Version History: Guitar Hero

Welcome to The Verge Cast. I'm your friend David Pierce, and you're about to hear another episode of our new show, Version History. Before we get into it, one reminder, send us all of your feedback about the show, everything you like, everything you don't like, everything we should do differently, and most importantly, go subscribe to Version History wherever you get podcasts, because it will not be on this feed forever. Let's get into it. Would you like to be a rock star? Here's the deal. You don't need any skills. You don't need to know how to play a musical instrument. You don't even need to be willing to get up on stage in front of people and do something. All you need is $70, PlayStation 2, and probably a whole bunch of time on your hands. Because there's this game you might have heard of called Guitar Hero that is going to, if not make you a rock star, but at least make you feel a lot more like one. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most interesting products in the history of technology. I'm David Pierce, and today it's time to talk about what is almost certainly the most important guitar in video game history.

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Everyday comfort worth obsessing over. Visit bombas.com slash audio and use code audio for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash audio. One purchase equals one donated. Always. Welcome back. It's Virgin History. It's Guitar Hero. Let's do this. Ash Parrish is here. Hi, Ash. Hi. All the way from Ohio. Yes. Can do this with us. I'm so excited. Chris Grant, also here. Hello. Not from as far away. That's okay. We're making it work. So before we get into Guitar Hero, here's what I want to know. I want you both to describe your peak Guitar Hero era. How good were you? When was it?

How do you feel about it now? Ash, you go first. Peak Ash. Peak Ash. This was shortly after the first Guitar Hero came out. It was a big deal that I got the game at all. You had the first one? Yes. Because like gaming was not a thing, a not allowed thing in my house for the most part. Like my consoles had to be bought like by my dad and my dad would give me money and he would send me to the mall like, here kid, like go have fun or whatever. And that was a substitute for parenting me.

It was a big deal to get Guitar Hero because it was so expensive. And it was like this big clunky piece of plastic. And my mother is very neat and very clean. And she doesn't like, first of all, she doesn't like the idea of like a console. Because back in those days of 2000, the console was on the floor, like hooked up to wires. Like it wasn't a thing where a console was connected to your TV at all times. You took it out, you played with it, you put it away. So the idea of having this console and then this other big piece of plastic on top of that was like a non-starter. So the fact that I had it was like a big deal. And then I just played it over and over and over again. And the cool thing about Guitar Hero for me is that I was a very nerdy child. So I grew up listening to jazz music. Nice. Yeah. Like I played saxophone when I was a kid. And my saxophone.

phone teacher she told my mom to get me like Dave Brubeck CDs and like Stan Getz CDs and that's what I listened to and that's what I liked. Did not endear me at all to my peers. You get in the car and you're like yo guys Dave Brubeck and they're like it's time to go. And then I got to play Guitar Hero and I got to get exposed to Incubus and like even Jimi Hendrix like this I was not like a rock and roll household so like I heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time Ozzy Osbourne for the first time and I like loved these songs and that like continues to today. That's awesome. Yeah. Do you have a song that you remember as like

the track you would tread on in the first one? So it was Spanish Castle Magic, which was the Jimi Hendrix experience, and then Bark at the Moon. Nice. Yes, I would just do it over and over and over again. That's awesome. Chris, what about you? I don't know when I was best at it because I can't remember that far back. It was 20 years ago. I know, two decades. I'll say this, we loaded up Guitar Hero 1 here on my PlayStation with my 8 megabyte memory card and had a save file on it, which I had, in my wisdom, at age of 25, titled God as the username.

