. And then Microsoft's like, ooh, physicality. We need some of that. We'll do Connect. And that didn't, it didn't quite go how they thought. And then they went all in on Xbox One and that's all she wrote. But yeah, Dance Central. Dance Central, by most accounts too, wasn't my cup of tea. But it did okay and people liked it. It was again, critically acclaimed. Yeah, yeah. And then Rock Band lived on a while, got onto some next-gen consoles. Guitar Hero, everybody kind of soured on after a while.

50:54I think it became such an obvious money grab that everybody just kind of gave up. They gave up. The thing I didn't know is the coda to this story is Harmonix got acquired by Epic Games and is now part of Fortnite. Yes. Fortnite Festival. Which is actually like a perfect ending that I had no idea had ever happened. It's kind of like a very good Happily Ever After. Yeah, it kind of is. Because that game still lives on. Yeah. And you can still play it and you can still get new controllers that work with your computer and play it. Can you still buy a guitar for Fortnite Festival? Yes. They do exist?

51:23Oh, that makes me happy. Riff master. My favorite part of Fortnite Festival is I can now get Sabrina Carpenter to play music in Fortnite Festival, where I can also have her kill fools in Battle Royale. And that's just dope. I got Hakuna Mitsu killing fools. I got Sabrina Carpenter killing fools. I feel like if you've ever wanted a perfect encapsulation of where games have gone in 20 years, it's that sentence that you just said. Sabrina Carpenter killing fools? Yeah. Sabrina Carpenter shredding and killing fools. Yeah. 2025. 25. I got Billy Iash, Hakimitsu, and Sabrina Carpenter on my squad. We're going to roll out on you.

51:55With Ariana Grande and LeBron James. Watch out. First of all, it's a sick rock band lineup. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Second of all, it's good stuff. All right. We need to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we have the version history questions.

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52:55Sierra, let's get moving. All right, we're back. So in every episode, we have eight questions that we try to answer about every single product that we talk about on the show. The first question is, what was the best thing about the very first Guitar Hero? Chris, what do you think? I'm going to go ahead and say the thing that was true before Guitar Hero and the thing that was true to some degree after Guitar Hero, which was the game itself. right just the rhythm gameplay itself was adaptable it worked in these different formats it worked with different instruments the guitar is the thing that got people to pick it up but when people played frequency and amplitude they liked them they just didn't pick them up and so the guitar got them to pick it up but the game itself was the best thing there okay i i like the physicalness of it i like the different kinds of genres of music like encapsulates like uh across like several decades.

53:45Like you've got, I don't know, I can't even think of this stuff off the top of my head. But just that smattering of different music tracks from different genres, like definitely opened my eyes to the possibilities. And I really appreciate that. I like it. I'm going to go more niche, which is that I think the real-time audience feedback was amazing. And it's still like an underrated thing that you don't get enough of in video games anymore. People booing at you. When it boos, it feels bad. Yeah. It is like genuinely upsetting when you're playing poorly and the crowd starts booing. I'm just used to people booing at me all the time anyway, so I'm just used to it.

54:21Walking down the street getting booed at. It's just your day-to-day. I love them fill you. It's all right. All right. Question number two. What was the worst thing about the first Guitar Hero? Well, I was going to say the worst thing about Guitar Hero was when Activision came in and bought Red Octane, which I guess technically works. I guess that's true. That was technically in the life cycle of the first guitar hero. All right. I wasn't going to allow it, but I'll allow it. I'm going to go ahead and say, I can't remember 2005 and what it felt like. A time of like limitless opportunity and possibility.

54:55The future was bright and wide open. We probably had a lot of positive feelings about the world. I can't imagine. That was the year I graduated high school. So yeah, that was all. That was in my commencement speech. And then 2008 happens and. Imagine what a commencement speech is like today. Everyone's like, good luck out there. See ya. Bye. Bye, crypto. So I'm going to go ahead and say the price tag. I think, again, in the limitless pocketbooks of 2005, we all apparently had money and interest rates were low, I guess. I don't know. But that price tag, I'm sure it was an impediment for the people who could afford it.

55:33You know, could have been less. Hindsight 2020, I know, I know, I know. But$70 and you got the controller. And the gate. I know. Yeah, but gas was 50 cents or something. I don't know. No, but it's not. To buy a Coke for a nickel. You scamp, get out of here. No, that's what's fun. I think both of those things are true, right? In retrospect, it was very expensive and it was a big swing to be as expensive as it was. But we also look back and it's like, aw, weren't they adorable for thinking that was expensive? I know. This is bless their hearts. I think the worst thing, and this is somewhat controversial, and I might get in trouble for saying this, but the music library on the first one was not.

