In the newest version of the Guitar Hero franchise, Guitar Hero 5, as many as four players can all play guitar at the same time, instead of just two. Further, any combination of instruments is now possible.
(Credit: Activision Blizzard)SAN FRANCISCO--The first couple of weeks of September are going to be a banner time for music video games. On September 9 (09/09/09), the much-anticipated The Beatles: Rock Band will hit store shelves, just eight days after Guitar Hero 5 gets its chance to rock living rooms everywhere.
With the Beatles game, it's easy to imagine long lines and huge sales figures. After all, this will be the first time that any of the recent slew of music-oriented video games will feature any Beatles songs, let alone dozens of them.
But with Guitar Hero 5 (see video below)--has so much time gone by already that there could even be five Guitar Hero releases?--one has to work just a little bit harder to envision the big bucks that its publisher, Activision Blizzard, surely is hoping to bring in.
Still, the guys at Neversoft, the game's developer, have proven time and again that they know what they're doing. The Guitar Hero franchise has produced hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and created a dynamic in which people everywhere are now comfortable picking up and jamming away on a guitar, albeit a plastic one with buttons instead of strings.
And with that in mind, one has to give the Neversoft team the benefit of the doubt for their new game, which will be released for all the major video game platforms.
On Thursday, I stopped in at a Guitar Hero press event here and had the chance to speak with two of the executives most responsible for the new game: Brian Bright, the project director at Neversoft for Guitar Hero 5, and Tim Riley, who oversees the Guitar Hero franchise's music licensing.
Among the big-name rock stars who appear in Guitar Hero 5 as characters is Carlos Santana.
(Credit: Activision Blizzard)One of the things I was most interested in was the rationale for a new Guitar Hero game. To be sure, game companies like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two have a mandate to generate massive revenues, and so franchises like Guitar Hero are tried and true in that regard. But in spite of that, each new edition of a franchise game has to have something significant to offer to entice enough customers to earn its keep.
To hear Bright tell it, the best rationale for Guitar Hero--besides its 85 new songs by 83 artists--is its "Party Play" mode in which players can jump in or out of songs any time they please, all with the click of a single button.
What that means, Bright added, is that Guitar Hero 5 will offer a potentially broad new audience an entirely new level of "accessibility," in particular because in the previous versions, many people playing for the first time would have found themselves needing a little hand-holding to get started. Now, he said, that's no longer the case, and players new and old will be able to easily and quickly go right into rocking out.
Another important Guitar Hero 5 innovation, Bright said, is an "any instrument" selection that will, for the first time, allow more than two people to play guitar at the same time rather than someone in a foursome having to play drums and someone having to sing. And even if there isn't a mad rush to grab a guitar, this features means that any combination of instruments is, for the first time, possible, whether a group is playing cooperatively or competitively.
Downloadable content
Given that many players of the game's previous iteration--Guitar Hero: World Tour--likely paid to download songs, Activision is making it possible to port most of those songs to Guitar Hero 5. The company said 152 of the 158 downloadable songs from the earlier game will be compatible with the new one, though users will have to pay a "nominal re-licensing fee," the amount of which the company hasn't publicly spelled out yet.
Among the innovations in Guitar Hero 5 is the ability for Xbox players to use their Xbox Live avatars.
(Credit: Activision Blizzard)And that means that with the 85 songs Guitar Hero 5 comes with, plus new downloadable songs, the new game's players can have set lists of potentially hundreds of songs, Bright said.
I wanted to know a little bit more about how Activision persuades musicians to allow their songs to be included in Guitar Hero, especially after learning how the Beatles were won over for the forthcoming Rock Band game.
Riley, the publisher's music licensing specialist, said that as the Guitar Hero franchise becomes better-known, he and his team have an easier time of it. In part, that's because "the larger the game gets, the more known it gets within the (music) industry (and) with the artists themselves."
And that means that Riley and his team have now had the chance to get musicians like Arctic Monkeys and Elliott Smith--whom they've never worked with before--to contribute songs to the game. Indeed, he said Guitar Hero 5 features songs from nearly 20 artists who have never allowed their music to be in a video game before.
