Music is the quintessential lifeblood for those of us who feel things, and make others feel things, through sound and words. It has been around for at least 40,000 years that we know of. The earliest instruments were flutes and strings, and the oldest arranged and notated songs were discovered to have been written as long as 3,400 years ago. Music might have co-developed with language or even have been a language at one point. It is now said to be the universal language. I suppose that it can be at times, but given there are so many different dialects, music might as well itself have been stricken at one point like the tower of Babel.
As it evolved, so have the players. Look at songs from a historical standpoint with me if you will. Truly thinking about it, music with words has been a remarkably exponential trend of merely the past 100 years. Indeed there were songs before the 20th century with words, and plenty of them; however before this time frame, the largest percentage of compositions were instrumental or largely so. Even the minstrels who sang tales through song would compose using simple chord structures and write songs 'by the numbers,' meaning that the couple of chords used to tell a rhythmic tale could very well be the same chords you hear in the next song with either a slight or no variation in meter. Rarely would any of the lute players or the string players that were popular possess the skills to play sets of scales or strangely tuned chords. The more experienced players reigned in their talents in search of coin and goods when the times would get hard, because it was never so much about skill as it was entertainment. Kinda sounds like music today huh?
Enter the 20th century. Radios are a part of nearly every home. Phonographic transference becomes easier to replicate and far more affordable. Then we have concert broadcasts. Then we minimize the size of the disc that our phonographs play. Then we create tape. Then we advance further, using this reel technology to record and write audio, even showing a film. Then we keep advancing. Video cassette recorders, tape recorders, eight-track players, beta max players, enhanced radios, boomboxes, loudspeakers, Walkmans, compact discs, laser discs, mini discs, mp3's. Here we are. We advanced exponentially in such a short time with the presentation of our mediums. With that, our population has doubled since the early 1980's. With that, so have our tastes, our instrumentation, our musical varieties and our own culture.
In 1998, a small developer named Bemani (Dance Dance Revolution, DrumMania) decided to try something off the wall. Off the wall tends to work well in one certain country: Japan, where Bemani was located. They wanted to create a game that would simulate the playing of a guitar, but be fully interactive within a game environment, tracking the notes played and rewarding you for following a rhythm. This went over well. The game was called GuitarFreaks and was backed by gaming giant Konami. By the time the series hit their stride, a publishing company named RedOctane started making peripherals for them, specifically starting off with pads for DDR and working their way to guitar peripherals for GuitarFreaks. Before Japan could try to import the game here, RedOctane did what any self-serving capitalist would do: copyright their peripheral and get a juggernaut publisher (Activision) and a big developer (Harmonix) behind them. Guitar Hero was born on the same premise of GuitarFreaks in 2005, around the same time the fifth iteration of GuitarFreaks was out in Japan. It hit big and it hit fast.
Activision has a history of cashing in on its opportunities, ignoring the principles of oversaturation and simply promising bigger and better and more with each iteration of its tentpole franchises (see: Call of Duty). By the time Japan knew what hit here, they decided to try and port over GuitarFreaks. There was just a slight problem. That little company who developed Guitar Hero using 'borrowed' ideas from their time spent on GuitarFreaks, RedOctane, had copyrighted their guitar controller and licensed it. Since Guitar Hero hit here and made mad money (unlike GuitarFreaks in Japan), they decided to block the import of Konami's game by suing them for using 'their' peripheral. Konami has had a history of lawsuits against other companies for using controllers and making games similar to DDR and other games like that, so while this may seem tit for tat (which it is, in my opinion), evidently this is business as usual in the gaming world. With GuitarFreaks officially blocked and out of the picture, Guitar Hero and everyone involved made their millions and had the market cornered. But, alliances shift and things change.
Harmonix decided to quit after GHII. Developers are paid percentages by publishers, and anybody who knows anything about Activision knows that they get their money first. So Harmonix teamed with EA and began making their own game. Guitar Hero thought nothing of it and brought in Neversoft (Tony Hawk: Pro Skater) and Vicarious Visions (also Tony Hawk and several others) to develop the next entry under the leadership of RedOctane. Guitar Hero III was received to rave reviews for stepping up the challenge aspect of the game and bringing more downloadable content. But then came Harmonix's game, Rock Band. Now you could sing, play guitar, play bass AND play drums. GH got played, and played hard.
This ignited an all-out war of the music games. So many came about during this time, from 2007 until 2010. The DJ Hero's, the Guitar Hero expansions, the Rock Band expansions, the crazy drum sets, the split-fingered bass, the ridiculous amount of songs, the Rock Band Network, the Guitar Hero exclusives, Rocksmith, Band Hero. The market had too much. I don't know about you, but when I'm presented with too many ways to actually do one simple thing, I become disinterested and disillusioned with it pretty quickly. All I ever wanted to do, as I'm sure was the case with most of you with Guitar Hero, was play songs I enjoyed. The competition aspect in the game was awesome. Excelling and actually learning the structure of your favorite songs without having to navigate strings was cool. Cheating and kinda foolish, but still cool. It meant we were all on the same level as long as we could press five buttons and strum the bar at the same time. Rock Band got it right because then we could all form a virtual band and never have to leave the house. But, therein lies the ultimate demise of all music games.
We don't all like to sit at home listlessly forever. Okay, well, I don't. I am a musician. In order to enjoy music, I have to be playing it, feeling it, seeing it, living it. Sometimes musicians don't enjoy music because it gets to be like a job, a product that you have to put out, a numbers game. Guitar Hero and all other things like it became EXACTLY that. An arms race with no clear winner and an idea that became polluted and ultimately diluted by oversaturation (I also hope the same thing happens to Call Of Duty, I'm so tired of FPS's right now I could scream). Guitar Hero is dead and so is Rock Band, DJ Hero and all other music games. You might pick it up every now and again if you get really bored, but probably not. I think the main reason you won't is not because of all the reasons listed, but mainly because you realize the real thing is so much better. When the fun is gone, it's gone. The only way to bring it back is to take it back to basics. But why would I do that when I can just try to actually learn my favorite band's songs on a real instrument? When I could buy a guitar, practice amp and effects pedal for the same price as a Rock Band bundle? Simply put, I won't go back to it.
I was a musician before this even was released to the public. It was fun while it lasted and it's gone now. Perhaps it will come back again one day when we've all forgotten what it became. As a matter of fact, I'm sure it will. That's what trends do. Come, go, come again when the time is right. I do hope, however, that when that time comes around, you'll encourage someone to pick up an instrument and learn the real thing. It's so much more fun to play a real pentatonic solo than slide your fingers across imaginary frets. But you don't need me to tell you all this, do you? In the end, Guitar Hero deserved to die because it was a product. It wasn't about music. Music isn't a product (despite what the industry might say), it's an emotion. You feel it or you don't. I think we're all in agreement that none of us feel like sitting through another barrage of ridiculousness like the music game wave.
... for now.
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