I don't remember doing this. I did unlock all the tracks on that profile though, so I'm going to go ahead and say that that's probably when I was best based on the arrogance of the name. I did enjoy the thing we got to the end of one of the rounds and it pops up like the newspaper showing the headline of how you did and it was like, solid set from God. Hell yeah. At no point do I ever feel like I sell that. And I think that the secret of Guitar Hero for me, I didn't play an instrument at all. I don't feel like a musical person, but I could play Guitar Hero well enough that I felt competent in my living room alone or with my partner. I would go to press events and see people playing Guitar Hero, other press members, and just like...

shredding on an expert level and doing all that stuff for me. I still felt good doing it at home. So I think that's like one of the magic, part of the magic of the game. But I would say I'm consistently a C player. Okay, that's about where I landed too. And my memory of it is my friend group went straight from all playing N64 Mario games, which I was good at, to playing Guitar Hero, to playing Halo, which I was trash at. And I would lose like 50 to negative three in Halo because I would like run off the side and die a few times. And like, that wasn't fun at all. Guitar Hero, I was the worst at all of my friends.

but was still like fun to play, which was like a magical thing about Guitar Hero. It's like accommodated being lots of different ways at the game. But then I had a bunch of friends who were like actual musicians and guitar players who got really good at it and really annoying about it. You know who you are if you're watching this. My musician friends hated it because they're like, oh, this is wrong. Like this doesn't, like if you know how guitar feels, you're playing it. Yeah, all those people who are like, this doesn't feel enough like a real guitar. Didn't matter. Very cool. Yeah, congratulations to you on all of your accomplishments. And your big monster. Exactly. So let me just, I have a lot of notes here on like the story of Guitar Hero a bit. So we're talking about the very first Guitar Hero. And I'm just, I'm going to.

Walk through the history as I have come to understand it. You both know a lot about this, too. So, together, we're going to try to explain where Guitar Hero came from. Does that sound good? Sounds good. Okay. So, the story starts in 2004, which is actually substantially later than I would have guessed, which is sort of fascinating. And there's two companies, Harmonix and Red Octane. We should probably talk about Harmonix first. And I'm curious for you in particular. You had been, like, sort of in the gaming world professionally around this time. Were you aware of Harmonix, like, in the early aughts? Harmonix had... The company existed before this, and they had some flops, at least. But they...

They did strike some magic with their earlier PlayStation 2 games, Frequency and Amplitude, I think in that order. Both great games, critically acclaimed. Oh, actually, while we're talking about Frequency, let me just play you this clip we have of Frequency. The gameplay in Frequency is like Tempest meets Dance, Dance Revolution, where you're actually traveling around. I love that description. That's actually great. And you choose a particular track to play, which is a particular instrument, like drum, bass. It looks a lot like Guitar Hero. Like Guitar Hero in an octagon. Okay, so you got the two games right, but you missed one thing that Harmonix did that I would very much like to tell you about, which is called The Axe.

And I just have, I have this clip that I want to play for you in which Harmonix describes what The Axe is. This is the first thing they ever made as a company. Harmonix is an interactive music software company created by two guys from MIT's Media Lab. And they've spent the past five years developing this technology, which is going to be the hottest thing to hit the music world in the last decade. And it's called The Axe. You pick your song, you pick your instrument, and you pick your interactive music video, which graphically shows you what you're playing. You hit the play button and you're off. You're making music. I just love the way the 90s look. You control the sounds and playing style of the instrument with either a joystick or mouse.

I really love the X. It was like, with no practice, I could pick up a guitar and play along with James Brown. First of all, there's just no way that's true. The flight stick also is great. That's my favorite part of that whole clip. He's describing how it works, and it's this insane-looking on-screen control center, and then he just picks up a joystick, and it's like, and now I'm ready to play guitar. Yeah, for folks that are listening, this is a 1990s-style sidewinder flight stick, just some real 90s PC energy. It's very good. But that's a bunch of the ideas that ended up being Guitar Hero, right? It's a physical object. You get to have a thing that moves around. You get to sort of control the instrument lots of ways. And then frequency and amplitude were...

