Evolution of Guitar Hero Games (2005-2018)

guitar hero is one of those games that sounds really awful on paper like a really gimmicky simulation game and yet somehow guitar hero blew up to be one of the biggest games and icons of the mid to late 2000s and it seems like just as quickly as Guitar Hero grew in popularity it died and often when I'm looking back at the games from the mid to late 2000s I asked myself what happened to this franchise that was so huge in the gaming industry well today on rocket South were taking a look at the evolution and death of Guitar Hero let's get into it in 2005 gaming company red octane noticed that there was a highly popular game in Japan called guitar freaks which was mostly available in arcades that took on a simulation style gameplay where you play a guitar - very popular music guitar freaks actually had gameplay that was pretty similar to what the gameplay we would see in Guitar Hero later on would be like but since this game was so popular in Japan redoctane saw the opportunity to maybe try to see if the game would be just as popular in Western markets redoctane already owned the gaming company Harmonix who had previously made games like karaoke revolution and wanted to see if maybe translating the gameplay style that was so popular in guitar freaks could translate well in a different market mind you this happened after the hype of games like Dance Dance Revolution that were already becoming popular and starting to make their way into the homes of regular gamers so the idea to develop a peripheral that used a guitar to simulate the style of actually playing the instrument was something that they thought could be profitable especially because it would give them an opportunity to add a slight increase in the cost of buying the game so that you could have the peripheral and with that Guitar Hero released in 2005 on the PlayStation 2 and was actually a pretty huge success especially with this being a game on hardware that was kind of ending the end of its lifecycle the guitar peripheral was kind of something new and something we hadn't seen in gaming yet and it ended up sparking more interest in just gaming as because it was something different and just one year later harmonics would go ahead and release the follow-up to Guitar Hero guitar hero to which this time would release on the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox 360 bringing this game to a much larger market than what the game originally saw especially because a lot of people were buying the 360 in 2006 Guitar Hero 2 and the accessibility that the game had really was the turning point for the series that made this game one of the experiences that people jump to to play in their living rooms Guitar Hero was a really popular game amongst parties or friends to hang out with the guitar that came with Guitar Hero 2 was just really cool and a ton of people really just loved the variety of music that this game had to offer it was a mix of both challenging and fun songs and this really was a huge time in just the gaming industry because the gaming industry as a whole was trying to innovate in different ways the Nintendo Wii had come out and was using motion controls and this use of a controller really was different and a ton of people were down because the controls were tight it was easy to pick up but there was a huge gap of how good you could get could you get to that expert level of gameplay and that was a challenge that a lot of people saw and the Guitar Hero just became one of those Smash Hits seeing how successful Guitar Hero 1 and Guitar Hero 2 were Activision decided to step in and purchase redoctane as they wanted to produce future Guitar Hero games and they pretty much saw the Guitar Hero franchise as a goldmine Harmonix wasn't included in this purchase so Harmonix no longer being attached to the Guitar Hero franchise would go on and make their own rhythm game building off of what worked in Guitar Hero and went on to develop rock band which ended up being one of the biggest competitions to Guitar Hero down the road and maybe even contributed to the downfall of both Guitar Hero and rhythm games in general but more on that a little bit later or in a different video all together despite it just being one year after the purchase of Guitar Hero Neversoft one of the development teams that Activision owned and put in charge of making the next Guitar Hero game released Guitar Hero three legends of rock and Guitar Hero 3 was the pinnacle of Guitar Hero as a whole in 2007 Guitar Hero already had the brand recognition from the first two games and Wickett our hero 3 legends of rock came out the songs in the game's setlist or popular songs there were great songs and the gameplay was slightly refined to make it just a little bit more consistent across the board which really resonated with players and even better through the fire and flames was in this game and that was the hardest song up until that point and it was so intense and it was such a challenge to see how far you could get on expert difficulty and I'm pretty sure that this game put dragonforce on the map I don't know a lot of people who just listen the dragonforce on their own accord without playing guitar hero 3 first but this was an amazing game across the board and just having that as the finale song was a really really cool moment rock band still had a pretty good year - and having the full band concept working over there with Harmonix was something Activision took note - and they knew that they would have to somewhat evolve Guitar Hero if they were going to be able to continue to exist in this space and try to compete directly with a rock band in 2007 it looked like Guitar Hero was really at the top of the world and nothing was gonna stop Guitar Hero from growing and continuing to get bigger and better each year Activision kind of shot themselves in the foot by trying to make as much money as possible and really milking this game and franchise completely dry in 2008 before the main Guitar Hero game came out they decided to release a Guitar Hero Aerosmith game that just played the best of Aerosmith songs and while I guess it was kind of a cool expansion or idea it definitely kind of confused some people as to what Guitar Hero was doing with their direction as a whole especially because since it was songs it didn't really make sense why they couldn't just released it as DLC for Guitar Hero 3 it was just a little bit of a weird idea and they didn't stop there later on that year they would release the next main Guitar Hero game which was really Guitar Hero 4 but they didn't want to call it that they called it Guitar Hero World Tour which pretty much was just Guitar Hero meets rock band they added in all of the other instruments that rock band had already had and it was kind of cool and it sold okay but it didn't nearly sell as well as Guitar Hero 3 and also in 2008 they released Guitar Hero on the DS which was this huge peripheral with the touchscreen and a pic and a some buttons it was a it was a little bit much for one year just a lot of Guitar Hero being thrown at us especially since they hadn't taken a break from Guitar it was just every year a new Guitar Hero and 2008 had quite a few Guitar Hero's and when 2009 rolled around they didn't they didn't stop there either they released Guitar Hero Metallica Guitar Hero van Halen and Guitar Hero 5 at the end of the year which still used the four instruments also in 2009 they decided to release DJ Hero which would