56:09for me. Especially because, again, this is American Idol watching recently Puka wearing David Pierce in 2005. Big ACDC fan. This was not nearly poppy enough for my taste. This was like the music that I listened to when my friends were in the car because I wanted to impress them. This was not the music that I listened to by myself in the car. Which was like, did I know all five parts to the NSYNC song, Tearing Up My Heart, and could sing any of the harmonies on demand? I did. and I could. That's the music I wanted to guitar hero. Ladies and gentlemen, David Pierce. And I eventually got some of that stuff, right?

56:46And I was like, the thing I liked, actually, I think I might have been the only person who liked the like artist-specific ones that came out eventually because some of those were just sort of closer to my zone. This was just, I wasn't cool enough to like rock music enough to really get into this game. Have you talked to your therapist about this? No, honestly, that felt really good to say. I'm not going to lie to you. I appreciate you guys being here for this. My claim to fame is at some later point when DLC happened in Rock Band, the theme song for the podcast I used to host, the Joystick Podcast, made its way to the DLC.

57:17That's cool, too. Yeah, RIP Joystick Podcast. That's a claim to fame right there. I like that. All right, question number three. Would it have been a bigger hit if Apple made it? No. Part of the reason why Guitar Hero occupies the space that it does is because it's really grimy. It's not polished. Apple would have over-engineered the hell out of this. It would have, we've got, would have gotten like all white, seriously heavy guitars that you could not like lift. It would have been so expensive. Like you think 70 bucks is expensive. Ridiculously expensive. It would have been one button because, you know, it's too many buttons.

57:49It just says guitar and you just press the button. That pared down, stripped down, like funkiness of it, like still works. Like it's good to have like an older game that with all that you can see the edges of it and the edges are actually really good. I totally agree. And especially the first one is like it's such a weird sort of bizarre game and like all the names are inside jokes. There's a human footprint or fingerprint in that game that would have been completely erased if Apple had done it because nobody human works at Apple. I'm sorry. All right. Next question. What feature of this thing should every current version have?

58:22Oh, okay. So the thing that would go back in time and change about this is I would steer Bobby Kotick away and like tell him to go do more Moneyball stuff and be like a baseball financier instead of getting into video games. I had a feeling that was going to be the answer. Do you think that there was like a much longer life for something like Guitar Hero? Absolutely. You think? Because my only counter to that would be the, like, I already own Guitar Hero. Maybe I don't need it. Like, maybe there just was a ceiling in the same way that, like, everybody who was going to buy a Peloton already bought a Peloton.

58:54And that kind of screwed Peloton. Like. I think we could have gotten more out of it if we didn't oversaturate the market as fast as we did. Probably true. You know, you've got all these different versions like Beatles Rock Band and, like, Guitar Hero Aerosmith and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Like, we didn't need all that. Like, give them time to space it out. maybe develop more innovations for their controller or do something like give them time to cook a little bit instead of just like serving meal after meal after meal after meal and then eventually we're full and we can't eat anymore um yeah i think time and not saturated work it would have saved this game a little bit and we would have had it for a little bit longer i don't think it would have maybe become like a call of duty kind of deal where you know we need one every year or we need one so often, but, and it's okay to let video games, like, die, essentially.

59:44Like, we had a good run. I think five years was too short for this run. That's fair. I'll give you that. I'm going to argue a counterpoint to that, and then I'll give you my reason. But I think that, to some degree, they had this window, just like the Wii, where a bunch of people bought it. They bought the big controllers, the big drum sets, and there's a limited period of time before they put that on Craigslist, or they put it in a garage sale. And so you've got, you know, your Aunt Linda has the whole setup, and she liked it one year. Like, she's not going to keep it forever. It's not going to go in the basement.

1:00:11And when I break out my set, the number of people who are like, oh man, I used to have it. Nobody has it anymore. Everyone got rid of it. Nobody keeps it in the basement. I'm just a sicko. First, if I'm going back in time and I can redo it all, I'm gonna buy a lot of tickets. I'm gonna bring back a sports book and just put a dollar in the high yield savings account, etc., etc. So I'm going to do all that first. Sure, that's good. Put some money in a Panama account too. So am I Red Octane or Harmonix? Who am I? Interesting. You're the CEO of Harmonix. No, this is a treasure-own adventure. This is The Walking Dead.

1:00:46So you have to get a branching path. Ashes, right. If I'm Red Octane, I buy Harmonix. Okay. That was a big boo-boo. That's a little bit of a mistake. Just split up. Don't split the party. I buy Harmonix. I make them, you know, I buy Merge, right? Like just straight up some structure in which that those two things stay together. Just make it one thing. And then in terms of like the saturation, you have a little bit less of a saturation problem with one major product that is sort of excellent instead of two excellent products. From harmonics, hmm, that's a little trickier. I mean, maybe I would, maybe same answer, but I would propose a merger.

