Prophetic words from Alex Rigopulos, CEO of Harmonix, recalling the early days of Guitar Hero. And when you look back far enough – past the millions of copies sold, past the weekend parties, before the game became a pop-culture milestone – his skepticism is actually very understandable.

At that point in history – 2005 — Harmonix had created several high-quality games, but none that were megahits. Frequency and Amplitude brought innovative music gameplay on PlayStation 2, following the trail blazed by Parappa the Rapper, Um Jammer Lammy, and Konami’s Japan-only Guitar Freaks. Harmonix had also worked with Konami on Karaoke Revolution with success, but even Rigopulos says “they weren’t blockbuster hits, they were base hits.”

When a small publisher named RedOctane approached Harmonix with a request, it was backwards. RedOctane wanted to make a guitar controller, but they didn’t have a game to go with it. Would Harmonix be interested in making that game? “In the beginning, we were kind of reluctant,” says Rigopulos. “They were this tiny company – they were like half the size we were. They had no money or marketing resources. They had no experience in publishing.” It was a destiny moment: Do you focus on staying afloat with base hits, or do you go for that blockbuster? “This was the game we had been dreaming of making for years,” admits Rigopulos. “We had complete creative freedom. We decided to do it – and of course, Guitar Hero happened.”

And oh, how it happened. Word of mouth propelled the original PS2 game to better and better sales throughout the 2005 holiday season, and well beyond. “Basically, as fast as RedOctane could make the guitars, the games were selling to retail and selling out,” recalls Rigopulos. Among the game’s biggest fans: Activision, which acquired RedOctane and the Guitar Hero name, then worked with Harmonix to bring Guitar Hero II to market the next year.

However, by the second sequel, Harmonix had been acquired by MTV Games, and the third GH installment would be handled by Neversoft — themselves enormous fans of the series. “We put it on a projector in the back room,” recalls Alan Flores, GHIII’s Lead Designer, “and then suddenly every week, we were having a big Guitar Hero party.” Rigopulos and company went on to create Rock Band, even if it was hard to let go of their creation. “Obviously, Guitar Hero is dear to our hearts,” he says. “It was our breakthrough game and we are very proud of having created it.”

Neversoft had its own mountain to climb, starting from scratch with none of Harmonix’s programming code to build upon. “Just being fans of the franchise, we didn’t want to f*** it up,” says Flores. “That was the first thing that came to our mind: we wanted to do a pure Guitar Hero experience. People loving the game as much as they do made us nervous – they’re going to be skeptical.” But with additions like Battle Mode, celebrity guitarists like Slash and Tom Morello, an epic good-vs-evil storyline, and a wireless controller for maximum living room rocking, fans embraced it, and several new ones got on board. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock wound up being the first video game to top $1 billion in sales.

Every GH game kept the innovation coming – full band play and a music creation studio in Guitar Hero World Tour, a free-flowing Party Play mode in GH5, and a detailed challenge system in Warriors of Rock that let you call out any friend on any song, on any instrument. And of course, there are full explorations of the catalogs of legendary bands like Aerosmith, Van Halen, and Metallica.

With the release of April’s downloadable Track Packs, Guitar Hero as a franchise goes on vacation until further notice. Some are sad to see it go, others happy — but of course, the music lives on. Those games and guitars are in your collection, and it’s easy enough to fire them up whenever you want to feel like a guitar hero. Long live rock.

In honor of Guitar Hero’s remarkable run on PlayStation consoles, I’m giving away a Guitar Hero “time capsule” – multiple games from the series, lots of DLC, and other collectible swag for superfans. Check oneofswords.com for how to enter, and good luck!

Tomorrow, Friday July 24th, Beenox developers will be online to challenge you for the 1st time on Guitar Hero Smash Hits.

We’ll have drums, guitars, vocals, and bass so they’re will be plenty of ways to challenge us. Don’t forget to bring your headset as you’ll be invited to ask us any questions you may have on the development of Smash Hits.

