While they may be relaxing or rewarding to many, video games can be alienating to those unfamiliar with the medium. During the mid-2000s, though, the Guitar Hero series started a successful rhythm game fad by creating an instantly understandable concept. Its custom guitar controllers were less confusing than traditional gamepads, and the singers and musicians on screen helped new players feel at home. The series has since died, but a new Guitar Hero game would be welcome today, as it's perfect for casual and hardcore players alike.
Guitar Hero made rhythm games feel closer to the real thing with its guitar-shaped controller. The colored buttons on the neck of the controller corresponded to notes falling towards a line on the bottom of the screen, at which point players needed to press the corresponding neck buttons and strum a lever in place of the "guitar's" sound hole. Combined with a soundtrack comprised of real-life rock songs from huge bands like Metallica, this helped Guitar Hero take off into the mainstream and appeal to many more players than just the usual audience.
As fast as it came, Guitar Hero seemed to vanish. Once the series got really big, other franchises like Rock Band and DJ Hero were released. Each of these came with multiple large controllers, so they were frequently expensive. With so many games and so many proprietary peripherals, the market became saturated. Even considering the plastic-instrument clutter they left in their wake, Guitar Hero and its copycats were truly great rhythm games, and they should make a comeback sometime in the future.
The Guitar Hero series disappeared, and so did all of its competitors. Rock Band, DJ Hero, Band Hero, and even games like Dance Dance Revolution have been off store shelves for years. Nothing has come around to replace these games, despite the potential for an untapped market of physical rhythm gaming. It's also been many years since the last games released (for Guitar Hero, that was 2015's Guitar Hero Live), so there are countless new songs for a new game to take advantage of. This could help the game differentiate itself from older entries and appeal to modern audiences. Watching expert players beat Halo using a Guitar Hero controller is certainly entertaining, but gaming could really benefit from a new game actually made for it again.
There is still is a community surrounding Guitar Hero today. Clone Hero is an indie game that takes Guitar Hero's concept and keeps it alive in the modern era. Players can create their own charts for whatever songs they wish and upload them for other players to download. The game's Discord server has almost 150,000 members at the time of writing, with many more joining every day, as of late; its popularity is evidence enough that there's a market for this type of game, and its players would surely hop on if a new Guitar Hero game dropped in the future. The final Guitar Hero and Rock Band games were already last-ditch efforts to bring the series back, but perhaps it could work out this time, especially with so many people stuck at home during the pandemic.
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