When was guitar hero made

Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Video Game Titles. Guitar Pictures Guitar Hero players shred on a plastic guitar-shaped controller modeled after Gibson brand guitars.

See pictures of guitars. Rock Band. Cite This! Print Citation. The game was only available on PlayStation 2. The game was developed by Harmonix, which is known for games such as Amplitude and Frequency , and published by RedOctane Gies.

The next year they released the next game, Guitar Hero 2. This game featured better graphics than its prior one and a different track list.

Also, this game was co-published by RedOctane and Activision. They improved the controller and also made it available on Xbox Gies. In , they released Guitar Hero: Encore: Rock the 80s. This game was different from the previous because its track list consisted only of top rock songs from the s.

The next game was called Guitar Hero: Legends of Rock , and was released in Later that same year, the next game , Guitar Hero: Aerosmith , was released. Also released in , Guitar Hero: On Tour was their first portable game. This game is only available on Nintendo DS. This has the same concept as their other games, but without the guitar shaped controller.

The next game involved many changes in game play than the previous ones. Guitar Hero: World Tour was released in This game introduced a drum-set controller and a microphone to allow players to play as an entire band. Also, they improved the pre-existing guitar controllers. Also on that year they released Guitar Hero: Metallica. This game had the same idea as Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.

One plays as if a member of the rock band Metallica Gies. Their next game was made by another new developer. This was another portable game available for the Nintendo DS. Not only is it motivation to finish it in that timeframe, but it's also built so that it's not going to have hundreds of characters or hundreds of venues that we can't actually finish in time. Rob Kay lead game designer, Harmonix : That's why the newspaper reviews came out.

I remember being inspired by The Incredibles. They had a scene in The Incredibles where the hero's looking at his walls of all the newspaper cuttings of his life. It's like, "Oh, we could have newspapers! You kind of show a newspaper cutting, and it could be the review of the show. It's comically awful. Compared to, like, by the time we were making Rock Band , for example, we had this incredibly sophisticated animation system that made the drummer play every note in the drum part sort of drum perfect.

And the guitarist, their left hand is in the correct fret positions on the neck of the guitar. And the animation—it's all this sophisticated stuff. Rewind to Guitar Hero 1 , and it was just like butt simple, barely functioning animation [for] the other musicians on stage because, again, limited time, limited money.

We had to. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : It's hard to imagine making that game right now with that amount of money, but I think because it was a scrappy little company and it was just sort of the right time [ I think that helped us make such an influential game with such a short amount of time and money. In game development, making a new series, or intellectual property IP , is notoriously difficult.

The game industry thrives on sequels, which are able to iterate on the ideas of an established brand, building on something that's a known quantity. It keeps a developer from having to start from scratch every single project. But Harmonix also had a solid foundation it could build on top of: its previous games.

Even though it had made Frequency and Amplitude for Sony, and had developed the Karaoke Revolution series for Konami, Harmonix, an independent developer, was able to retain a lot of the under the hood technology it'd used in previous games on Guitar Hero. It also, of course, had a lot of music game development experience at this point.

So even though Guitar Hero wasn't a sequel to Frequency, Amplitude , or Karaoke Revolution , and despite the fact that it was published by a different publisher, it was able to build upon all the lessons the team had learned and the tech they'd built up to that point.

The technology that we developed from our first game, which was Frequency , and then all the way up through all of the games, we had an internal engine that we used. Which means that a subsequent game that we made would be able to take advantage of innovations that we had created. Eric Malafeew systems lead, Harmonix : But we also had just proprietary everything else—the tools, the graphics, the rendering.

Back in the day, we didn't have Unity or Unreal; [they] weren't as accessible or powerful as they are now. In later days, in the past five years, Harmonix has moved to those things and carried their core audio engine over to those, but back then we just made everything from scratch.

Eran Egozy co-founder and CTO, Harmonix : I don't know specifically what it's like in other studios, but I do know that we made it a point to have clear distinction about what Harmonix owned and what the publisher owned. And in general, our deals were structured such that the publisher owned what's known as the "look and feel. Whereas the underlying technology—the code, or what we call the engine—was always something that Harmonix retained ownership of.