Basically similar games. So this is also like right around the time, if I'm doing my history correctly, that DDR was like taking over the world. Were you guys DDR people? Yes. This actually makes perfect sense. I was like, I knew for sure you were going to say yes to this. Were you good at DDR? No. Were you committed anyway? Yes. Because, so, you know, I'm a girl.

boys like this is you know back in 2005 2006 you know that kind of like era of video game girls versus boys kind of culture and the boys had like the shooter games that they would be really good at and they would play like doom on ultra nightmare and stuff like that and i wanted a game that i could be good at that i could like they would look to me like the same kind of prowess as we look at people that can do like those shooters games really well and like rhythm games were that for me but uh ddr is uh way too intensive for the cardio even back then so i focused on making guitar hero my thing to varying levels of success I'm a spaghetti man. You can't see it. You're listening right now. He's made of noodles, everybody. I'm a very tall man, and I have very, it's called inconsistent control. There are different parts of my body are going. So DDR was particularly challenging for me. My feet are very far away from my head. So the brain signals just don't get there quickly. They take a minute or two to get all the way down there. And so I'm not going to show you what that looks like, but you can imagine it in your head. It's not great. Similar to Ash. Guitar Hero for me was some chance to sort of like...

see and enjoy that style of physicality from rhythm games, but in a way that my hands were closer to my brain and only took a little bit of time to get there. It feels good when a game engages your entire body. Games don't really do that so much anymore, and that's why when you get games that do take full faculties, you have to write notes, or you get into it physically, it feels good, and that's why Guitar Hero feels good to play, even though you get really bad claw hands at the end of it. Yeah, Guitar Hero, I think, ended up being right down the middle of that. It's very physical and not too much work. But the reason I bring up DDR is because it came out in 1998.

And it was mostly in, like, an arcade thing in Japan. And it was this giant monster hit. And Red Octane first sort of made its money by making somewhere between, like, legit and bootleg DDR pads for people who just wanted to play the game. Well, fun fact, they actually first made their money as a video game rental service. That's right. Did they make any money, though? Well, hold on. They had one. They made something. This is before the .com bust. They busted on that. And Idea was good. I mean, Idea came back later with other services, gameplay.

But they pivoted to, yeah, physical pads. Yeah, and so they were making these pads and selling them to people who had a PlayStation version of the game because you could get the game, but you couldn't get, like, the thing to dance on, which is sort of important in DDR. And basically what happens is Red Octane is like, okay, we want to do all this rhythm game stuff in the U.S. We want to make a, like, peripheral. We probably need to make a game. They don't know how to make a game. So they call Harmonix, which, like you said, has made these two games, Frequency and Amplitude, that were rhythm-style games this way, but they were, like, kind of wonky. They were, like, accomplished games, but people didn't like them that much. People who played them liked them. They won awards, but they didn't do very well.

It did not, the description of the game and seeing any footage of the game was not appealing to, like, based on the sales numbers, anybody. Right. This is the thing I've heard about rhythm games over and over from people is that, like, one of the great challenges of these games was once you play it, you get it and it's really fun, but the description of it sounds awful. And even to watch, like, a video of what the game looks like on a screen is bad. You're like, it's just dots running at me. Why would I want to play that? It's not physical. And for folks who are familiar with what controller looks like, frequency and amplitude look exactly like that. They look almost identical, but you're playing with a PlayStation controller. Yeah. Just with your hands. And so it doesn't have any of that same sort of visual appeal. Yeah.

The Harmonix folks did make one other game that I should just show you very quickly because a thing that I have discovered is that this game, Karaoke Revolution, also turned out to be very important in what would become Guitar Hero. So here's what Karaoke Revolution was. I miss commercials like that. Yeah. But there's a bunch of things happening in that video, right? There's a game that you have to do something with other than press buttons on a controller. You get active feedback from the crowd. It gives you, you sort of improve and fail as you go. There is a thing that looks like a stage that you're on as you're performing.

add a guitar and karaoke revolution just is guitar hero and the realization they all take out of this is like oh people want to be rock stars like that's the thing put me in coach is like the vibe everybody has here they want to be part of it and I think in the way that like dancing very quickly and well is really hard more people can stand in front of their TV and sing passively. And so that was like fun and people were into that. So these two companies, one that like knows how to make rhythm games but can't figure out how to sell them to anybody. And one company that knows how to make really cool peripherals but doesn't really know how to make games. It's like kind of a perfect match. So they find each other and they pretty quickly, as I understand it, decide they're going to make a game together. And Red Octane, from what I understand, was super, super into Guitar Freaks, which was big in Japan. They had been thinking about wanting to bring it to the US. So these two companies make a deal in early 2005 to make a game and they decide they want to ship it.