Of course, it doesn't happen overnight. In the case of Arctic Monkeys, Riley explained, it took multiple visits with the band to show them demos and explain what the Guitar Hero franchise is all about to get permission.
One big factor, Riley added, was being able to assure artists that their music is "safe" in Guitar Hero, meaning that users won't be able to easily pirate the songs from the game.
At the same time, he explained that for a lot of musicians, games like this are now seen as an attractive way to get their music in front of large audiences, particularly because the record industry is becoming more and more notorious for doing a poor job of helping distribute new music.
"Just by having a song in the game," Riley said, "kids become familiar with the song, or the artist, and will go out and buy (it) or go out and purchase more music from that artist."
Among the dominant trends at E3 in Los Angeles this week were music games. Everywhere you looked, publishers were announcing new ones, and players were rocking out to them.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)As planes packed with video game industry people start heading out of Los Angeles in droves after this week's E3 convention, the question is, What really transpired during the confab?
If one thing was clear, it was that the industry largely played it safe this week. Sure, there were a few big announcements--perhaps led by Microsoft's announcement of its planned revamping of the Xbox Live architecture--but for the most part, this was a pretty uneventful E3, an unsurprising reality given that we're a couple of years into the "next-generation" of consoles already and the fact that all the expected big games for the year have long since been announced and previewed and tested and showcased.
There were, of course, some themes that dominated the show, and for anyone who's been paying attention to the industry the last year or so, they shouldn't be surprising.
First, music games are taking off in a very big way. This is hardly shocking, given that Activision's Guitar Hero franchise and its first cousin, Harmonix's Rock Band, have brought in many, many millions of dollars in sales and have turned the industry on its ear.
Now, Activision has a new version of Guitar Hero coming out called Guitar Hero: World Tour, for the Xbox and Sony's PlayStation 3. Among its innovations will be an entirely new guitar controller as well as a drum kit and, more interestingly, a system called Tunes which will allow anyone using the game to create their own all-new music and then upload it to a network where other users can listen to it and rate it. The upshot of this is that there are almost certainly going to be future rock stars emerging from the Tunes community, much the way that some stars have come out of the YouTube world.
Brian Bright of 'Guitar Hero' developer Neversoft demonstrates the Music Studio element of 'Guitar Hero: World Tour' during the Activision press conference Tuesday evening. This is the part of the game that will allow players to create their own music and share it online through what is called the Tunes system.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)But Activision wasn't the only one riding the music wave. Nintendo, too, has jumped on the bandwagon and announced at its press conference on Tuesday that it will be releasing a game called Wii Music that will have some of the same elements of the next Guitar Hero, including the ability to create and share new music. And with the Wii's huge popularity, I think it's safe to say that Wii Music will be a gigantic hit, especially because it's the kind of far-reaching game that will appeal to core gamers and non-gamers alike.
And Rock Band was able to make some waves of its own with announcements of the set list for the forthcoming Rock Band 2, which will include tracks from AC/DC, Bob Dylan, Guns n' Roses and more.
'Resident Evil 5'
Another obvious trend was the emergence of cooperative, or "co-op" play in many games being showcased at E3. Such games included the next Call of Duty,MAG for the PS3, Resident Evil 5, Fable II. As my colleague Dan Ackerman wrote on Crave, "This year's big (E3) buzzword is 'cooperative gameplay'--meaning gamers play together, but are collaborating, rather than competing, to complete the game's goals. This often happens online, where gamers connect via Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network from remote locations."
This is an important trend because it ties gamers together, no matter where they are, making the experience more meaningful for being less of a solo thing. And this, clearly, is the promise of connected play on systems like Xbox Live and, the PlayStation Network.
And it is becoming increasingly obvious that these kinds of innovations are crucial for the industry, especially as Nintendo has proved that it has opened up video gaming to entirely new markets with its Wii.
That success has a clear ripple effect, perhaps best seen in the revamping of Xbox Live, which Microsoft announced Monday morning at the first major press conference of the week.
