Cullen Jones - Air Guitar

By Cullen Jones

When Guitar Hero hit the stores in 2005, I was skeptical.  As a lifelong videogame enthusiast, I just couldn’t imagine people spending $70 on a big plastic guitar-shaped controller.  Fortunately, I was wrong. Today, Guitar Hero (along with its competition, Rock Band) is a worldwide phenomenon.

Harmonix is the company most responsible for bringing this fad to the masses. They created Guitar Hero in 2005 with the help of the peripheral company RedOctane, who built the guitar controller.  It is important to note that Harmonix did not invent this genre of videogame; a Japanese videogame company called Konami has been making similar guitar games since the late ‘90s.  However, these games did not gain much traction in the Western market, perhaps because of the songs, or perhaps because they were released in arcades, a business that is sadly on the decline in this country.  

Harmonix, headquartered in Massachusetts, was better prepared to engage the American consumer. Rock Band was released on the ridiculously popular Playstation 2 system, and it featured well-loved tracks by artists like Jimi Hendrix, Ozzy Osbourne, Deep Purple, and ZZ Top just to name a few. 

  The following year in 2006, "Guitar Hero II" further cemented the genre as the newest mainstay in the world of videogames.  I began to see references to it in sitcoms and comic strips, with characters talking about the product with implied assumption that the viewer or reader knew what they were talking about. 

  "Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's" followed in 2007, and was the last game to be developed by Harmonix.  In 2006, Harmonix was purchased by MTVgames.  RedOctane, their publisher, was acquired by the videogame company Activision that same year.  The lucrative Guitar Hero name went with them, and Harmonix lost control of their creation.

 In November of 2007 Harmonix bounced back with the most culturally important music videogame to date, Rock Band.  The game took the concept of Guitar Hero to its logical conclusion; now gamers could play simultaneously on the guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.   Activision meanwhile released "Guitar Hero III."

 In 2008, "Rock Band 2" was released.  To stay competitive, Activision released its own band game, "Guitar Hero: World Tour," which featured gameplay similar to Rock Band, with only minor differences. 

 Today, the two franchises compete for supremacy in a market niche less than five years old, on the ever-shifting battleground of the videogame market.  Hopefully, the winner in this battle will be the consumer.