by the holiday season of 2005, which I don't, y'all both know a lot more about game development than I do, but that strikes me as insanity. It's unusual. Yeah, unusual. To say the least. Yeah, I mean, to the point where it's like, and they decided pretty quickly they wanted to make a controller. They love Guitar Freaks, so they wanted to do something like that. The Guitar Hero controller, spoiler alert, looks an awful lot like the Guitar Freaks controller. They wanted to make it a little more complicated. They wanted to make it so that you could actually feel like you're playing a guitar and it's hard and it works. So they added more buttons. They made it a little more complex, but...

This was just the thing that they wanted to do. And yeah, like you said, they took on this truly bonkers task of trying to do it in nine months. Their other option I found out, by the way, I don't know anything about this except that one of the developers said that their other option other than Guitar Hero was to make a DuckTales game. I have no more information, but I would desperately love to know what that game was. What the Red Octane version of. Yeah, right? The peripheral would have been Uncle Scrooge's cane, and you would have put a goat on it. Yeah, hell yeah. I can't change why that's really good. The theme from the moon. It's trademarked, by the way, Chris Grant, 2025, so nobody touched that. We're bringing back DuckTales, everybody. I'm mailing that to myself right now. You heard it here first. Can't touch it. I think what's crazy about that timeline, too, and I'm sure we'll get to this in your notes, but they made an E3 demo. It wasn't just that they got the game ready and packaged up for holidays. They had it ready for people to play just a few months after that. So I can do even better. They had a prototype of the game that they were playing in their office in like a couple of weeks.

And it's because all this stuff is so tied together, right? There actually is frequency technology in Guitar Hero and there's amplitude technology in Guitar Hero. And Harmonix had made all of these deals where it would make the games for other companies, but it would keep the sort of core technology for itself. And so it just poured all of that into this game. And it basically, the way they all described it is like without those deals that it had made, not thinking about Guitar Hero, none of this would have been possible. They couldn't have done it this fast, they couldn't have done it this way, but it was just all this, they had all this stuff sitting there and they were just able to like recompile it and have a game working really quickly. See how like development works? You let companies just like do shit that they're good at.

See how that works? And they knock this out. And I would hate to see like that crunch condition was probably awful. But just the idea, like it's almost verboten now to hear about like, you know, a company taking stuff that they've done from other places and pouring it into this game and they can make this different version of those same ideas so quickly and have it be do so well. It doesn't happen in modern video game development anymore unless you're a very big indie studio or something like that. It just doesn't happen. It's not just the soundtrack and the haircuts that make this feel 20 years old. Maybe some of that deal structure also making it feel 20 years old. And then the thing that, well, okay, we'll say that. That's for another time. Yeah, I'm not sure Guitar Hero gets done quite the same way in 2025 as it did in 2005. But so anyway, so they get this done really fast. The other thing it seems like this company had going for it was that it was like a company full of musicians. A thing I didn't know about Guitar Hero until I started researching for this episode is that a lot of the songs in the first Guitar Hero...

are from Harmonix employees who are like legit bands. I had no idea. I remember their head of marketing publicity, John Drake played a show in Philly at some point. I went to go see him. He was like a musician in a band playing shows. And yeah, I think that was true all the way down to the folks on the marketing side of the house. Yeah, apparently like two thirds of the employees there were in some band or another. And a bunch of the songs in there are from them. Most of the songs are just like songs that they liked. They ended up, instead of getting the actual versions of a lot of the songs, paying this band to do covers, which was much cheaper for very unnecessary to go into licensing reasons. But they...

were able to get this list of songs that everybody knew, but that they definitely couldn't afford. What was funny is I went back and was doing a bunch of research on this, and a surprising number of people on that team have no memory of the first songs in Guitar Hero. Everybody agreed that Walk This Way by Aerosmith and Back in Black by ACDC were iconic ones, but then they would be like, oh yeah, what were your favorite songs from the first Guitar Hero? What were the first ones you guys decided on? And they're like, I don't know. And there would be people who disagreed on which song was the first one to show up, but everybody said Back in Black was the first iconic Guitar Hero song. I don't even remember that song. I just completely skipped over that to go to Ozzy Hop Sport. It wasn't hard enough for you. I get it.

