Min Wage Review: Guitar Hero Vs. Rock Band: Part 1

I figured I'd do something a little different this time, a head to head franchise review. However, this is going to get quite lengthy for a typical review and thus I'm breaking it up into parts. This part will briefly cover the history of Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band completely changed the video game scene overnight, garnering billions of dollars in sales every year. Then they simply disappeared. It was a wild ride while it lasted but why did the plug get pulled so soon?

Guitar Hero was a small title published by Red Octane for under $1 million in 2005 for the PS2. Guitar Hero was a sort of reimagined version of Konami’s GuitarFreaks for a North American audience. RedOctane was a successful 3^rd party peripheral manufacturer specializing in Konami’s Bemani series of titles while Harmonix, the developer, had made several music titles such as Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution. The fit was perfect and Guitar Hero, consisting of 47 rock songs, was a big success selling 1.5 million copies despite sharing a launch year with the Xbox 360. The following year Guitar Hero 2 launched. It improved on the original in every way and hosted a new, larger soundtrack and doubled the sales of the original. After releasing an updated, 80s version of Guitar Hero 2, the Guitar Hero franchise and RedOctane were bought by Activision and Harmonix weren’t part of the deal.

At this point, Activision assigned a new studio to build Guitar Hero 3 and with Activision’s marketing reach and budget it was hoped to be the biggest, best Guitar Hero yet and skyrocket the franchise to the top. Activision accomplished their goal and 2007’s Guitar Hero 3 was the first game to generate over $1 billion in sales. They did this mostly by hype, marketing, licensing more popular songs and celebrity appearances, and by releasing versions of Guitar Hero 3 for every home console on the market for the first time including PC. Meanwhile, Harmonix was bought by MTV Games, a subsidiary of Viacom a relative newcomer to the video game market. In 2007, Harmonix released Rock Band which expanded the Guitar Hero premise to include singing and drumming into a four player co-op experience.

The following year saw the releases of Guitar Hero: World Tour, their first attempt at adding four player co-op like Rock Band, and Rock Band 2, a sequel that improved the nuances of the first much like Guitar Hero 2. By this point, customers had to either pick a franchise and stick with it or maintain a lot more plastic peripherals than they probably had room for. Not only were all these ‘instruments’ bulky but they were quite expensive. In addition, each year would see upgraded, revised instruments hit the shelves alongside new software. Plus, most of the original instruments were quite fragile and couldn’t hold up long for a hardcore player.

While 2010’s Rock Band 3, which hosted new instruments, had an impressive ability to teach players how to play real life instruments it was counter intuitive to the music genre’s biggest problem. Rock Band 3, so far, has been a financial disappointment and Guitar Hero hasn’t fared much better the last few years. Since the revenue streams were unsatisfactory, Guitar Hero production was halted and NeverSoft, the primary developer, was laid off. Similarly, Harmonix was sold back into the indie scene and MTV Games sort of disappeared altogether. The only additions to either franchise since have been the consistent, weekly additions of DLC for Rock Band 3 via the Rock Band Network and Harmonix themselves.