Xbox Live will feature an entirely new look and feel starting this fall. It will have an avatar motif that reminds many of what Nintendo has done with its hit console, the Wii.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)With the introduction of an avatar-based interface for the new Xbox Live, it was obvious that Microsoft has decided that the mainstream appeal of the Wii is something it wants a part of. Microsoft says that it isn't trying to copy anyone else, and that it is just trying to open up its system to the broadest possible market of consumers. But to anyone watching the industry, it is evident that the Wii was on the minds of the designers of this new architecture. As one commenter on my Xbox press conference story put it, Microsoft's announcement could easily have been called "Mii too," in reference to the Wii avatar system.
Sony, while having the least newsy--at least from this corner--of the week's major press conferences, did still grab a few headlines.
Among those headlines was the announcement--without any promised release date--of God of War III, the follow-up to a very popular franchise; and it also announced that it was going to start offering its 80GB PS3 for $400.
Although it did not announce a publication date, Sony said 'God of War III' would be coming to the PS3.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)For its part, Electronic Arts gave the first glimpse of The Sims 3, the next major iteration of its monstrously-popular franchise. It also unveiled a new system in its next NBA game, NBA Live '09, called "Dynamic DNA," which will incorporate real-life stats on a daily basis in the game. The idea here is that players can see their playing experience change day to day, improving or regressing during the NBA season as the real players go through their year. Those changes will be reflected in the video game in how the digital point guards and power forwards perform on-screen depending on what happens on courts around the country.
But with all that news, there's no question that E3 was really kind of quiet and conservative this year. As I mentioned above, this wasn't a big surprise, but it did make the experience of walking through the halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center feel kind of flat and lacking energy.
This actually is kind of a relief after years at the convention center where being there was completely draining. But if anyone expected to come to Los Angeles this week and have their socks knocked off by the industry's giants, they most certainly did not get what they came for.
There are few things that video game publishers--or any consumer products companies, for that matter--like more than reaching big, notable milestones.
So it was with considerable pride that Activision's wholly owned Infinity Ward studio told me Tuesday that its war game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, has just sold its 10 millionth copy.
Infinity Ward studio head Vince Zampella didn't know exactly how many units the game had sold on each platform it is available on--the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC--but did say that COD 4 had been most successful on the Xbox.
These days, monster hits like Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo 3 have gotten most of the media's attention for best-sellers, but by reaching 10 million sold, there's no doubt that COD 4 deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as any other title.
And to be sure, it's not the only game that has reached 10 million units moved--Infinity Ward said that COD 4 is one of "less than 10" games to do so since 2000--but it's still a notable milestone, especially when you consider that, at a sticker price of $60 a pop, even when considering that you can buy it for less at some retailers, Activision has raked in many hundreds of millions of dollars with the game.
Of course, one wonders how many more copies it would have sold had it been available on Nintendo's Wii. But Zampella said that Infinity Ward decided not to make the game for that console because "it just doesn't fit on the Wii. We thought it would be compromised to be on (that) platform."
Well, with Guitar Hero III, Halo 3, and Grand Theft Auto IV inspiring record-setting sales in their own right, we might easily see a few more games reach the magic 10 million mark soon. And the next Call of Duty, COD 5, which is being produced by Tryarch, not Inifinity Ward, might see even bigger numbers.
Indeed, Zampella acknowledged that COD 4 has set the bar very high for his studio, and it's hard to imagine Infinity Ward being able to come right back with another 10 million-seller.
But, COD 4 still has some juice left. He suggested that the game is still selling, that it's map pack add-on has sold 1.5 million copies, and that the main game itself is expected to sell a lot more copies this holiday season.
True or not, hats off to Infinity Ward on reaching a milestone few ever reach.
On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.
Uh-oh.
For all the champagne toasts that are no doubt going on over at Take-Two Interactive and its subsidiary Rockstar Games over the grand launch day of Grand Theft Auto IV, there's a bit of a dark cloud brewing.
According to a post on CNET News.com sister site GameSpot, there's a brouhaha afoot in GTA IV forums all over the Internet because of some players' complaints that the game is freezing up on them.
As GameSpot's Brendan Sinclair points out, it was only a month ago that another one of Rockstar's games, Bully had freezing-up problems. Now, with reports of crashes with GTA IV, mostly on the PlayStation 3, but also on the Xbox 360, one has to wonder if perhaps there's someone in Rockstar's QA department that's not doing their job.