be a DJ version of Guitar Hero and they also released Band Hero which essentially was like Guitar Hero four and five and rock band but it had a different name but it was still Guitar Hero pretty much and I was just the stuff that Activision was doing the industry was getting super saturated with these amuse icky games there was already the rock band 1 & 2 games that had come out and they had done their own spin-offs with the Beatles and Green Day and they had a LEGO version of it for some reason but even then Activision didn't seem to care then the sales were still good and the games were relatively inexpensive to make it was mostly reusing the programming from before and upgrading things here and there and just getting the licenses to the songs some of the songs will be re-recorded of course but for the most part these games weren't really hard to make and they made a ton of money Guitar Hero's six warriors of Rock released in 2010 and it was at that moment Activision realized that the music rhythm game genre was pretty much dead and they kind of killed it where Guitar Hero 3 and Guitar Hero World Tour sold 1 point five million and five hundred thousand units respectively in their first weeks Guitar Hero six warriors of Rock sold a grand total of eighty six thousand units that's it which is really really bad and that same year DJ Hero 2 came out and it didn't do too well itself and of course part of the bad sales could be attributed to the fact that rock band kind of saw the fact that there was over saturation in the market and they saw that the genre was slowing down quite a bit and they waded off a year in releasing their next entry instead of going to yearly route that Guitar Hero game rock band 3 released in 2010 two years after rock band 2 and really focused on innovation the best way that they could they decided to introduce a new Pro Mode which allowed you to actually play the songs for real if you had the MIDI instruments involved and they also added a keyboard function and harmonies into the singing side of the game this is really really cool especially if you were either a musician or an up-and-coming musician and you wanted to learn how to play some instruments you could use a MIDI enabled guitar to play the real songs on guitar or a real keyboard to play the real songs or even just playing him on the new improved drum set that had cymbals let you play the songs for real which was a really awesome addition to the game but even then with these innovations rock band 3 didn't do too well just because the industry as a whole was slowing down people weren't very interested in these music games and Guitar Hero really really oversaturated everything and even rock band 3 struggled until their online service store kind of brought profits up a bit either way the rhythm genre as a whole was something that was hugely popular and kind of just disappeared right after that people really got burnt out pretty quickly by these types of games back in the day we spent so much money on all the peripherals that went into these games and now if you go to a goodwill I guarantee that you will find a guitar hero controller there you can pick up literally everyone has them laying around somewhere and that was pretty much it for the rhythm genre as a whole until 2015 when new and improved money-hungry Activision decided that maybe it's time for them to read night this game genre once again and maybe they could make a ton of money like they did back in the day in 2015 they released at Guitar Hero live which was kind of a revamp on the original Guitar Hero gameplay and it really focused on making it feel like a real live performance it was a first-person motion video instead of what we had seen in the past and honestly while it looked kind of cool on paper at first some of the videos were just a little bit over the top and maybe exaggerated a lot and on top of that they introduced a new Guitar Hero TV mode which would allow you to access more songs more footage and other types of things for microtransactions which was sweet because everyone loves microtransactions just everywhere and you couldn't really even buy songs you had to almost borrow songs or get access through in-game credits it was a whole mess and no one really liked it and to make it even better in 2018 they decided to close the Guitar Hero TV mode which reduced the total number of songs from almost 500 that they had grown over the years back to the base 42 that came with the game but Aliana says someone who was a huge Guitar Hero fan in my younger years in early teens Guitar Hero live just didn't really seem that interesting to me I didn't want to buy another guitar or play with the new format and it just seemed too complicated and if I really wanted to get back into a rhythm game I feel like I was more inclined to just play rock band 3 again also in 2015 rock band 4 released on the Xbox one and PlayStation 4 and for the most part the game obviously didn't do too well while the game was positively received for the most part people just kind of burnt out from that genre and even then rock band 4 and Harmonix thought that maybe they could find profits on a PC version of the game and did a crowdfunding project trying to get half a ttle for a PC version of the game as they believe that players would be down to play and the idea was cool because it was going to utilize the community to track songs and they work on getting the rights to the songs to release them for everyone to play and they just needed 1.5 million dollars and they could do it and the funding campaign failed to reach the goal because honestly at this point there's just not a lot of interest in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band rhythm game genre anymore or at least a song as widespread as it once was sure there are modified Guitar Hero like games online that have very dedicated fan bases because there's way more freedom than any platform that could come out that already was monetized by some big company what it really came down to was the fact that while these companies were dormant for a couple of years with these games the fans that were really hardcore went ahead and made something better and they just don't need to rely on these companies to make these types of games anymore but Guitar Hero will always be a staple of the 2000s to me and the mid to late 2000s era and just those early Xbox 360 days it was just really fun and I won't forget those times and all the music that it introduced me to at the same time some things are just best remembered in the past rather than trying to milk them again in the future but if you liked this video hit the like button and subscribe for more in nostalgic videos just like this one leave a comment with which rock band or Guitar Hero game was your favorite and we will see you guys all next time with a brand new video [Music] you

Channel: Rocket Sloth

Views: 753,250

Rating: 4.8730507 out of 5

Keywords: rocket sloth, guitar hero, evolution of guitar hero, history of guitar hero, rise and fall of guitar hero, Why Guitar Hero Died, guitar hero new game, the death of guitar hero, death of guitar hero, guitar hero dead, guitar hero is dead, what happened to guitar hero, guitar hero 3 dead, why did guitar hero die, why did guitar hero live fail, how did guitar hero die, which guitar hero guitar is the best, which guitar hero should i buy, Evolution of Guitar Hero Games, 2005-2015

Id: SUacrWelB0M

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 03 2019