‘Guitar Hero’ gets born again with a new look and a new controller

Guitar Hero has no business being relevant in 2015. Ten years is an eternity for video games, especially so for games tied so closely to specific technology like Harmonix’s revolutionary PlayStation 2 game was to its inner-rock-star-summoning controller when it came out. A decade on from that original, and five years on from the last release in the series, Guitar Hero is an icon, but it also feels like a relic, a work hopelessly locked in its era. A 10-year anniversary reissue, maybe with some bonus tracks thrown in, seems like the best-case scenario for Guitar Hero coming back to life in 2015, a dignified archive for the nostalgic. FreeStyleGames has done so much more with its new game Guitar Hero Live. The studio has made a game that feels deeply modern, relevant, wholly distinct from Rock Band and somehow still rooted in tradition. It’s all thanks to a new controller and a wildly different look for the series’ debut on PS4, Xbox One and Wii U.

Guitar Hero Live keeps the fundamentals of the classics — using a plastic guitar to play fake notes in a song when they appear in a scrolling bar on your TV — but it’s different in every other way starting with its guitar. Harmonix set the standard for the entire music-game genre, from Guitar Hero to FreeStyle’s own DJ Hero, with the original plastic guitar and its five primary-colored buttons located where a guitar’s strings would be. The basic shape and weight of the new guitar is the same. The whammy bar is still there to furiously tap during a sustained note, accompanied by a devoted “Hero Power” button to hit when you’ve hit a series of successive notes just right, boosting your score in the process. The classic five finger buttons, though, have been replaced with six buttons at the far end of the neck. Three black buttons on top of three white buttons, arranged tightly together and flush with the rest of the fret board. It looks slick and, in action, feels even closer to playing the real thing.

The classic five finger buttons, though, have been replaced with six buttons at the far end of the neck.

​“This is the universal air guitar, right?” asked Jamie Jackson, creative director of Guitar Hero Live during my demo of the game. He was furiously wiggling the fingers on his left hand in midair while doing a Pete Townsend windmill with his right hand. The air-guitar finger-wiggling is something everyone knows, but how do you translate that motion to a controller? “We actually have six buttons in two rows. We’re creating that illusion of playing guitar a bit more — still really, really easy to learn, but also difficult to master.”

When playing Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark,” the familiar stream of cascading note cues still fills the screen, but is a little more staid thanks to the black-and-white color scheme. Playing on Easy has you fingering just the left, middle or right white (lower) buttons or black upper buttons in simple rhythmic combinations, but move it up to Normal or Expert settings and you’re bending your hand to cover both rows. It almost evokes the very real feel of chords on an actual guitar. It’s easier than playing a guitar, but the buttons are, after all, a whole lot bigger than strings.

While the stream of notes on the screen is familiar, the cleanliness of the display is new. It’s not just the color palette, but also a clearing of detritus. The neon explosions when your score goes up, the little multicolored meter telling you to use your “Hero Power,” are totally gone. In fact, all the cartoon elements of the old series are gone, including the bulbous polygon caricatures that you’d see flailing around in the background while you played. The visuals replacing them are cleaner, but also more complex and strange. “The other cool thing about Guitar Hero is it’s not like a Call of Duty where I need to run around,” said Jackson. Guitar Hero had a lot of flash, but the cartoon graphics in the background weren’t much more than, as Jackson put it, a painting in the background instead of an environment the player needs to explore. FreeStyle figured it would do something more dynamic. “So we thought, ‘Fuck it, let’s film a movie instead. Let’s film real people, looking at you, and responding to you.’”

Guitar Hero Live is played entirely in first-person view on a stage and in front of a crowd of live people. When you pick a song and venue, the game shifts to a shot following a bearded, tattooed roadie out onto a stage in front of a few thousand screaming fans. The drummer will give you an assertive nod before you start going. Jackson clearly loves the concert feel of his game, and it shows in Live‘s presentation. “You want them to scream at you if you’re doing well,” he said. “We want them to sing the songs along with you if you’re killing it. But if you screwed them up, we want them to tell you you’re screwing up as well.”