1:01:22I would propose some kind of, you know, don't just pay us to do this contract work for hire. Give us a piece of the pudding and we'll keep doing it with you and see how that works out. Okay, so you also think that in theory there could have been a bigger, longer Guitar Hero history than we got. I think that part of that history has to account for having a second marketplace player that was in its own right excellent, making a clearly duplicative product. In that sense that there wasn't just one product that was saturated in the market, but two. That's pretty hard to unwind. And who's to say that, you know, this Harmonix-Red Octane merger would continue to make rhythm games as like straight up simulations?

1:02:03Also true. We're starting to see now a lot of people incorporate rhythm games into other kinds of games. You got Crypt of the Necrodancer specifically. Those kinds of games. We could have seen something like that come out of them much earlier than what we're getting now. And I think giving them the opportunity to have that runway and not just be ground down in the dirt would have been potentially, you know, good for gaming as a whole. It is an interesting sort of parallel universe in which you have like mainstream interest in rhythm games in the United States and a company with theoretically tons of resources that only cares about making rhythm games.

1:02:40That like it is probably true that is hugely unexplored territory. I mean, I even think about like dumb examples like Supernatural, the fitness game for VR. It's like that game was huge and fun. It was a completely different use of that same mechanic. There's probably a lot of places you could point that thing. Yeah, yeah. Beat Saber has some of the same make-your-own-song mechanics. Somebody made, there's mods on the PC version. Somebody made an incredible version. You can check it out at home for the Outer Wilds soundtrack on Beat Saber. It's incredible. But I was thinking about another thing, and just to give Activision some credit here.

1:03:15They did try and, you know, find new parts of that market when the guitar and rock music part of the market died off. DJ Hero? DJ Hero. Oh, okay. DJ Hero. You're serious. I'm serious. No, DJ Hero's great. Freestyle games. Yeah, you both said that word, but you said it very differently. She's like, DJ Hero? I'm like, DJ Hero. DJ Hero. I got two DJ Hero turntables in my office. It's a good game. DJ Hero 2 is good too. The tracks are great. These great mashups. They brought in great DJs. They did, I think, really good work. That game was, again, a critical hit. Did not sell great. I think there was some attempt to try and keep that party going, and it didn't quite work out.

1:03:54and they rebooted it. Freestyle Games, again, rebooted Guitar Hero Live, it was called, I think. Same developer, but... Your office must be enormous. You've described so many like 20-year-old peripherals that no one cares about that I'm like, at some point, you just have a, you know, six-story office going on here full of video games. I got a virtual boy. I got it all. Here's the thing. It's not huge, but it's very dense. I'll give you a tour one day. It's great. All right, next question. What feature of this thing should every current version have? And I will rephrase this one slightly for Guitar Hero, which is if you could borrow one either piece of the game or mechanic or idea about Guitar Hero and shove it back into mainstream gaming in 2025, what would it be?

1:04:38Star Power. So we haven't talked about this through this entire podcast, but like part of Guitar Hero, if you've never played it, you can build up like a resource like Star Power and then you can deploy it to get like super high scores or whatever. You can also use it to come in and save you when you're failing. So I think modern games could do a lot with, I know there's this whole like thing about get good and, you know, Dark Souls is game for adults or whatever. Wrong. But exactly. And having some kind of mechanic, like you are clearly sucking at this. And instead of like getting these pithy, like, would you like to switch to a lower difficulty?

1:05:11Like any of those patronizing messages, like there's something that you can deploy to make, to save you, to make you better or to get you through like this difficult part. So it's like you're bad, but you did one sick thing. So you're back. Yeah, exactly. I love that. That's the dream. That's life. You just do one sick thing, we're so back. I'm waiting. It hasn't hit me yet any day now. It'll happen. Also, Star Power, the fact that you could do it by tilting up the guitar. Is so cool. Very cool. Very well played. Chris, what do you think? This is tricky, but I think the thing for me that was really transformative about it, again, something about the timeline with YouTube.

1:05:46I think there's still something here with live streaming and games and watching people beat Dark Souls bosses using Guitar Hero controllers and all this stuff. The idea of performance. That the video game itself is performance. The tools that you use to play it are performance. And I think a lot about an essay that we published on Polygon and about Spelunky and live streaming and how Spelunky's challenges were only solved by a community playing in parallel with each other. That they could only sort of understand the complexity of the game by building upon what other people had already done. and so this idea of like games that exist and augmented by distribution channels that are not the game YouTube or Twitch or whatever and the physicality of it that sense that you can see actually tell when somebody's better and that you can share that and that is not the game it is this different asset this different thing and in a world where everything is connected through streaming and channels and distribution mechanics it's strange to me that more games don't don't specifically build themselves to travel that way.