Greg LoPiccolo project lead, Harmonix : Basically, we had developed a whole beat match library and a set of design insights from Frequency and Amplitude , and then we figured out all the character animation and crowd and cameras and venue rendering in the Konami games, in the Karaoke Revolution games.

Alex Rigopulos co-founder and CEO, Harmonix : Guitar Hero was the first game where we were able to merge the kind of fiendishly addictive rhythm gameplay from our early games, Frequency and Amplitude , with the very superficial marketability of the Karaoke [ Revolution ] games, where one screenshot and a sentence or two and you just know what this thing is.

Kasson Crooker audio director, Harmonix : If Guitar Hero was Harmonix's first video game, first music video game, it probably would not have been that good.

That was a huge lesson learned for Guitar Hero , which is, if you're going to do a guitar game it has to be like karaoke. Rob Kay lead game designer, Harmonix : I think that was a massive part of Guitar Hero's appeal; you could see somebody playing it and you instantly understood the fantasy and what you would get to do in the game. You're like, "Oh, I get to be a guitar god because I can see that I'm going to be holding this guitar and making those kind of motions.

There was another unique advantage Harmonix had when working on Guitar Hero: it was a studio full of musicians and people in bands. In fact, for a long time, it was almost a non-official prerequisite for working at the company. Speaking to people for this project, it was rare to hear anyone say they weren't a musician in some capacity. Similar to its mission statement of wanting to bring the joy of music making to everybody, with Guitar Hero, Harmonix wanted to give players the unique experience of playing music on stage in front of an audience.

Of being, well, a "guitar hero. Guitar Hero was inspired by the real-world experiences its employees had of playing in and touring with bands. With the people making the game so ingrained in the culture it was trying to imitate, every facet of Guitar Hero was meant to be an homage to rock and roll, to do the genre justice. According to the people we talked to, if Guitar Hero wasn't made from a place of authority, at the very least it was made from a place of sincerity.

Dan Schmidt game systems programmer, Harmonix : Oh, completely, yes. Take that sentence you just said and pretend I said it to put it in the oral history. We definitely felt like we were the people to be making this game. This was a company of rock musicians, basically, and I think that's one reason that it turned out so well. Daneil Sussman producer, Harmonix : We had enough people who'd experienced [the band life], had been on the road in their own bands, had slept in vans, and had shitty practice spaces, and had guitars of their own.

There was a really strong affinity for the culture, but not to a person. And then we had people who were like, "Guys, I don't know what the fuck a whammy bar is. Like, what are you talking about? Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : Music made its way into everything in our corporate culture.

And then 15, I got my 15 year one, and so on. Little things like that made their way into every little nook and cranny of the company. Probably to the detriment of the company as the years went on, because I have heard, now that I work with other studios, I've heard people complain that they never even applied to Harmonix because they had to be a musician.

In some ways, that may have even hurt us in ways we'll never know. But at least in the early days, it was nice to know that if you started talking about some random Fleetwood Mac b-side, almost everyone would know what you were talking about. Matt Moore artist, Harmonix : There was a venue right down the street called T. That was awesome in that it was just a few blocks away from the office, but oftentimes somebody would post into general chat or send out an email or something and say, like, "Hey, my band's playing down at T.

Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : Harmonix did create bands. People at Harmonix would join together and make bands. Either experienced [people], like Megasus, we made that band while we were all working at Harmonix, [or] bands would be born out of new players that are starting to get better because they're surrounded by music all the time and kinda growing into a band themselves.

Jason Kendall artist and animator, Harmonix : And we had a practice space, too. We all got together and we actually used Outlook to schedule practices for bands down there. Daniel Sussman producer, Harmonix : You look at the writing and there's a lot of inside jokes—the basement address is Greg's practice space studio.

You know, it's like we were all pulling from the life experience that we'd lived. For a lot of us, it was really that cool that anybody gave a shit. It was like, my life has [been] validated in some weird way. Greg LoPiccolo project leader, Harmonix : We loved it. We were into it.