Live‘s presentation isn’t wholly successful. Of the two venues I got to try, including a medium-sized arena comparable to New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom and a massive outdoor festival akin to Glastonbury, both suffered from the inevitable feeling of manufactured excitement that comes with an orchestrated concert. Viewed from the outside when you’re not playing, Live has the air of a Super Bowl halftime show, full of sign-wielding super fans jumping up and down furiously regardless of what’s going on. There’s no one in the crowd checking their phones; they’re all too excited. Like any truly great illusion, though, Live‘s filmed action feels best when you’re not looking directly at it noticing its imperfections. When you’re actually playing the game, the effect is fascinating because you only notice the details of the film when something changes. Stumble over a few notes and the screen blurs for a split second and those adoring fans seamlessly turn to giving you confused, disapproving looks. Keep messing up and you swing around to see that drummer staring daggers right at you. The effect is both engrossing and motivating in the right ways.

There’s no one in the crowd checking their phones; they’re all too excited..

​The live performances of Guitar Hero Live may not ultimately be what most players spend the bulk of their time with. Included is Guitar Hero TV, the game’s most thoroughly modern feature. Rather than a download store for purchasing new songs of even more annualized disc releases (the flood of which arguably destroyed the series by 2010), Live‘s primary online mode is a set of music video stations. Guitar Hero TV lets you play the game over artists’ videos, like a playable cross between YouTube and Spotify.

“It’s very much like your TV at home,” explained Jackson. Like a cable box, Guitar Hero TV will let you bounce between set channels or pick a tune from an on-demand song list. There’s even a multiplayer component, with a list of scores on the left side of the screen showing you in real time other people who are playing the same song while you are. Guitar Hero TV feels like it’s delivering what previous games in the series and even Rock Band never could: a streaming service that lets you access new content without having to buy a disc or individually download songs.

Whether Guitar Hero TV can deliver on its promise remains to be seen. Only a video showing off its features was on hand, and Jackson was even hesitant to commit to which artists would be available. Newbies like Ed Sheeran were on display alongside classic staples like Blue Album-era Weezer, but beyond that are a lot of question marks. How many songs, how many live performances and many other details about Guitar Hero Live will have to wait for E3 2015 and later in the year, closer to the game’s release according to Activision. Even the briefly discussed Guitar Hero Live mobile version for tablets and phones — which Activision says is exactly the same game as the $100 versions hitting consoles this fall — remains under wraps. Still, FreeStyleGames has done something deeply impressive with Guitar Hero Live; it’s filled a seemingly dead series with life in time for its tin anniversary.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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Resurrecting ‘Guitar Hero’ through live rock and robots

Guitar Hero Live is trying to pull off one of the most difficult acts in rock and roll: the return to relevance. Not just a reunion tour feeding off nostalgic fans looking to recapture the good, old days of 2005, but a bona fide resurrection. After a five-year hiatus for the series, FreeStyleGames has taken over. It hopes to bring the rock star simulator back to the prominence that made Guitar Hero 3 the first game to break $1 billion in sales. Its first step: redesigning the iconic guitar, trading its five primary-colored buttons for six black and white keys that mimic actual chord fingerings, but that’s not its primary gambit. Chasing the rock star fantasy that the old games sold even further, this fall’s Guitar Hero Live places you on a real stage with a real band and audience, all filmed from a first-person perspective.

Gone are the bulbous cartoon people that rocked out in the background of Guitar Hero and its sequels. Replacing them are actors playing the band around you, roadies and the massive crowds filling the outdoor festivals and arenas where you play songs like Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark.” Play well and the audience adores you. Miss a bunch of notes in a row and the crowd will turn against you faster than a Slayer riff. The transition is instantaneous while you’re playing, which makes the process of capturing the game’s fictional concerts on film all the more impressive.

“It was interesting bringing what we knew about video games into a world about films,” explained Jamie Jackson, creative director on Guitar Hero Live. During my hands-on session with the game, Jackson seemed genuinely pleased with his studio’s foray into a different creative medium. “Just getting a tent, getting the extras from the tent to the stage — that was a chore. And getting them to act how you wanted was even more interesting. I’d come on stage and say to them, ‘All right, this song is going to be on; this is the band; this is how you feel about the band: Go crazy. That was easy. That was funny.”