You’ll be able to meet with, artists, note trackers, testers, programmers and more…the team is really excited about this event and has a lot to share.

How this works is pretty simple, just add the list of developers to your friends list and when you see us online at 4pm EST, send us game invites or simply search for players with GHBXDEV in their name.

When: Friday July 24th
Time: 4pm EST
Developers to invite:

Programmer: GHBxDevJonathan
Programmer: GHBxDevMathieu
Animator: GHBxDevJeff
Producer: GHBxDevPaul
Guitar Note Tracker: GHBxDevGuy
Guitar Note Tracker: GHBxDevFrancois
Tester: GHBxDevMelissa
Drum Note Tracker: GHBxDevClaude

I really hope you’re ready for the challenge! Happy practicing and see you all on Friday!

Paul “GHBxDevPaul” Gadbois

The event will take place in the “Backstage with Guitar Hero” space where players will be able to rock out on their PLAYSTATION 3 controllers to a lightning-fast finger rock-style interactive mini-game. In this mind-boggling party game of music, memory, and reflexes, players are challenged to follow the lead of a guitarist by matching an ever-increasing color and sound pattern. With each turn a new note is added to the tune, and when a player misses a note they are knocked out of the game until only one player is left standing. A local leaderboard captures the highest scores in real time so the true champion gets their due props and the losers are left to practice their chops in shame.

On Friday, March 27th, between the hours of 12:00pm and 5:00pm PT (3:00pm and 8:00pm EST) the PlayStation Home Community Management team will be visiting the new Guitar Hero game space each hour on the hour and awarding the user with the current high score a special prize. So come out and show us your godly guitar skills. Who knows – you might just emerge the new virtual rock star of PlayStation Home…

Recently, I was flying back from San Francisco after doing some press for the game, and I was reading a music magazine. Inside was an article on the history of thrash metal which listed what they felt were the quintessential 12 thrash metal albums of all time. I looked over the list and realized that I have nine of these records on vinyl and one on CD. Yeah, thrash metal, especially Metallica, played such an important role in my life when I was in high school, and now 20 years later being able to work on a Metallica game is nothing short of a dream project.

A small sampling of my vintage thrash metal record collection

It seems like almost everyone I know has a story about how Metallica has meant so much to them, and I’ve definitely heard that sentiment here at Neversoft a lot. There’s a group of people here that would work on the Metallica game for 30 hours a day. From that perspective, we really wanted to make a game that we felt spoke to all the metal heads out there and would make them want to get up and scream about how freakin’ awesome it is.

We approached the game this way and really tried to put as much stuff in there that we (as fans of the band) would want to see. Awesome playing Metallica songs, check. Absolutely amazing opening acts (like my favorite band in high school – Slayer), check. Great character models, venues (with lots of pyro!), lifelike animations, Metallica-themed Pushead UI, check. Then we were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get some old photos of the band? How about putting some rare live footage in there?” One of the first things people ask when they hear we’re doing a Metallica game is whether the game will support a second bass drum pedal so gamers can play the double bass tracks. With time schedules and such, it’s really easy to limit ourselves, but we felt pretty strongly that to have an authentic Metallica experience we need to have a second bass drum pedal. We also worked with the fan club, who are Metallica fanatics, and they gave us old photos and live footage of the band and really helped us pack this game with tons of cool bonus content.

I just want to talk about one more thing before I sign off. We have this new feature in the game called Metallifacts and it’s kinda like DVD commentary where the song will play back sans notetrack and you get information in a text box about the song that’s playing. It’s great to get context about the guest artists (why is Lynyrd Skynyrd or Bob Seger in there?) and for getting some insight straight from the band about what a song is about or how they wrote it. Also, one of the things that is really exciting to me about Metallifacts is that metal heads always seem to get a bad rap as uneducated or not very intelligent, which is totally bogus. Lots of metal songs are written about some pretty deep stuff so with the Metallifacts, we can educate people a bit about the music in the game. For example, did you know that the intro to Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” is based on Gustav Holst’s “Mars” from “The Planets Suite Op. 32,” that Mastodon’s album “Leviathan” is based on “Moby Dick” or that Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” is based on the Hemingway novel?

