Because Air Guitar Is Boring and Real Guitar Is Difficult

Amid surprise generated by recent reports that the video game industry pulled in a record-breaking $18 billion in the U.S. in 2007, many analysts were taken aback by the additional news that two of the year’s most popular games were also two of the year’s most musically eclectic.

Activision’s Guitar Hero III and Electronic Arts’ Rock Band, both music-themed games that focus on recreating the feeling of playing an instrument, exceeded expectations at retail last year, and together generated more than $1 billion in revenue, according to various reports from the NPD Tracking Group.

“Guitar Hero is one of the biggest brands and one of the most powerful distribution platforms in all of entertainment today,” said Michael Griffith, president and CEO of Activision, in a press statement released on the company’s official Web site. “Guitar Hero’s popularity with broad audiences is a confirmation that video games have become a true mass medium.”

Industry insiders and fans alike agree that the secret behind the success of games like Guitar Hero lies in the novelty of the specialized instrument-shaped controllers that come packaged with many titles in the genre. Electronic Arts’ Rock Band, for example, ships with a replica guitar controller, a set of drum pads, and a microphone. The basic template for most music games has players timing their button-presses on these controllers with scrolling icons that match up with the rhythm of the game’s soundtrack.

“Since I’m not very musically inclined and I can’t play any real instruments, it makes me feel like I’m actually being a part of the music for once,” said Claire Popplewell, SEAS ’10, referring to Rock Band.

The social and pop culture aspect of many music games also does much to attract people who aren’t normally video game players. In Rock Band, four players can form a virtual band and cooperate as they play drums, guitar, and bass, as well as sing vocals. The game also features a variety of rock hits from the past several decades, including songs from popular artists such as The Who, Boston, David Bowie, and The Killers.
“Whenever I see people playing those games, I laugh,” said Arash Bahar, CC’10, when asked if he had ever played Guitar Hero. Similarly to Rock Band, Guitar Hero uses a special guitar-shaped controller. “It’s really funny to see a bunch of people going crazy with plastic guitars in front of televisions.”

In addition to appealing to the casual consumer, music games are often big hits among dedicated game players and critics. Guitar Hero III received a positive average rating of 85 percent on Metacritic.com, a site that compiles aggregate review scores for various titles from dozens of different media outlets. Rock Band was awarded the Best Social Game, Best Hardware/Peripheral, and Best of Show honors at the 2007 Game Critics Awards.
But despite the critical and commercial success of recent releases like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the music and rhythm genre has not always enjoyed such widespread acceptance. The first modern music game, released for the PlayStation in 1996 by Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, was entitled PaRappa the Rapper and tasked players with timing button presses to the lyrics of Japanese rap songs. Accordingly, while it was hailed by critics for its then-innovative fusion of music and gameplay, the game generated only modest sales.

It wasn’t until Japanese game company Konami introduced the first Dance Dance Revolution arcade machines in 1998 that the music genre really began to gain widespread recognition. Initially positioned as a niche title, the game’s unique dance-pad controller, upon which the player stands and furiously taps four floor-mounted pressure-sensitive buttons with his feet to the beat of techno tunes, proved immensely popular with hundreds of thousands of arcade go-ers across the globe. The series’ success has since prompted the release of dozens of sequels and, according to USA Today, even warranted adoption by the public school system in West Virginia as a part of the state’s physical education curriculum.

Dance Dance Revolution’s debut marked the first time a music game hit critical mass, and the music and rhythm genre saw a number of lesser-known releases in the years that followed. Cambridge, Mass.-based developer Harmonix Inc., creators of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, released Frequency in 2001 and Amplitude in 2003 for the PlayStation 2 (PS2), both of which emphasized music-gameplay hybrids using a traditional gamepad. Other notable releases include 2001’s electronica-shooter Rez for the Dreamcast and PS2 and the 1999 arcade release of Guitar Hero’s spiritual predecessor, Guitar Freaks.

Since then, the explosive growth of the popularity of the rhythm genre has made a powerful impression on publishers fighting to earn profits in a market dominated by big-name sequels and licensed games. Activision is rumored to be preparing no fewer than four new Guitar Hero games for release in 2008, one of them being an entry featuring exclusively songs by Aerosmith. Electronic Arts has also promised a Wii version of Rock Band and several of its imitators, such as THQ’s Band Mashups, are being targeted for release next year as well.