And we very much had that sense of like, "Let's try and introduce people to the things about rock and roll that we love. It was a lot of inside jokes, like the loading screen tips, and details about stuff on stage. We would try and jam as many inside jokes and rock references as we could into it.

Jason Kendall artist and animator, Harmonix : We realized, like, "Hey, for loading screens, we want to have tips. But we don't want to have just Guitar Hero tips, we wanna have real tips [for] if you're actually touring in bands or if you're playing shows. We need to gather actual tips. I sent a bunch, I remember a couple of my tips got chosen, but the one that got chosen for the loading screen that I'm always proud of because I think it's hilarious and true is just this—"Always keep an empty bottle in the van.

You'll see [laughs]. The influence of Harmonix's music history is also reflected in one of the most visible facets of Guitar Hero : its art and presentation. Led by Ryan Lesser, the small team, made up of a lot of people Lesser hired from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he also taught, was in charge of getting the characters, venues, guitars, and all art across the board into the game.

But the team didn't have to look far for inspiration for things like characters. Sometimes they just needed to look a desk or two away. Sometimes they needed only look in the mirror.

Eric Malafeew systems lead, Harmonix : You know, [the Guitar Hero ] team was so heavily influenced, I would say, by the art staff.

It wasn't a lot of this new code being written. Ryan Lesser, our art lead, was coming from Providence [Rhode Island, about an hour from Boston], like a lot of our artists did, and he was also into the music scene down there quite a bit. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : The cool thing was that most of the art team were rock artists—rock musicians—so they also grew up with the same things. We could have meetings where we were talking about all these references and they just totally got it.

If we said, "This is going to be our CBGBs," everyone there knew about it because we had played there or we had seen shows there. Chris Hartelius character animator, Harmonix : It was just like six of us [on the art team] in this not super small room, but we were all pretty close together.

Matt Moore artist, Harmonix : It was a really tight crew. It was great, everybody was sitting next to each other. I think it was a really great environment for just giving each other lots of feedback; people could just sort of bounce around and bounce ideas off each other. It was easy to stay aligned on art style because we were all so close. Chris Harterlius character animator, Harmonix : I did talk to Matt Gilpin prior to this, and he reminded me that they gave me my nickname, which is "Horse.

Matt Gilpin lead character artist, Harmonix : He was playing [ World of Warcraft ] and another guy, [artist] Scott Sinclaire, was also playing, and Chris named his character "Dinner Horse. His character's called Dinner Horse. He just slowly started becoming referred to as Horse. And to this day he's Horse.

I don't ever call him by his real name [laughs]. Chris Hartelius character animator, Harmonix : Over a short amount of time, that nickname just kind of expanded beyond the art pit to the upper managers and the CEO calling me "Horse.

It just made me laugh every time, just the fact that they were shouting Horse, and just saying, "Horse do this. I still have that nickname today. Matt Moore artist, Harmonix : Yeah, that actually was a problem on Slack when it got implemented.

People didn't know how to contact him because Horse wasn't in the directory. One was I've always been a poster artist, like silk screen posters for rock bands and metal bands and stuff like that. So I wanted to bring in the gig poster vibe, which at the time was really getting hot again. It died out for a couple decades and then was really picking up back in the days when GigPoster. I wanted to bring that to the game, I thought it was really unique and didn't look like every other game out there, and was really related to rock and roll in a way that was atypical.

Matt Moore artist, Harmonix : We had a shared art forum where we would keep tons of reference imagery. You know, there'd be rock posters from hundreds of different bands, and thousands of different shows, and we'd sort of be collecting references that way. So there are actual rock posters in those games in the shell. If you're in the menu system for Guitar Hero , it's all rock posters.

Matt Moore artist, Harmonix : The art style, pretty early, I think we decided to set up the menu system to be inspired by rock posters—and there was just so much fun and varied art style[s] to work with there.

A lot of that was influential in the characters and environment as well. Ryan Lesser art directory, Harmonix : And then the second influence was similar but a little bit earlier. It was the general feeling that I got being a metalhead in high school in the 80s.

