Somewhere in your house, you probably have some plastic guitars sitting somewhere right?
Or someone you know at least does….cause for a time, a game named ‘Guitar Hero’ flippin’ dominated pop culture for a time….and it all started 15 years ago…which just seems like yesterday.
For those that don’t know (which would be kinda surprising…) Guitar Hero was a rhythmic music game where you had a small plastic guitar controller with 5 multi-colored buttons. As the colors would flow on the screen, you’d hit the buttons as they played along to songs from White Zombie, Black Label Society, Cheap Trick…you know, popular rock songs! Apparently so many people loved it that it became a cultural phenonmen….and EVERYONE….I mean….EVERY ONE was playing Guitar Hero.
My friend Bruce bought a Playstation 2 SPECIFICALLY to play Guitar Hero.
While the first game was a hit, the second was a SMASH HIT….cause by then? Record labels and bands started to jump on this guitar hero train. CD’s were really fading out, streaming was barely beginning, and buying music on iTunes was the new thing…so? How do bands make money on their music? Sell it on Guitar Hero, and it worked for a good amount of time.
Then it didn’t.
Games like Rock Band, Band Hero, specialized versions of Guitar Hero, band centric games like Van Halen, ACDC, Green Day, multiple expansions…every one was jumping on the rhythm game bandwagon so much that it flooded the market, and people stopped caring…it just, went away. I worked at GameStop during the craze, and there were just massive boxes of plastic instruments everywhere. You could barely walk in the damn store without running into some kind of ‘Hero’ or ‘Band’ game.
It was an interesting time in gaming and music! I still look at those old plastic instruments with fond memories.