How do you get a bunch of people at an imaginary concert to behave as you want them to? Conjure up the same emotions that some of the best rock songs do. “We came up with this concept of asking, ‘Who’s ever broken up with somebody?’” said Jackson. “There’s three stages to a breakup, right? The first one is denial. So it starts with the song as it goes wrong; I want you to be in denial. The second stage of a break up is kind of tears of sadness, right? So we want you to be more emotional; we don’t mind if you cry a little bit. Then the third part of breaking up with somebody is that complete abject anger, and hatred. So at the end of the song, throw whatever you’ve got at them. And it worked!”

Unfortunately, the live-action concert feels too manufactured when watching another person play.

Unfortunately, the live-action concert feels too manufactured when watching another person play. It falls prey to the same shortcomings all fake concerts do, in that it can’t help but feel staged when everyone in the crowd is acting the same way. Where are all the people staring at their phones? Where are the couples making out? The effect is far more thorough when you’re actually playing the game. When you’re the one holding the controller, focused on hitting your notes, the illusion is impressively convincing. The seamlessness of the transitions buries the fact that it must have been profoundly difficult to capture the very different audience vibes without making it seem abrupt. FreeStyleGames’ secret to capturing alternate versions of identical shots: robot arms.

Jackson and FreeStyle drew from an unlikely source of inspiration for Guitar Hero Live‘s style. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit managed to nail the effect of having Ian McKellen’s Gandalf look enormous next to Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins by filming them simultaneously on identical sets that were different sizes. While Bilbo’s in his normal-sized hobbit hole, Gandalf’s in a cramped version where he has to bend low. Cameras mounted on robotic arms, meanwhile, capture identically framed images in both so it seems like the actors are right next to each other; different perspective seamlessly intertwined. “I thought: mind-blowing, now this is fucking cool,” said Jackson of his learning about Peter Jackson’s technique. “We took from it those motion cameras where we can do that same pass every single time. We can do a positive take; we can do a negative take; we could then have them running and switch between them, which means the frame is exactly the same.”

Rather than a live cameraman on stage dodging actors playing instruments and capturing every shot live, FreeStyle had someone frame every shot and then leave the rest to a robot cameraman. The robot would then capture the exact same frames — crowd at peak excitement, crowd wondering why the guitar player is messing up, incensed crowd, etc. — one after another. After each version was shot, they switched between shots on the fly to create the complete concert experience.

“A cameraman is an invaluable asset because they just know how to frame, and they know how to move, and they know how to keep things smooth; and we had a great cameraman do all of that for us,” said Jackson. “Then we take that camera data and then give it to our physical camera, Priscilla. She didn’t need feeding; she didn’t need a break; and she’d do the same shot time after time.”

Of course there are risks that come with using the robot arm.

“Priscilla, she doesn’t stop very quickly. She’ll hit you in the face — she can take your face right off — so we also marked out the danger zone on stage,” said Jackson. “We told the band members, ‘Do not stand in this area. She will take your face off.’ It allowed us to do so many things apart from just having a positive and negative reaction from the band and the crowd.”

Priscilla may have been dangerous, but she’s worth it. Guitar Hero Live still feels like a concert. Even though there are only a few hundred actors in the crowd, a robotic camera capturing the same space over and over again can make them look like thousands of people.

Priscilla may have been dangerous, but she’s worth it.

“There was only about between [200] to 400 people in the crowd,” Jackson admitted. “But once we’d done the passage with the band on stage, we cleared them off, and moved all the crowd back. We changed their clothes, swapped them around, shot another pass, moved them back again and shot another pass. By the end of that, we turned four hundred people into several thousand real people. Then actually we started to fill in with 3D, CG.”

Impressive effect or not, the jury’s out on whether these live performances will make the world fall back in love with Guitar Hero 10 years after the original’s debut. That will be borne out later this year when Guitar Hero Live comes out on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360, Wii U and a plethora of still unconfirmed mobile devices.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo

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