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[toymachine]

Too much DLC and they just released titles way too frequently. Why buy the new game when they just released the previous one a few months back and there are hundreds of songs you can pick or choose from on the marketplace. The model just kind of fell apart.

It was pretty huge at one time though and I personally had some awesome times destroying my buddies.

Guitar Hero only had 406 DLC songs by the time they wrapped up

3 of those are Hendrix songs that can only be played on Guitar Hero World Tour

and another 3 were taken down because of the lawsuits involving Adam Levine and Maroon 5 (I'm assuming)

GH DLC (full band) started in 2008 and ended in 2011...

 

[ThaiNoodles]

Did anybody else always think guitar hero was stupid? It came out when I was in high school, and all of my friends loved it and I played it with them here and there, but it always seemed really lame.

 

[Heart of Black]

I'm sure plenty did, I was not among them.

Gamestop thought it was lame enough not to ship it overnight, but I ran down the street and bought it at Bestbuy and demoed it at my store (and told people where they could buy it). People's minds were blown by the concept, which I knew would be huge.

It became such a great game that anyone could play when Harmonix introduced Rockband.

 

[Dinosur]

Did anybody else always think guitar hero was stupid? It came out when I was in high school, and all of my friends loved it and I played it with them here and there, but it always seemed really lame.

I will admit I have always been glad it didn't come out until I was way done with college. I got to spend all my high school and college time being in "real" bands with my roommates/friends. I shudder to think how easy it would have been to just stick with the plastic fun if that was available.

Gamestop thought it was lame enough not to ship it overnight, but I ran down the street and bought it at Bestbuy and demoed it at my store (and told people where they could buy it). People's minds were blown by the concept, which I knew would be huge.

I got at least three people to run out and buy PS2's within the first week of release (and I don't hang out with many people lol). I was lugging that thing around all over the place and everyone fell in love.

 

[Returners]

Frankly the GH5 guitar I feel is the best of out of all them.

 

[FyreWulff]

I yell at people playing air guitar in their front yard to go learn a real instrument

Then they stabbed me with their drumsticks

 

[drexplora]

maybe making less games and releasing more official free tracks
and maybe less music from the top 40's or w/e

 

[richiek]

I remember when Dance Dance Revolution was the hot rhythm gaming fad in the early 2000s, and then crashed into irrelevance. Funny how the same thing happened to Guitar Hero.

 

[AkuMifune]

C'mon GAF.

 

[AlphaTwo00]

And someone brought up Singstar being dead (in the US anyway) earlier? I wish Lips hadn't died off. My wife and I enjoyed Lips quite a bit; I bought all the disc releases with the exception of the German and Spanish discs (I imported the 80's game even, my very first import ever!).
I suppose it just came out at the wrong time. If Microsoft had released the games just a couple years later, they could have added some dumb Kinect functionality and marketed it hardcore to the casual crowd and probably have made a killing.

I'm considering importing the 80's disk. The UK version works in NA right?

iNis did take that codebase and moved on... to Karaoke on 360, so yeah, it's there, it has that dumb Kinect functionality. LOL.

 

[Lasdrub]

Does it really work as a learning tool? Did you start from scratch or already knew, say, a bit of acoustic guitar?

First I will say it is not great for guitar. I took two guitar classes in college and have played for years. The best you are going to get from the game is some techniques and learn some chords. You'll also learn how to play the songs in the game, of course. It's not terrible, but I would not buy it to learn how to play the guitar. Maybe an OK place to start.

For learning bass, on the other hand, it seems much better. Bass is mostly about technique and getting to the notes at the right time. Playing bass in the game helps you to get familiar with the layout of the instrument, so eventually you can start playing without looking at the frets. I have a lot to do in the game still. I am definitely much better at the bass now than the first time I played it. It's all about training your fingers how far away notes are.

 

[Crag Dweller]

I will admit I have always been glad it didn't come out until I was way done with college. I got to spend all my high school and college time being in "real" bands with my roommates/friends. I shudder to think how easy it would have been to just stick with the plastic fun if that was available.



I got at least three people to run out and buy PS2's within the first week of release (and I don't hang out with many people lol). I was lugging that thing around all over the place and everyone fell in love.

I remember the game getting a lot of buzz at that year's E3. Picked it up at best buy and a couple hours later I was calling my friends and telling them to get over here and check this shit out.

 

[FyreWulff]

I will admit I have always been glad it didn't come out until I was way done with college. I got to spend all my high school and college time being in "real" bands with my roommates/friends. I shudder to think how easy it would have been to just stick with the plastic fun if that was available.

I've literally never heard of anyone interested in guitar being diverted away from it by Rock Band or Guitar Hero. Meanwhile, plenty of people's interest in playing instruments was sparked by it. My stepdad and brother also got into guitars because of Rock Band and both now own two of them, and the game teaching me to separate my hands from each other for fretting/strumming let me finally get into playing a bass.

This is like saying Madden reduces the amount of kids playing football.

 

[Izick]

I think it was due to the novelty wearing off. Guitar Hero through Rock Band 2 are amazing games, but after Rock Band 2, there wasn't really anywhere that they could logically take it. They tried new instrumnets, more realistic plastic instruments, but you couldn't beat the awe factor of playing a plastic guitar for the first time, or playing in a plastic instrument band with your friends for the first time.

I know the oversaturation of games helped speed the process of falling out of relevance a lot quicker, but I always thought that Rock Band, like the Wiimote, had a shelf life due to what kind of people it was bringing in. That's not to say there couldn't be awesome Wii games, or that people wouldn't still enjoy playing those instruments, but the idea of it being a cultural phenomenom couldn't sustain itself for very long. Unlike game IP's that peter out due to lack of innovation or people moving on, the fact that the game(s) were built around getting friends together and playing really kind of made it a rolling stone of irrelevancy that would only get worse once people started to get bored with it.

Such a shame though, because Guitar Hero through Rock Band 2 are some of the best experiences in gaming. The problem is that you had to be alive and playing those games at the time because it's likely this is one of those things in gaming that won't be able to be recreated, or at least recreated in a natural way.

Who knows? Maybe we'll see a revolution of the plastic instument genre some day, and we'll all be reliving the awesome fun we had with these games.