The kind of meat-headed, macho, but big heart that 80s heavy metal had. The way I transformed that pseudo-machismo into the game was [with] big, top-heavy shapes and really thick or really thin extremes, and all the rooms, we called them the clubs, basically our levels, they were all kind of off kilter and wonky.

Nothing was plum, nothing was square, everything would be on an angle, kind of swollen and top-heavy, and looked like it was sort of falling over. Matt Gilpin lead character artist, Harmonix : Actually we called the art "wonky," that was the term we would use. Like, you know, a speaker or an amp wouldn't be squared off. One side would be a little more tilted and curved. So we always called it "wonkifying. I think the only place we could sort of wonkify it was the headstock.

Greg LoPiccolo project leader, Harmonix : Ryan Lesser had a very specific idea of what he thought it should look like. Which I, quite frankly, didn't totally understand. I was a little skeptical. Go do your thing. He was totally right. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : Not everyone was on board with that kind of weird art style. They didn't think it was palatable.

They didn't think it would be as pop as it needed to be. But I felt really good about it, and being a huge rock fan, I just really felt like it spoke to the style of the music. In the end, when we were done and we released it, those folks came up and they were like, "You were right [laughs]. I was wrong, I'm sorry. You know, we were a good group and we didn't hold grudges.

When people were right or wrong, it was not a big deal to be like, "Yep, you had it. Another influence from my rock years in the game was the character designs. Those are based on people that we knew growing up, or even as adults in the rock scene. So like, Axel [Steel] just was basically me in high school. Matt Gilpin lead character artist, Harmonix : Axel Steel definitely started from just both Ryan and I, the era we grew up in. There was a lot of kids into Megadeth and Anthrax.

I was young enough that those were kind of older kids, and they would scare the shit out of you and threaten to beat you up all the time [laughs]. For me, that was what he was. When we designed him, we were both pretty much on the same page with that guy. He had a couple variations where we just were trying a few things, but you know, he settled on what he looks like based on [our past with] kids who were really big fans of those bands. Matt Moore artist, Harmonix : Actually, there was this terrible incident where during the concept phase I had unknowingly included an icon that was, like, controversial and I hadn't known the meaning of it.

It was, like, a rightwing, nationalist—it was not a Nazi thing. But it was, I dunno, similar to a shape on a—it was a white supremacist kind of thing. Yeah, it was not good. It actually made it onto the guy, onto Axel's teeshirt, and then someone in QA was like, "Woah! This needs to change! We worked with actually a really good guy named Dare Matheson, and I was just like, "That's a little too on the nose and too goofy. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : Judy Nails, interestingly enough, was based on Judita Wignall who was a musician and in bands that we wound up hiring to be a mocap actor for the game because we really like her and everything she did on stage and stuff.

I wound up reverse engineering that and putting her right into the game as Judy Nails. Eddie Knox was based off of me. I don't know if you know who Eddie Knox was, he's like the rockabilly-ish guy. I really loved the bassist from Smashing Pumpkins. Matt Gilpin lead character artist, Harmonix : Izzy Sparks was—there is a guy we worked with named Izzy.

That's not a very common name and it fit the character. Izzy Maxwell sound designer, Harmonix : There was one day in particular that I came in, and I was tired and not a hundred percent with it, and I walked by the meeting room and I hear everyone's talking about me.

They're saying like, "Yeah, Izzy doesn't look that good. He's kind of emaciated, his face looks all messed up. On top of developing the actual game portion of Guitar Hero , Harmonix had to design what would become the selling point of the title—the physical guitar it'd ship with. While RedOctane would be responsible for manufacturing the hardware for the peripheral, it was up to Harmonix to figure out just how this thing would work in tandem with gameplay.

Alex Rigopulos co-founder and CEO, Harmonix : Well, you know, a lot of the earlier conversation [was] about all of the ways that we wanted it to be different from Guitar Freaks , actually. We wanted to break away, for example, from the 2D UI that characterized so many of those early games in Japan. We wanted to break away from the three button constraint [that Guitar Freaks had] that felt very, just too confining and [limiting].

Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : We also really wanted to try and give people the feeling of playing a real guitar. It was important to us when we started designing the hardware, the very first sketch that I did for that SG [model of Gibson Guitars that the controller was based on]—which started as that because that was my guitar at the time, I was a Gibson SG fan for a long time—[to think about,] "What would the buttons be like?

Rob Kay lead game designer, Harmonix : I remember after one of the early meetings we had, where we were talking about the guitar controller and how many buttons it should have, Ryan was quite excited about the idea that if we had five buttons on the controller we could get three power chord positions that players could play with their fingers.

Eran Egozy co-founder and CTO, Harmonix : You might think that's strange because, you know, really you can only use four fingers to essentially fret the guitar, but adding that fifth button actually was really important, I think, because it made for more interesting gameplay. You actually had to think about shifting your hand to be able to play the faster passages, which made for a better game.

Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : That was important in two ways. One is that it created an extra challenge for people, especially if you were not a guitar player, and two, it simulated the feeling of playing guitar. Let's say you're even in a simple punk rock band, you're going to be banging out power chords. It's the same chord position on your left hand, so there's not a lot that changes there, but the way you move it around on [the] neck of your guitar changes everything.

It's where all the magic is. So being able to give the players now multiple positions made them feel more like a guitar player, rather than playing like, a simple video game interface. Rob Kay lead game designer, Harmonix : As he explained this, the first alarm bell went off in my head, which is like, "Wait a minute, we're going to expect people to be able to have that level of dexterity? So I was initially thinking, "Oh, maybe we just need three buttons because otherwise it'd be too much for people to get into.

That can be part of the skill progression of the game. Greg LoPiccolo project leader, Harmonix : Oh, and then we needed another game mechanic, and we came up with the whole [Star Power mechanic].

We wanted a physical component. It's like, "Wouldn't it be awesome if you lift your guitar and that did something? Eric Malafeew systems lead, Harmonix : You wanted to wail on this controller, you wanted to swing it around, pretend to bash them on the floor.

Alex Rigopulos co-founder and CEO, Harmonix : It was a secondary mechanic that added some tactical depth and variety to the game. This whole idea of creating special moments where Star Power phrases would appear that you really wanted to not miss those notes because you wanted to earn that power and special moments where you chose to deploy.

For example, saving up for the solo because you want to deploy to help you get through the solo and not fail out, or if you had already mastered the song but you were trying to just squeeze out the highest possible score. Izzy Maxwell sound designer, Harmonix : Of course at first it was just a button, because we didn't have guitars with tilt sensors. I remember it being a real pain in the ass to try and time when you move your hands so you can start the Star Power. And then when we got the guitars with the tilt sensor, it was really cool and it felt right.

It felt like, "Yes! I'm a musician, I've done this pose before, this is in fact what it feels like. Alex Rigopulos co-founder and CEO, Harmonix : I remember there was some kind of comical early conversations where we just knew we wanted a whammy bar on the guitar [laughs].

We were telling this to RedOctane, like, "Hey, can you guys put a whammy bar on the guitar? Trust us, we'll find a way to put it in the game. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : I remember sitting in Greg's office many times trying to sort out what it felt like, what it sounded like, what it did, what it looked like, and so that one really went through a pretty rigorous prototyping phase. Rob Kay lead game designer, Harmonix : They just loved the idea that a whammy bar from a real guitar could come in and change the pitch of the guitar track.

They're like, " If we get something in there that changes the pitch of the guitar part as you hold down the whammy bar, that's going to sound great and it's going to lead to some expressivity. Eric Brosius audio lead, Harmonix : You give a guitar with a whammy bar to any non-guitar player and the first thing they'd do was yank on it and try to make funny noises.

Keith Smith quality assurance, Harmonix : And then there was also a crazy freestyle mode where you could just go nuts. But that didn't make it in. Rob Kay lead game designer : It was very much about going back to the core mission statement of Harmonix of bringing the joy of making music to everyone.