Then they get through all this. They're cranking like crazy towards fall of 2005. And E3, like you were saying, Chris, was like the coming out party for this game. Were you at E3 in 2005? 2005, I was not at E3. I have a lot of memories of the 2006 E3 showing for Guitar Hero, but 2005 E3 was like a big deal E3. It was maybe one of the last really major E3s that you can make a case ever. And one of the stories that to this day, you ask any games journalist about 2005 E3, the thing that would come to their mind first before any of that is Kensha Hall in the basement with the weird carpet and the smell and Guitar Hero.

Kensha Hall is the place where you put the international pavilions, your German game developers pavilion. There's a bar down there, which just gives you some of that energy of that place. The weirdo controllers, there's some, like, you know, the weird 3D mouse controller stuff, like all this junk stuff all went to the basement, the security networking software for the games industry in the basement. And Red Octane with Guitar Hero. And it became, and everything you read about it, people played it and would go tell everyone else to come play it and then people would come and watch people play it. Yeah, so as I understand it, that was when that game became sort of real. That was the moment. Yeah, and it was like, because we were saying with all these rhythm games, the thing is, you can describe to somebody, oh, you stand and play guitar in front of your television and it does the buttons for you. It's like, it doesn't sound good. And they were apparently actually having trouble explaining to possible buyers and distributors and whoever how this game actually worked and why it was fun because there was nothing like it.

But then, like you're saying, at E3, it starts to percolate, and it's like the thing everybody's talking about, and it's the moment. And so all the Harmonix folks and the Red Octane folks have long said that that was the moment that they're like, oh my God, we have something. Like, we don't know what, but it's something, and we have it. And there was one other moment, and it involves, I assume, your sworn enemy of games journalism, IGN. We're all friends here. I'm just kidding. One other thing that they've said is, IGN made a video that year playing the game, and it was one of the first public demos from a big-name game publication showing the game, and they loved it. And they had apparently been, they sent them a Guitar Hero set.

unprompted, and then, like, begged them to play it over and over and over again, which is an experience I suspect we've all had. Where somebody's like, please try my thing, you'll love it. And you're like, I have other things to do and I've never heard of you and what is this? And they're like, please, I beg you. I have to imagine at the time, too, IGN, along with GameSpot, were the only two kind of huge major sites. There was UGO and there were some other ones at the same time, but, like, IGN and GameSpot at the time were massive. And I think getting that coverage and that attention there in a pre-social media era was it. You're not going to get it. Maybe a magazine later on a slower publishing timeline. Totally. So let me just play you a little bit of IGN's video in which they have an extremely... How much psychic damage is this going to do to me as a video game journalist? We're going to find

Look, Tal. Wow. There's IGN's Tal Blevins shredding in a white cloak? A cape? A cape, I guess. Let's see how they're doing. There are two people and one of them doesn't appear to be playing at all. They're busy shredding.

Wow, 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 a game people were excited about. This was 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. People start taking their phone calls. People start caring. People start actually wanting this game in their lives, which is nuts because that video is deeply hilarious.

You gotta 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 the controller here behind me. It's like it's a big guitar. Well, the good news is retailers love huge boxes and they love making shelf space. So 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. Just thinking about that now in 2025 brain, it's just like mind-blowing. That's a dozen eggs today.

