The year is 2005, November 8th. A game was released with low expectations, no one was following it, no one expected it to sell well. This game was Guitar Hero, a game where gamers could play rock songs with five buttons on a plastic controller. Little did Harmonix Music Systems know that this unexpected hit would change the face of the video game industry in the coming years.
These groundbreaking video games changed gaming forever and drew in scores of fans in the process.
The Guitar Hero franchise died in the wake of Activision's lust for Call of Duty, but we should be dusting off those plastic guitars for a new Guitar Hero game.
Guitar Hero was good. The problem was Activision started creating many versions. Guitar Hero had the every one year cycle like COD and people felt they were being robbed.
Why in the hell would one want to spend time to learn a button mashing order when you can lean to play a real guitar in the same time frame.
TheGamer Writes "Harmonix has proven plenty of times it can make Rock Band work without instruments."
I mean, yeah, but was anyone saying otherwise? The fact is people liked the plastic instruments rather than pressing buttons on a controller. They enjoyed the simulated experience.
"Work"? No, but to be good? It's absolutely necessary. Not having the accessories is like playing a lightgun shooter with an analog stick sure it works, but one experience is completely unique and fun as hell, and other is torture trying to make do playing in a way it was never meant to be played
I think CHEAP plastic instruments is THE reason why the instrument-genre ‘died’.
People invested in buying the game AND the peripherals, so the guitar, the dj-set, the drum, whatever, and the experience was absolutely fantastic. Great fun, great music, etc.
But then the instruments would break. A button would stop working, or your hits wouldn’t register, and that kind of hardware failure would end in you not being able to play the game as intended, and thus you not getting the scores you deserve.
So, now you had a great game, but a broken instrument, and nobody is gonna buy a new plastic instrument every 3-6 months in order to keep playing the game.
A solution would have been to release better quality instruments (obviously), at a slightly higher price, so you could have kept the new games coming and the genre alive, but sadly, that didn’t happen.
Bust a Groove, Gitaroo Man and Parrapa the Rappa were such good games. Neither needed any extra peripherals
Rhythm games were the best after after school!
Next: "The rise and fall of the FPS genre."
These types of games didn't really need new releases every year, people got tired of buying the new games when they could have easily released some Music packs as DLC.
Then they started packaging expensive peripherals and people kind of got sick of paying over $100 for these things.
I own a few of the Rock Bands and Guitar Hero games and they are great fun online or in groups.
The difference between this genre and the FPS genre is that the FPS genre did not spring up overnight, FPS games draw dedicated hardcore gamers and have done so for over a decade now.