It's like, "Well, making music involves creativity. How do we give players a way to be creative? Izzy Maxwell sound designer, Harmonix : They did make some functioning demos. I imagine you've seen, they were all pretty terrible in my opinion. Danel Sussman producer, Harmonix : It was pre-recorded samples that had icons like "Press the triangle, and then the square, and then the guitar pick, and that makes the little solo sequence.

Rob Kay lead game designer, Harmonix : It's a huge problem. There's several problems encapsulated within it. One is how do you motivate people to do anything? You give them a creative musical toy, how do you motivate them to do that within the game integration? But even before that, it's how do you make a creative toy fun and sound like a synthesized guitar in a way that it sounds good enough that it feels like it's part of the recorded guitar track as well? I'm not even sure we got past that hurdle.

Izzy Maxwell sound designer, Harmonix : That was where it really lost its expressiveness, because if you played it really slowly [with] nice held out wholenotes, it would sound alright because we used guitar samples and they were kind of okay. But then you'd wanna do something fast and it sounded terrible. So we sort of built the system that I think is very similar to how the scrolling works on Roku or any device that has scrolling, where it plays a single sound effect when you move from one to the other but once you are doing [continuous] scrolling it actually switches to a stream so it's not just hitting the same sound effect over and over again.

So we had this idea that, yeah, once it detects you're playing above 16 notes or whatever, it starts selecting from a pentatonic scale so that you get some heavy metal stuff. Which like, again, was cool but the transitions just never sounded good and when you started playing faster it started to sound more like a keyboard and less like a guitar.

In fact, there was a GDC we actually brought the lead guitar thing to demonstrate it to everybody. And then it actually made it into Rock Band 4 , a different version of it. It ended up years later—like 10 years later—shipping. Arguably the most important part of Guitar Hero, licensing the game's soundtrack required the help of parties outside of Harmonix and RedOctane. Randy Eckhardt, a contract music licensing expert, was brought on board to help acquire licenses for the real-world rock and roll songs the game would feature.

Because it was cheaper to reproduce those songs, WaveGroup Sound in Fremont, California—which also worked with Harmonix on some of the Karaoke Revolution games—was hired to record covers of almost every song in the game. Doing so required building out a soundtrack. So Harmonix developers made a list of songs they wanted in the game. And then they argued about that list. Also Ryan Lesser, who was our art director and art lead on Guitar Hero.

And I'm not one of them, by the way. I'm, like, a classical music nerd. But we had a lot of people in the studio who felt very passionately about their rock music.

Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : There were certain bands that we thought just had to be included and then songs that had to be included. Sometimes we would start with the song and then sometimes we would start with the band.

We might say, "You know what? ZZ Top has to be in this game," or something like that. But then we would say, "'I Love Rock 'n' Roll' has to be in this game. Of course, we would have those high school arguments about what band was better and what song was better. People are very passionate about what they love and they're convinced everyone else's taste is terrible.

They have these fantastic animated fights. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : We would have conversations where if I said I wanted a Judas Priest song in there, someone like Greg would actually poo-poo it because, "Judas Priest is stupid and their songs are simple," or whatever.

And then we'd get in a giant argument because I'd be pitching something like Judas Priest and Greg would be pitching something like Boston. Greg LoPiccolo project leader, Harmonix : Because at that point, Boston had been off the charts for, like, 15 years. Nobody remembered them, but we were all teenagers when that record came out, which was an amazing rock guitar record.

We were like, "I bet this would play awesome. Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : You know, a Boston recording is just so lush and rich and filled with a bajillion parts that you can see how it's the opposite of a Judas Priest song, but they both totally belong there. Greg LoPiccolo project leader, Harmonix : I lobbied hard for that. I was like, "We gotta have 'Godzilla. Alex Rigopulos co-founder and CEO, Harmonix : It didn't matter that " Don't Fear The Reaper" was a bigger commercial success, "Godzilla" was the song that would be a better song for this game, better song for gameplay, et cetera.

Jason Kendall artist and animator, Harmonix : I was super psyched also to get The Donnas in there, because they were kinda new, which was awesome.

Ryan Lesser art director, Harmonix : They were pretty unknown. I would go see them play all the time when they would come through Providence.

