Yesterday the Beatles made an appearance at the E3 gaming event and hyped up The Beatles: Rock Band, but they will find themselves competing against Activision Blizzard’s Guitar Hero 5. The advantage that the Guitar Hero franchise has over Rock Band is a release date that is one week before. The exact date of Guitar Hero 5’s release is September 1.
Guitar Hero 5 will be available on the XBox 360, the Sony Playstation 2 and Playstation 3, and the Nintendo Wii. Some of the songs on the game include Blue Orchid (The White Stripes), Sympathy for the Devil (The Rolling Stones), All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan), and Ring of Fire (Johnny Cash).
The instruments for the game include a mic, guitars, drums, and the bass. Any combination of the instruments can be used at once. Before there was a one-instrument per player restriction.
Amit Chowdhry | April 13, 2009 | 272 views | Comments Categorized under Guitar Hero
Guitar Hero was first introduced about four years ago and it has become such a craze since then. I’ve heard some cases where people that played the game a lot have actually become better at playing the guitar. Since the game franchise was introduced, GH enthusiasts have been creating all sorts of products inspired the game. LayersOfLove decided to add themselves to the list by creating a cake called the “Fist of Rock.”
At the Game Developer Conference there were several students from the Rochester Institute of Technology showing off their banjo controller used for games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero. The students gutted the wires and buttons out from a guitar controller and moved it into the banjo.
The students involved in the project include Michael Ey, Sela Davis, Alex Lifschitz, Joe Pietruch, and Dominick D’Aniello as a project for Professor Schwartz’s Alternative Controllers Seminar. The project was called “Oh No! Banjo.”
All you need to complete this picture is the guy to be wearing overalls and have him chewing on a weed.
In 2007, MTV’s Rock Band franchise launched. Now the franchise as a whole has hit a major milestone, $1 billion in sales. These numbers are based on the North American market. The numbers were released in a press release this past Thursday. Rock Band players have also downloaded more than 40 million songs from the DLC selection.
Even though Rock Band 3 has not been announced yet, there will be a Beatles version of the game for the PSP coming out soon. Electronic Arts is the distribution company of the game and it was developed by Harmonix.
There are about 600 songs available for download to add to the game. It took Guitar Hero about 26 months to hit the same milestone whereas it took Rock Band about 15 months. The complete version of Rock Band costs almost $200.
Dan Rosensweig is the former COO of Yahoo! Inc. and former President of CNET. Now Rosensweig is getting into gaming by joining Activision Blizzard Inc. to head up the Guitar Hero franchise. Rosensweig quit Yahoo! in 2006 after working there for five years in product development and marketing. Rosensweig left around the same time Terry Semel did.
Coincidentally Activision’s current CEO Bobby Kotick served on the Yahoo! board of directors up until last year. When Rosensweig left Yahoo!, he worked at Quadrangle Group. Quadrangle is a private equity firm based out of New York. Rosensweig was the Silicon Valley representation of the firm.
Rosensweig’s responsibilities at Activision will be to maintain the whole Guitar Hero franchise. The franchise was put together by Activision’s Red Octane unit and Neversoft studios. Guitar Hero has had three blockbuster games in the franchise, but some analysts believe that the growth for music games may be slowing down. Rosenweig needs to make sure Guitar Hero does not become obsolete.
“With a platform and content that universally engages a wide range of audiences, Guitar Hero has incredible growth potential,” stated Rosensweig. “I look forward to continuing to develop Guitar Hero into an even more successful enterprise.”