1:06:53So that would be my thought. I like that. Mine is just physical controllers. I just want more game-specific items to hold. You say that, but you really don't. So my only reason for thinking that I do is playing Mario Kart with the actual wheel. Yeah, no, you're right. Is a delight. It is a delight. I don't know how far this idea goes. It's possible it goes right to there and nowhere else. And I also understand that what I'm asking is for a lot of expensive things that I want. I have this illness. I have the Taito Drum Master set for Switch. I have... The office just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

1:07:30I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. To my partner who's not listening to this at all. I'm sorry. I've got the maracas up there from Samba Di Amigo. I've got all the dumb... If they make a dumb thing that looks up to a video game, I'm like, well, I guess I have to have it. I can't not have it. I'm down. Just reboot Duck Hunt in 2025 and I will buy the thing again. I'm just saying. All right, next question. Is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful? And I think, I suspect the answer is the alternate timeline of these companies do not get acquired and blame.

1:08:06They acquire each other and get to have that long life, longer life, hopefully. I would have just really liked to have seen them iterate on the idea of applying rhythm game fundamentals to different kinds of games. I think that's a really fun thing that we're doing now. And I wish we had more of that. So game developers, please, like incorporate rhythm stuff into your games because that's how you get me. I like it. Chris, anything else? I don't know. I think that the time it launched was really unique. Maybe a couple of years earlier, it wouldn't have had the same opportunity. I was going to ask about this too.

1:08:40It launched on the PlayStation 2, which is launched at the tail end. Again, new console generation coming out. so it launched on a console that had a higher install base than any home console ever made before and it just had a lot of things going for it it really was like a little bit of you know the right people the right place the right time and then a little bit of serendipity and cosmic kismet there i can think of a lot of ways it would have gone worse right like the size of that hit is hard to imagine it's hard to replicate and it hasn't happened again in that way so i i kind of I'm going to say that, you know, maybe again, sort of these counterfactuals of mergers, etc.

1:09:18that didn't happen. I think they really nailed it. They did 100 % expert play on hard mode using their feet. They definitely had that vision and they executed on it. We want to make non-musicians feel like a musician and feel like a rock star. And they nailed that really good. They really did. And it's really hard and really rare to have like such a clear vision executed so perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. Which brings me to the next question. Especially in video games. Could you reboot it now? Could we bring back Guitar Hero in 2025 and would it work? We do that. Like, that thing exists. That's what Fortnite Festival is.

1:09:54It hasn't like... Does that count? Like, I genuinely, like, I guess the pro case for that would be that Fortnite is so huge that something inside of Fortnite is sufficiently huge to work. But I feel like a feature of Fortnite is just never going to be the thing that Guitar Hero was. I think if you think about Fortnite, and I'm going to channel my Tim Sweeney for you here. Okay. Okay, Death to Apple, Death to Google, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But Fortnite is a platform at this point. So, if Fortnite's a platform, if Roblox is a platform, and if you think of it more as a platform, and what they're trying to do is incubate different games inside of this platform, there is Battle Royale, and that's our shorthand for where Fortnite is.

1:10:32But I think what Epic would really want you to believe is that Rocket Racing is a part of that platform, and that Fortnite Festival is, it's not reflected in the player accounts, which are still playing Battle Royale. But I think there's a world in which, like, are they on to something? Is there some future there? Is music and culture a part of Battle Royale? It is. And so how do you actually get the music and culture part out in gameplay that isn't about shooting people? That's where Festival comes in. Have they nailed it? I think you could probably make a strong case they have not nailed it.

1:10:59But I do think there is something there. I also think, and Ash, you could tell us about Clone Hero, like the community taking on games like this and making some of this themselves in a way that is not tied up with the vagaries of music licensing and the distribution platforms and channels. We have the music. We have our Spotify accounts. Like, how do you just, like, hook up a guitar controller and play? And I think that's what's so cool about video games in general is that when the corporations step out, the communities step in, and the community for Guitar Hero has stepped up in a big way where you have Clone Hero, which is this game that you can download for free.