So 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 demonstrations 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. And 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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Okay, we're back. So you guys would remember this more than I would. I was way too cool to play video games in 2005. What were you doing in 2005? What 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. So that was cool. 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 are you off? That's good. That might have been right after the double popped polo phase, but it wasn't. Oh, I was right there. But it wasn't. This was well after pukas. Okay. But not far enough. You know what I mean? I was doing great. I'm just trying to get a mental picture for the listeners at home. I'm trying to get all, 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. 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. 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. Do 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, I got a PlayStation 2 specifically for Kingdom Hearts. And I think that was 2006. So I didn't, I don't think I got a guitar here until like 2007. I love this as a way to remember the years of your life. 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. So 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. There's a lot of content. Sicko mode. Let's do it. Listen, for bonus episode, Ash is going to spend

explaining Kingdom Hearts 2 to you. Just two. Not all of them. Just Kingdom Hearts 2. I was the nerd that was watching that IGN video and getting that pre-order in early and picking it up. That was what I, before I was doing it full-time for a living, that was my, those were my friends. Just my PlayStation. I love this for you. They were my friends. So the story is that the Harmonix and 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. What 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. 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. Madden's kind of a boring answer. I know, but that's why you bet a dollar. 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. People 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 Davis in there. That's still 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. It certainly makes you feel like one for a five out of five. Just flexing by calling out people by name. Well, I'm just saying, you know, for the old heads in the house who were watching all that same stuff when they were kids.

See, guardsmen, 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 comes together. And it does seem like the biggest difference between a lot of that was just the guitar. And 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, but certainly will mean some things to other people. And the thing that they took from Guitar Freaks was the idea of 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 the energy into everything we do in life. Yeah, right? Where can we have a whammy bar? We're going to find news for it. Yeah, that's a good 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're 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 in the game but it's like a very harmonics thing to do or like all the way back to the axe that people just want to play but obviously I wish they did that because one of the challenges or frustrations of Guitar Hero was 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 play video games and I think later they did add some of those modes back into future iterations of this game but um 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. 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 the guitar. It's just close enough that I don't care. And it feels good. It's a very tactile thing. I'm going to go ahead and say, as a non-guitar player, it feels a lot better than playing the 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? 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. This 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's success, which is YouTube. And people being able to record themselves and put up these crazy high scores, these crazy stunt videos. You know, as a video game blogger in 2005, 2006, et cetera, like, crazy Guitar Hero videos was a staple of the genre. A staple of, 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. And 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. What are they doing on that?

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 it's like, ah, shit, that's good. That's really hard. Yeah, it's going very fast and hitting all the buttons. Yeah, all the buttons on time. So the physicality of it, in the same way a slam dunk looks impressive. I cannot do that. He jumped good. And like, seeing somebody play guitar here 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. All games do 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, like, high-level players and, you know, you're impressed, but you can also, there's a very clear way that you yourself can do that. That was when I was, like, playing guitar here 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 fret. You also can't see if she's got a Rocky-style montage outfit on. She's actually playing guitar right now. I don't know how that's even possible. Just 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

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. Because 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 won't say small, but more humble publisher than the one you think of today in that earlier period. They 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 Stephen to tell them. And this is, I remember there was an ethical question over whether Stephen, for example, at MTV News is like, how do you cover the game? It's MTV. And he's like, it's different. It's 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 and 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, brought everything together. But I think 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. 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 in the biz, by the way. And so you had these two competitors, one that still had the brand name and still had the retail weight, and then the other Critical Darling, and it set up a really great competitive set. I refused, on principle, to play Rock Band because I had Guitar Hero loyalty and Rock Band was 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. Like, oh, you want me to spend however much money to buy this entire kit? Absolutely not. We're just going to stick with our PlayStation 2 and our three Rock Band games. I was a snob.