Other recent hit games, of course, have also had quality problems. You might recall that some players of Guitar Hero III had problems with their guitar controllers.
So one thing that will certainly help Take-Two and Rockstar get through this relatively unscathed--assuming the reports of GTA IV freezing up are real--is if they react quickly and solve the problem and reach out to their users. If they don't, it won't look good.
I can almost hear the derisive laughter coming from the executive suite at Activision.
This after the video game giant, the publisher of the monster-hit Guitar Hero III, issued a scathing response to a lawsuit brought against it by its former partner, iconic guitar manufacturer Gibson.
Activision responded harshly Thursday to a patent infringement lawsuit brought against it by guitar maker Gibson.
(Credit: Activision)According to the video game blog, Kotaku, Gibson filed suit against Activision, claiming that it owned a 9-year-old patent for "technology to simulate a musical performance."
In a March 11 filing for declaratory relief (Click for PDF), Activision noted that in a January 7, 2008 letter, Gibson attorneys argued that Guitar Hero infringed on Gibson's patent.
"By continuing to sell any version of the Guitar Hero game software and/or instrument controllers for use with the Guitar Hero game software...Activision is taking advantage of Gibson's patented technology without properly compensating Gibson," the guitar maker's attorneys wrote. "Gibson requests that Activision obtain a license under (the patent) or halt sales of any version of Guitar Hero game software."
But Activision later decided it didn't need a license under Gibson's patent and on March 10 wrote Gibson saying so.
Gibson subsequently sued for patent infringement.
In a press release Thursday, Activision also went public with its assertion that Gibson has nothing on it.
"Gibson's lawsuit is a transparent end run around an impartial court that Activision asked on March 11 to rule on patent assertions that Gibson knows have no merit," Activision wrote in its release. "As Activision noted in its filing, Gibson waited three years to make its patent allegations, and only did so after it became clear that Activision was not interested in renewing its marketing and support agreement with Gibson. Activision continues to believe that Gibson's claims are disingenuous and lack any justification."
To be sure, one would expect language like that from any company in Activision's position. And one would expect a company in Gibson's position to file suit. Because that's how business gets done these days.
But usually, one side or the other in these cases has no real argument, and the courts tend to determine that awfully quickly.
In this case, it is probably too early to tell what the outcome will be.
But as one commenter called VeritasVierge on the Kotaku story put it, "The problem for Gibson is the patent says that the guitar would have strings which the Guitar Hero controllers lack...The idea of recording music and replaying it via a guitar is just to broad an idea to patent."
Who'd have thought a guitar game could help one of the world's biggest video game companies double its earnings?
That's what happened though, as demonstrated by Activision's third-quarter earnings, which it reported Thursday afternoon.
According to the company, which was recently bought by communications giant Vivendi, Activision brought in third-quarter profits of $272.2 million, nearly twice its profits of $142.8 million from the same quarter a year ago.
Why?
Well, it's clear that a huge part of it is massive sales of the company's explosive hit, Guitar Hero III.
Other games, too, most notably, Call of Duty 4, played a role. But it's surely the millions of people out there "strumming" on plastic guitars that really put the oomph in Activision's bottom line during the third quarter.
Artist Aaron Skillman created a portable turntable 'Guitar Hero' controller in his garage.
(Credit: Aaron Skillman)Over at Hustler of Culture today, I read about artist Aaron Skillman's latest creation, a portable Guitar Hero turntable controller.
This is a pretty cool gizmo that allows users to play the game using the turntable to scroll up or down. To my untrained eye, watching Skillman demo the device on his YouTube video, it seems that the turntable controller gives the same control over the game with a smaller and perhaps easier to use form factor.
Skillman's 'Guitar Hero' turntable controller allows users to play the game much as they would with the original controller, but with a more hip-hop sensibility.
(Credit: Aaron Skillman)More to the point, Skillman, a self-described "maker," told me in a telephone conversation Monday that the turntable controller was about promoting hip-hop.
"As a turntablist myself," he said, "I just wanted to represent hip-hop and put it out there and spread good vibes.
