Activision Axes Guitar Hero

jtillots writes "Activision Blizzard has canceled the Guitar Hero franchise, citing 'declining revenue of the music game genre.' Also on the chopping block was DJ Hero and True Crime. Fat_bot put it best — it's the new Day the Music Died." This comes only a few months after Viacom dropped Rock Band developer Harmonix for similar reasons, and less than a week after they closed MTV Games altogether.

Re:Weird

[Tukz]

And then they kept fucking the customers over, by releasing new games over and over, with nothing more but new songs in em and a small feature tweak that easily could had been sold as DLC.

Rock Band was actually on the right track, Guitar Hero was not.
But Guitar Hero ruined it for everyone else, by giving the entire thing a bad reputation.

Reality goes only so far...

[RoverDaddy]

Gee, in most race car games I've seen, you can sideswipe the walls, crash into other drivers, spin out, etc, and you aren't immediately disabled, dead or permanently out of the race. The game is forgiving -on purpose-. And by they way, in GH and RB, if you don't push the buttons, the tune does NOT keep on playing. Your errors screw up the music you hear, until eventually the performer 'fails' and the band is booed off the stage. Of course it's artificial - doesn't mean it's not fun.

Your Race Car Hero game sounds a lot like Dragon's Lair, which boiled down to nothing more than 'push the correct button at the beep'. Yet that game did pretty well for it's time.

Re:Weird

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true, 100 times over. The key has always been Harmonix: Harmonix developed Guitar Hero 1 and 2, which were great. Activision then bought the franchise, ditched Harmonix, and released a barrage of crappy Guitar Hero games. Harmonix went on to create Rock Band, and Activision copied the band concept. The only reason Activision had a few sales successes after ditching Harmonix is because they were literally riding the reputation Harmonix had built for the series with the first two incarnations.

It simply can't be said enough - Harmonix knows how to make appealing music games, but Activision has nearly run the entire genre into the ground.

Re:Finally, some sanity!

[gstoddart]

I think future generations will look back on the days where everyone thought 'Guitar Hero' was 'cool' much in the same way as my generation looks back at the days where 'air guitar' was cool: with a shudder of embarrassment.

*shrug* Like it or hate it, from my perspective, I credit Guitar Hero et al with teaching me to understand the musicality of a lot of music I had previously been unable to listen to.

I didn't grow up listening to punk, metal, or alternative -- as a result, I found them to be overly dissonant with no clear structure or rhythm. These games taught me to appreciate what was actually going on in there, and as a result, my music tastes have expanded to encompass a lot more things (and as a result, buy a lot of CDs I'd never have considered).

From that perspective, I am quite happy for the time I spent playing Guitar Hero -- I sure as hell wouldn't have bought any Rise Against or Social Distortion before playing those games.