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Guitar Hero is a music video game developed by Harmonix Music Systems and published by RedOctane for the PlayStation 2 video game console. It is the first entry in the Guitar Hero series. Guitar Hero was released on November 8, 2005 in North America, April 7, 2006 in Europe and June 15, 2006 in Australia.
The game features a guitar-shaped peripheral (resembling a miniature Gibson SG) that the player uses to simulate the playing of rock music. The gameplay is very similar to the GuitarFreaks, in that the player uses the guitar controller to hit scrolling musical notes. The game features covers of 30 popular rock songs spanning fives decades of rock, from the 1960s to current music.
Guitar Hero became a surprise hit, earning critical acclaim and winning many awards from major video game publications. The game's success launched the billion-dollar Guitar Hero franchise, spawning the sequels Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, and Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.
Development
An interview with Harmonix developer Ron Kay describes many of the details of the development of Guitar Hero.[1][2]
The idea of Guitar Hero was directly inspired by Konami's GuitarFreaks arcade game, where the player used a guitar-shaped controller to interact with the game. At the time, GuitarFreaks had not seen much exposure in North America. RedOctane, who were then in the business of making dance pads for games like Dance Dance Revolution for home consoles, were planning to also create guitar controllers, and had approached Harmonix about making a guitar-based game for those controllers. With a budget of about one million dollars (which Kay noted was "pretty tiny for a video game"), the two companies worked to make Guitar Hero. Kay noted that "No one had any notions about it being a massive success; we all just thought it would be fun to do."
Harmonix worked with third party controllers that were already on the market, and started with "super-basic Pong-style graphics" for the game display; through this, they found that "the controller really was the kind of magic sauce for what we wanted to do." Further art was added led by Ryan Lesser, using the art team's involvement in the music scene. Based on the experience from Frequency and Amplitude, the team realized that "people don't necessarily relate to really abstract visuals", and included the depictions of live performances as previously used in Karaoke Revolution. During development, the team identified three focuses for gameplay: the note-matching aspect, the development of Star Power as "to provide a little more depth to the game — some replay value, some interest for people as they were playing beyond just hitting the notes", and showmanship by incorporating the whammy bar and tilting of the guitar into established gameplay.
The team did not have any initial idea of what songs would be present in the final game. Kay noted that "We wanted 30 or 40 songs for the game and put a hundred on our wish list." Harmonix continually had to modify the track list as certain songs were cleared or removed based on licensing issues, balancing difficulty and popularity of the track list, which continued concurrent with the development of the game engine and up nearly to the shipping date. "Gem tracks" for a song were developed by a team in Harmonix, taking usually a day for a song, identifying key notes to "make you feel as if you're a brilliant musician." Software algorithms were used to assess the difficulty of the tracks, and the quality assurance team helped to rebalance the tracks for accuracy and difficulty. The software also allowed Harmonix to quickly make changes to the set list or to reauthor a song to make sure the overall difficulty of the game was appropriate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero_(video_game)
Labels: guitar games, Guitar hero, guitar video games