I apologize for gushing about Guitar Hero Metallica since I did work on it, but it’s really been a labor of love and I feel it’s the best Guitar Hero game yet, and certainly the most “Metal!” game ever. But you guys can decide for yourself when the game comes out this spring!

- Alan Flores

It’s been a while since I last posted and I want to pass along some news about another great opportunity for all you Guitar Hero World Tour players.

This coming Tuesday, January 27 (yes, you read that correctly, Tuesday), we’re all VERY proud to welcome Bruce Springsteen to the Guitar Hero World Tour family, as you’ll be able to download the Bruce Springsteen Track Pack for FREE from the PlayStation Store.

The Track Pack has two great songs, the classic anthem “Born to Run” (if you don’t know, go ask Dad about it and watch him reminisce about his younger days as he begins to sing at the top of his lungs) and Bruce’s new single “My Lucky Day”. We’re giving this to you on a Tuesday, as it coincides with the release of Bruce’s new album “Working On A Dream”.

Bruce has been pretty busy lately, as he won a Golden Globe, performed at the Inaugural Celebration, is releasing a new album AND will perform at halftime of the Big Game in Tampa on February 1. So do yourself a favor and add these songs to your ever-growing Guitar Hero World Tour set lists! We hope you enjoy playing these songs as much as we enjoyed delivering them to you.

One last note about the Track Pack. It’s FREE for a limited time only. You have from Tuesday, January 27 – Wednesday, February 4 to download it for free. If you miss out during this time, don’t sweat it, as you can always purchase it for $3.99 from the PlayStation Store starting Thursday, February 5.

Thanks to Bruce Springsteen and Columbia Records for all their help in making this happen!

Baby we were BORN TO RUN!!!

For the past several months, we have been working closely with Neversoft and Activision, Harmonix and Konami to ensure that PlayStation 3 guitars and drum sets will all feature a basic level of gameplay compatibility.

For the most part, this means that the titles with musical peripherals will work with the other’s software. A few specific examples include: Guitar Hero: World Tour’s guitars and drums will work with Rock Band 2 and Konami’s Rock Revolution software.

And yes, you guessed it, Rock Band 2’s guitar and drum set will work with Guitar Hero: World Tour and with Rock Revolution.

Conversely, Rock Revolution’s drum set will work with both Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2.

In addition, Guitar Hero: World Tour and Rock Band 2 will both support the SingStar microphones.

We’re still working hard to ensure compatibility between the Guitar Hero and Rock Band titles currently on the market, and we hope to have an announcement on that shortly.

Of course each of these great games have their own specific cool features that may not be compatible with the other controllers, but this is our first big step in bringing a level of compatibility to music games that is sure to benefit PlayStation 3 consumers.

Keep an eye out here for more information in the future.

Coming Thursday, June 5, you’ll be able to download “The End Begins (to Rock)”, a rockin’ take on the theme song from God of War II, exclusively for the PLAYSTATION 3 version of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

Most importantly, this Add-On will be FREE! The audio track will also be made available on the PLAYSTATION Store in free, downloadable form as well.

Starting Thursday, check in to the PLAYSTATION STORE and look for Add-On content on the home page. Download, fire up Guitar Hero III, check out the Downloads section and Rock Out!

Thanks to all the good people at SCEA and Neversoft who helped make this happen!

Add-on content: Aerosmith’s “Dream On” (16.1 MB)

The song will show up at midnight tonight (Pacific Time), and stay up until 11:59pm (Pacific Time) this Monday, February 18th. And it’s free.

What’s the special occasion? Fans of plastic Gibson guitars and Steven Tyler & Co will soon be in luck.