37 Facts About Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero is a series of music rhythm game video games first released in 2005, in which players use a guitar-shaped game controller to simulate playing primarily lead, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar across numerous songs.

In 2005, RedOctane, a company specializing in the manufacture of unique game controllers, was inspired to create Guitar Hero based on RedOctane's experience creating hardware for Konami's Guitar Freaks arcade game.

Activision claimed in 2009 that the Guitar Hero franchise was the 3rd largest game franchise after the Mario and Madden NFL franchises.

Guitar Hero Live, released in October 2015, was the first new title in the series in five years, considered to be a reboot of the series and developed by FreeStyleGames, who had developed the DJ Hero games.

Guitar Hero was created from a partnership between RedOctane, then their own company that produced specialized video game controllers, and Harmonix, a music video game development company who had previously produced Frequency, Amplitude, and Karaoke Revolution.

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Guitar Hero began considering the expansion of the series to band-specific titles with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.

Guitar Hero 5 is the first game in the series to use a new version of the series' logo; previous games used a logo in a font with sharper "points" on the letters, which was considered "idiosyncratic with a vengeance" to match the games' emphasis on heavy metal music.

Guitar Hero Live was released with both a career and an online mode.

Original Guitar Hero was released on the PlayStation 2 in November 2005.

Guitar Hero is notable because it comes packaged with a controller peripheral modeled after a black Gibson SG guitar.

The development of Guitar Hero was inspired by Konami's Guitar Freaks video game, which at the time, had not seen much exposure in the North American market; RedOctane, already selling guitar-shaped controllers for imported copies of GuitarFreaks, approached Harmonix about creating a game to use an entirely new Guitar controller.

Guitar Hero II was later released for the Xbox 360 in April 2007 with an exclusive Gibson Explorer guitar controller and an additional 10 songs, among other features.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith was the first Guitar Hero game to center on one specific artist.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith was developed by Neversoft for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, by Vicarious Visions for the Wii, and by Budcat Creations for the PlayStation 2.

DJ Guitar Hero uses a special turntable-based controller for players to perform with on various song mixes in the game.

Sequel, DJ Guitar Hero 2, was officially announced in June 2010 for release in the last quarter of 2010, featuring more than 70 mashups from over 85 artists.

Band Guitar Hero was ported to the Nintendo DS by Vicarious Visions, expanding the play to include vocals and drumming.

The game includes four-player local wireless play in a similar manner as Guitar Hero 5 allowing any combination of instruments to be used.

Band Guitar Hero is limited to vocals and drums on the two consoles for the same reason.

Activision and Konami, who had previously worked together to make sure that the Guitar Hero series meets with Konami's patents on music games, in conjunction with Raw Thrills, developed an arcade console version of the game, titled Guitar Hero Arcade, distributed to arcades in early 2009.

Core gameplay of the Guitar Hero games is a rhythm video game similar to Konami's Guitar Freaks and to a lesser extent Harmonix's previous music games such as Frequency and Amplitude.

Guitar Hero 5 allows players to create a band of up to four players using any combination of instruments.

Guitar Hero II added special lighting and other stage effects that were synchronized to the music to provide a more complete concert experience.

Main mode of play in the Guitar Hero games is Career Mode, where the player and in-game band travel between various fictional performance arenas and perform sets of four to six songs.

Guitar Hero III introduced Boss Battles, in which two players face off against each other, attempt to collect "distractions" to throw at their opponent, trying to make them fail.

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Many of the Guitar Hero games developed for the recent generation of consoles support downloadable content, allowing players to purchase new songs to play in the respective titles.

Games in the Guitar Hero series have been generally well received by critics.

Neversoft's first entry to the series, Guitar Hero III, was considered to be too difficult, with many difficult songs presenting players with "walls of notes"; the developers later acknowledged this.

Guitar Hero II was significantly more financially successful, with over 1.

Guitar Hero III, according to Activision, was the first single video game to sell more than US$1 billion at retail, with nearly 3.

Guitar Hero series has made a significant cultural impact, becoming a "cultural phenomenon".

Guitar Hero has seen a revitalization in the form of a software clone called Clone Hero, as observed in 2020.

Many critics believed that the number of releases of Guitar Hero games was "milking" the brand name and oversaturating the market.

Critics argued that Guitar Hero should have been doing the same, either through releasing expansions that could be incorporated into the main games of the series, or by issuing the songs as downloadable content.

Furthermore, some expansions were praised for the additional content beyond the note-matching gameplay; Guitar Hero: Metallica is considered to be one of the series' best works to be developed by Neversoft in part due to the care that the developers took with imaging the band and the available extras for the game.

Kotick believed that part of the downfall of Guitar Hero was due to Activision's introduction of DJ Hero, which they gave too much focus and left the core Guitar Hero games without the "nourishment and care" needed to continue to innovate in the series.

Activision Publishing chief executive Mike Griffith, in response to questions about Activision's approach to the Guitar Hero market, noted that Guitar Hero continues to outsell the Rock Band series in both number of sales and revenue, with consumers continuing to buy the separate games on the market, and considered the market acceptance of the multiple games as validation for their model.