1:11:33You can get all kinds of tracks for it, like tons and tons and tons and tons of tracks. You can make your own tracks for it. It plays on your computer. It will work with any kind of, you know, controller as long as you have an adapter and hook it up to your computer. And one of the things that I really like to do is I follow, you know, music creators and music game creators and watch them like do these super hard, like this is not musical at all. It just exists to be as difficult as possible and just watching them do that, it's just fun. It's fun. I downloaded Clone Hero 2 for myself because there was a moment like a couple years ago I think this was like on the tail end of like social distancing.

1:12:09We're all in lockdown. Like, OK, I'm going to make Clone Hero my thing like I tried to do with Guitar Hero and just play it. And I don't have to worry about like, I don't know, DLC or getting my PlayStation 3 to work or anything like that. It's just there on my computer. And I did that for a little bit. And my husband will tell you like every day for like, you know, a couple of weeks, I would go and I would play the same like six songs over and over trying to like relearn that muscle memory. And it was good for a bit. But what I've realized after playing this game today was that, like, I kind of don't want a 2025 version of Guitar Hero.

1:12:38I just want, like, that Guitar Hero again. Or I guess, like, a Guitar Hero with the songs that I like more. But it did make me realize, like, I don't know that I want more from this game. I just kind of want the game back in my life again. I don't know if I am going to be one of those people who forever regrets selling it on Craigslist. But playing it again, I kind of regret selling it on Craigslist. What if it was an NSYNC edition? I mean, I would never have sold it on Craigslist. For me, one of the appeals of retro games especially, and it gets complicated with 360, and if you bought games, you have to like restore your licenses to stuff.

1:13:07It's like a little janky, but when you go back to a PS2 and earlier, like the complexity of even just talking about Fortnite as a platform, like the simplicity of playing a game that just exists. You have it physically, it's on the disc, you hook up to a TV and it works. It is kind of wild in 2025 to have that experience where you're like, I plugged the thing and I haven't used it in a long time. And it works. Right. I don't have to update it. I don't have to download new things. I don't have to pay a subscription. I don't have to like remember a password. I just turn on the damn game and it plays.

1:13:34We are all old. Right? We are all old. I'm sorry. My caveat on that is two things. One. Kids don't know. Sometimes it doesn't work because you've got the input latency problem. You have some other challenges. Fair. Two, I brought my PlayStation Slim here, too slim because my PS2 fat, the disk drive doesn't work. It's temperamental. It works sometimes. You've got to, it was not going to work if I brought it on the train and bumped it the whole way. You've got to blow on it and put it back in. Yeah. So like those old consoles oftentimes just need a lot of attention. they aren't they will not last forever without maintenance and support and the folks who do that maintenance and support god bless you if you're out there it's not easy to find these folks and so the internet community to Ash's point takes over and starts to support this stuff but we do have a video game preservation problem you can't go to your library and get this stuff easily to play an old game it really is hard to access which is sad and so I think that you know part of my enthusiasm for having a home office full of this bullshit can I say bullshit on the podcast?

1:14:30is that I know I can't just go get it somewhere else if I don't keep it. Yeah, I like that. So, all right, last version history question. Does Guitar Hero belong in the Version History Hall of Fame? The rules for the Hall of Fame still in flux, but I would say the general rubric is, was this thing at least unusually important in the history of technology? Like, did this matter in some meaningful, specific way? and it has to it doesn't even have to be good it just has to matter does this thing matter enough to belong in the Hall of Fame? Yeah I think I mean there's only gonna be so many games that have this real confluence of like hardware software culture big moments events mergers like all those things that are part of the tech industry that are part of that sort of you know amplified growth it hits that in a way that breaks out of the normal niches of just video games and sort of transcends to some other larger cultural context.

1:15:30But it's also frivolous and silly, and it doesn't matter, and it is just fun, and it didn't change the world in that same way. It's not an iPhone or whatever. It is a tricky one. It was so big, and it burned so bright, and then it died. And that's what I would find beautiful about it. That's the beauty. It doesn't have to be transformative in that other way. It just has to have been fun and pleasant and well-intentioned. Yeah. I'm inclined to put it in just because I think it has a damn near 100 % approval rating as a thing. And I don't think there are that many things like that. I think it gets in for that reason.

1:16:11Yeah, I'm into it. All right. It's official. This controller behind us, we're going to hang it in the rafters or something until it all comes crashing down. All right. That is it for the show. Ash and Chris, thank you. This was so much fun. Yes, it was fun. Appreciate you guys doing this with me. I appreciate the invite. As always, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts. And if you want to support all of this and everything, the best thing you can do is subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com. It's a good website. We have journalism and websites and newsletters and podcasts like this one.

1:16:41Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time.

1:16:49Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.

1:17:24fascinating it's accompanied by his natural ally doug uh limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us cut the camera they see us only pay for what you need at liberty mutual.com

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