Compared to some of these other bands, like Stevie Ray Vaugn and White Zombie, they were tiny comparatively. Keith Smith quality assurance, Harmonix : One of the most powerful things I thought about Guitar Hero in the beginning was that it was a game, so it was going to be putting all of this music in front of people that, by and large, had never been exposed to it, right?

So it levels the playing field in a way so that my band and Black Sabbath and Aerosmith and The Donnas were all on the same playing field to these players. They hadn't heard any of those bands, so their judgement then was they either liked the songs or they didn't like the songs. In fact, there was an approval process that songs had to go through before they could show up in the game.

Harmonix liaisoned with the music committee at RedOctane, which added its own input, threw out songs it thought were bad fits, and then worked to secure the licenses for the songs that made the cut. That last point proved to be difficult, to say the least. RedOctane needed to prove to reluctant record labels why they should allow their bands in this new, weird, then-unproven game.

And then there were the bands to contend with, who weren't always very welcoming. Luckily, Randy Eckhardt was there to help.

Chris Larkin creative services specialist, RedOctane : So we had our group at the time—it was myself, Lennon Lange, and Kyle Rechsteiner, we were the leads on our team. Eric had put together kind of a master spreadsheet of songs, whether it's song-length, difficulty, how many solos, things like that.

We'd kind of pick through and then we'd pitch songs that we think would work well, they'd pitch songs that they think would work well, and then we'd just kind of work together on that side of things. The primary things we were looking at were obviously song length, difficulty, because we had to have certain [songs for each difficulty option], you have to have some medium difficulty songs, you have to have some hard songs, so things like that.

Those were the primary things. And then obviously, yeah, if it had swear words, what is the lyrical content, is the song about sex, that kinda stuff. Just from a ESRB ratings standpoint, we had to be cognizant of that kind of stuff. Lennon Lange associate producer, RedOctane : I would sit with a Guitar Freaks controller in my hands, and from my knowledge of how to play guitar, I listened to every song plus times to figure out if it was going to be a fun song to play.

But we can have our top wishlist and then you actually have to go and license the songs, and then you run into real world constraints. Meaning you can't necessarily acquire licenses for all the songs on your wishlist. Randy Eckhardt music consultant, music supervision, and strategic partnerships, Eckhardt Consulting : The song list was just massive.

We went after everybody at the same time and just kept going down the list like, "Yes, yes, no, no, no, no, no, yes, yes, maybe, keep going.

Eventually after Guitar Hero became a thing people were interested, but at the time it was like, a lot of the big boys didn't want anything to do with us, you know? They just didn't understand what the project was or the game was. Charles Huang co-founder and vice president of business, RedOctane : The labels aren't the gatekeepers.

They have to go to the band and the band has to approve it. Most of them would ask, "What does this game look like? So a lot of the time people would say no because they didn't want to be associated with a bad product. Randy Eckhardt music consultant, music supervision, and strategic partnerships, Eckhardt Consulting : I sent them a one sheet that said, here's the game [ Why would we want to be involved?

Lennon Lange associate producer, RedOctane : We would get a lot of questions of like, "What the hell is this? Randy Eckhardt music consultant, music supervision, and strategic partnerships, Eckhardt Consulting :: I mean, [Jimi] Hendrix, we had five or six or seven other songs we wanted and the Hendrix family was just like, "Eh.

David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," that was hard because he had some various publishers that were involved. Ramones were never easy. You know, Ozzy never happens right away [laughs]. Just because, you know, his wife is smart.

Chris Larkin creative services specialist, RedOctane : He'd come back with this list of like, "Hey, we got permission for these songs. Randy Eckhardt music consultant, music supervision, and strategic partnerships, Eckhardt Consulting : It's like anything, you get a few martinis, you work the phones with those on your side.

I mean, that's pretty standard with any kind of deal when it's a collective kind of thing. But EMI definitely gave us a lot of great support and had great people involved to help drive that. And then others definitely followed suit and everybody got excited about it. Chris Larkin creative services specialist, RedOctane : But then you'd deal with the record labels, so it's like, "We'll give you this song, but you gotta put this band in, put this song in.