Skillman said he created the turntable controller in his garage over a weekend.
"I just was really interested in having a turntable for a controller," he said. "Instead of waiting for one, I decided to make it myself."
What do you get when you cross two of the most popular video game franchises in history, Halo and Guitar Hero?
According to the video game blog Joystiq, you get a free downloadable copy of the Halo theme song, available Thursday to owners of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.
Microsoft's 'Halo 3' earned $170 million on its first day of sales in the U.S. The game's theme song will be available as a free download for 'Guitar Hero III.'
(Credit: Microsoft/Bungie)Apparently, some people thought the Halo theme song would be included with Guitar Hero II, but they were wrong. And now, instead of coming included with the third iteration of the franchise, it's being offered as a free download.
We're talking about video game royalty here, folks. Many hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of video game franchise revenue, together at last.
And for those of you who can't get out to play dodge ball in the park in San Francisco, then perhaps rocking out to Halo music on Guitar Hero may well be the perfect after-turkey entertainment.
One hundred fifteen million dollars.
That was how much revenue Activision's Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock brought in in its first week on the market recently.
But the Guitar Hero franchise, which Activision bought in 2006, has lost its monopoly as the only major video game giving users the fantasy that they can join Steven Tyler or Bono onstage.
'Rock Band' includes dozens of hit songs, including one by the Rolling Stones.
(Credit: Amazon)That's because Harmonix, the studio that developed the original Guitar Hero, has finally launched Rock Band, its own version of the rock star genre game, and the market is likely to heat up pretty quickly.
Many Guitar Hero fans still consider Harmonix--which is owned by MTV--the real deal, and so many of them are likely to eschew the new Guitar Hero in favor of Rock Band. Others will choose both games, and I can imagine dueling Guitar Hero, Rock Band competitions in bars, at parties, and even on TV.
Well, maybe not on TV.
It will be very interesting to see if Rock Band can come anywhere near the first-week sales figures of Guitar Hero III. My guess is it won't get there, only because of the name-brand recognition of the latter. But I'm willing to be surprised. There's definitely something to be said for true bloodlines, which is what Rock Band and Harmonix have going for them, even if they doesn't have the hit name anymore.
Either way, competition is good, and the end result is likely to be stronger versions of the games when both Activision and MTV issue the next iterations of their dueling titles.
Stand back. It's going to be guitar battles to the death.
Even as Activision and its RedOctane publishing arm have had a great couple of weeks of sales of their recently released hit, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, some fans of the game have been complaining about its quality control problems.
On forums and on game blogs, some users are reporting that wireless versions of the game's guitar aren't working properly.
Some 'Guitar Hero III' users are reporting problems with their guitars
(Credit: Activision)"I was having some real problems once I hit tiers 4 and 5 on medium," wrote Mark Methenitis on his blog, Law of the Game. "I found that the red and yellow buttons were not registering being pressed. After disassembling and re-assembling the guitar, the problem continued."
The issue, the theory goes, has to do with the contact points on the wireless guitars' detachable neck. The result? That some measurable percentage of the time, the buttons don't respond as they should.
"When I hold down the red fret button sometimes, it doesn't respond," wrote a user known as SpyroTheDragon on the official GuitarHero.com forums.
"You know why this happens? Because they thought a detachable neck would be a good idea for PINS AND METAL DOT CONTACTS," answered another forum participant, vsTerminus.
And still another user posted similar unhappiness on the blog, splith.org: "I've noticed some flakiness in the frets while I was playing. I would hold down certain frets and the game would not respond."
In many of these cases, the users reported that upon returning their original guitars, their replacements would have better success. So if true, that does point to poor quality control at manufacture, and not to some across-the-board defect.
And of course, this is by no means the first measurable quality control problem in the industry. For example, Microsoft had a great deal of trouble with the Xbox 360, as has been widely reported.
But it's unfortunate for a company like Activision that some of the good will that its new game got upon release--especially as measured by the strong initial sales--is being squandered on poor quality control.
Let's hope Activision and RedOctane will be quick to allay users' concerns.
A call to RedOctane for comment was not immediately returned.