I went to, in 2007, I mentioned E3 changed. 2006 was the last E3 of that kind. In 2007, they downsized. They went to this smaller media-only event in Santa Monica, where you went from 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. He was really, like, he's good. And every other, for years, when there's 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 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 I walked into the dimly lit living room. No, this is the suite. It's a fancy suite at a hotel in Santa Monica. And they had the drums 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 a rock band against Guitar Hero 3 from the original developers with a full set with singing karaoke revolution style they had all the pieces quite little mic drop yep and they had another fun thing about Rock Band is they had the masters it 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 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 start coming out in, like, crazy, absurd, rapid succession. And 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, like, at the very beginning, either nobody cared about Guitar Hero and didn't want their stuff because they just didn't want to, like, 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 short. The amount of money you made off of video game licensing before that was nothing, so. 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. In 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.

then it becomes a problem because they have to spend all of this money on their songs, eventually the image and likeness of the people that they wanted to have. And 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. 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. Meanwhile, at this point, Call of Duty is doing a billion dollars a year, so do 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's still...

Like, I don't play this one and I'm like, you know what I want now is Guitar Hero 2. It's 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. My 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.

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 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. This 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, there's a time when getting a whole Rock Band kit.

was on pre-Facebook Marketplace Craigslist for a dollar. 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. 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, coming in, what store? FYE, 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 week, because that's what they wanted. We would get them in, and they would disappear like that, because that's what people want. Even now, you go to, I don't know if they have that around here, but The Exchange, which is one of those 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. 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. It 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 and it has 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 a good setup. Come hang out. Questlove, if you're watching, I know you are. Get at us. We own the game or two. 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. At some point this is also the physicality that's going on here, right? It's the Wii.

The physicality of Wii Sports, it's Guitar Hero, and the physicality of Guitar Hero, and then Microsoft's like, ooh, physicality. You need some of that. We'll do Connect, and that didn't quite go how they thought. And 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. I 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 it's now part of Fortnite.

Yes. 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? Oh, that makes me happy. Riffmaster. 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. I got Billy Iash, Hakimis, and Sabrina Carpenter on my squad. We're going to roll out on you. With Ariana Grande and LeBron James. Watch out. First of all, it's a sick rock band lineup. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 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 first history questions.

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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 after Guitar Hero, which was the game itself. 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 like the physicalness of it. I like...

the different kinds of genres of music, like, encapsulates, like, across, like, several decades. Like, you've got, I don't know, I can't even think of this stuff. 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. When it boos, it feels bad.

It is like genuinely upsetting when you're playing Philly. I'm just used to people booing at me all the time anyway. So I'm just used to it. I'm walking down the street getting booed at. It's just your day-to-day. 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 limitless opportunity and possibility. The future was bright and wide open. We probably had a lot of positive feelings about the world. I can't imagine. That was when 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, the limitless pocketbooks of 2005 where 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 impediment for the people who could afford it. You know, couldn't last. Hindsight 2020. I know, I know, I know. But $70 and you got the controller and the game. I know. Yeah, but gas was 50 cents or something. I don't know. You could buy a Coke for a nickel. You scamp, get out of here. No, that's what's funny. 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, oh, weren't they adorable for thinking that was expensive? I know. 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 for me.

Especially because, again, this is American Idol watching recently Puka wearing David Pierce in 2005. 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. And I will, ladies and gentlemen, David Pierce. And I eventually got some of that stuff, right? And I was like, the thing I liked, actually, I think I might be 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 gonna 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. That's cool. 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. We've got, 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? It would have been ridiculously expensive. It would have been one button because, you know, we can't have this too many buttons. It 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. It's, 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? Oh, OK. So the thing I would go back in time and change about this is I would steer Bobby Kochek away and like tell him to go do more Moneyball stuff and be like a baseball financier instead of giving him the video. 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's going to buy a Peloton already bought a Peloton and 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. Yeah, I think time and not saturate the market 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. And it's okay to let video games, like, die, essentially. Like, 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 likes it when you're like, she's not going to keep it forever. It's not going to go in the basement. And 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 going to buy a lot of tickets. I'm going to bring back a sports book. I'm going to just put a dollar in the high-yield savings account, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm going to do all that first. Sure, that's good. Put some money in the Panama account, too. So am I Red Octane or Harmonix? Who am I? Interesting. You're the CEO of Harmonix. No, this is a choose-your-own-adventure. This is The Walking Dead. That's true. So you have to bring it back. Ash is right. If I'm Red Octane, I'd buy Harmonix. Okay. That was a big boo-boo. That's a little bit of a mistake. Split up. Don't split the party. I'd buy Harmonix. I'd buy Merge, right? Like, just straight up.

