November 8, 2005

The popular music-based series turns 11 today. For many, Guitar Hero was the first game to capture the feeling of being a rock star.

The concept of strumming wildly on a large, plastic, guitar-shaped controller may be commonplace today, but it wasn’t that long ago when nobody thought it was a good idea. Well, Kai and Charles Huang of RedOctane thought it was pretty good.

Background

The Konami game Guitar Freaks was a very popular Japanese game on the Huang’s rental service WebGameZone. Guitar Freaks was rhythm game that used guitar controllers to play scrolling on-screen notes. Previous efforts to localize the game for American consoles had fallen flat due to legal issues involving the controllers.

Seeing potential, the duo raised $1.75 million to bring this concept to the United States in the form of new guitar controller designs. The game idea was shopped around to many different gaming companies, with most of them rejecting the offer. It wasn’t until they met up with music game developer Harmonix before they’d get the green light on their game Guitar Hero.

Gameplay

The guitar peripheral’s design was a scale replication of a Gibson SG, with the addition of five multicolored buttons on the neck. Players must press these five buttons to match the scrolling in-game notes and earn points towards the game’s “Rock Meter”. A high Rock Meter is an indication of a great performance, while a low score expresses a bad performance and usually ends the song prematurely. Consistently high Rock Meter results in the gaining of the score multiplier “Star Power”.

Songs

Music production studio WaveGroup Sound were hired to reproduce high-accuracy cover versions of the game’s licensed songs. In the case of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Iron Man”, the band had singer Marcus Henderson record his voice in front of the exact model fan used to produce the original song’s vocal effects. Song selection was always changing, so much so that the final song list wasn’t completed until a week before the game’s shipping date.

What do you think of Guitar Hero? Is it a clear ripoff of Guitar Freaks? Which guitar controller did you play with?

We await your answers to these burning questions in the comments below!