some structure in which those two things stay together. Just make it one thing. And 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. If I'm harmonics, hmm, that's a little trickier. I mean, maybe I would say an answer, but I would propose a merger. I 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 actually 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? Also 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 good for gaming as a whole. It is an interesting sort of parallel universe in which you have mainstream interest in rhythm games in the United States and a company with theoretically tons of resources that only cares about making rhythm games. It is probably true that it's hugely unexplored territory. I mean, I even think about dumb examples like Supernatural, the fitness game for VR. 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 play that thing. Beat Saber has some of the same make-your-own-song mechanics.

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, just to give Activision some credit here. They 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. 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, like, try and keep that party going. And it didn't quite work out. And they rebooted it. Freestyle Games, again, rebooted Guitar Hero Live, it was called, I think. Same developer. 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, a six-story office. 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? Star 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. 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? Like 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. Do one sick thing. We're so back. I'm waiting. As it hit me any day now, it'll happen. Also, Star Power, the fact that you could do it by tilting up the guitar. It's 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. I think they're still sitting 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. The video game itself is performance. The tools that you use to play are performance.

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 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 in a world where everything's connected through streaming and channels and distribution mechanics. It's strange that more games don't specifically build themselves to travel that way. So that would be my thought. I like that. Mine is just physical controllers. I just want more game-specific.

No, you don't. Items to hold. You say that, but you really don't. I don't want that many. 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, but I want them. I have the Taito Drum Master set for Switch. I have... The office just keeps getting there. I know, 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 de Amigo.

If they make a dumb thing, I'm like, well, I guess I have to have it. I cannot 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. They 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, 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 years earlier, it wouldn't have had the same opportunity. A couple years later, it wouldn't have. It launched on the PlayStation 2, which is...

And it launched at the tail end, right? 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, but it hasn't happened again in that way. So I kind of am going to say that, you know, maybe again, sure, these counterfactuals of mergers, et cetera, that didn't happen. I think they really nailed it. They did 100% expert play on hard mode using their feet.

They definitely have that vision and they execute it on it. We want to make non-musicians feel like a musician and feel like a rock star. And they nailed that really bad. They really did. And it's really hard and really rare to have such a clear vision executed so perfectly. 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. That thing exists. That's what Fortnite Festival is. Does that count? Genuinely, 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. But Fortnite is a platform at this point. So 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 what Fortnite is. But 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. But I do think there is something there. I also think, and Ash, you can 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 community 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. You can get all kinds of tracks for it, like 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 controller as long as you have an adapter and hook it up to your computer. And one of the things I really like to do is I follow music creators and music game creators and watch them 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.

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. We're all in lockdown. Like, okay, I'm gonna make Clone Hero my thing like I tried to do with Guitar Hero and just play it. 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 weeks I would go and I would play the same like six songs over and over trying to like really learn that muscle memory and it was good for a bit. What I realized after playing this game...

today was that, like, I kind of don't want a 2025 version of Guitar Hero. I 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'm 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. It's, like, a little janky. But when you go back to 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 remember a password. I just turn on the damn game and it plays. And we're all old. Right? We're 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. I brought my PlayStation Slim here to Slim because my PS2 fat, the disk drive doesn't work. It's temperamental. It works sometimes. It was not going to work if I brought it on the train. So those old consoles oftentimes just need a lot of attention. They will not last forever without maintenance and support. And the folks who do that, I mean, it's in support. 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...

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? Is that, is 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 that 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. But 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. Like it was so big and it burned so bright and then it died. And that's what I would find like beautiful about it. Like that's the beauty. It doesn't have to be transformative in that other way. It just has to have been like fun and pleasant.

Like, well-intentioned. Yeah. I'm inclined to put it in just because I think it has like 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. Yeah, I'm into it. All right. So this controller behind us, we're going to like hang 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. I 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. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time.

Version 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. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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