Guitar Hero Vs Rockband

There’s something very game-like about a good old-fashioned rivalry. The medium is defined by the head-to-head, competitive instinct at the core of many of its products, and there isn’t a gamer alive who can’t recall at least one platform war, or who avoided taking sides in a franchise battle – Sony versus Microsoft, EA versus 2K, Halo vs Call Of Duty, the list goes on. Historically, gamers are at their most comfortable in tribal factions.

The current rivalry between Guitar Hero and Rock Band is one of the most significant in recent history. Both games are huge $1.6 billion revenue-generating monsters, which is hefty even when stacked against the biggest names in the business. Guitar Hero and Rock Band have made a significant impact on the industry’s commercial worth, accounting for 32 per cent of its growth from 2007 to 2008. But what’s really astounding is how it all started – with Guitar Hero, a quite little game from a budding music developer called Harmonix.

Greg LoPiccolo, vice president of product development at Harmonix, remembers the unassuming way that Guitar Hero debuted at E3 in 2005. “We had this tiny little booth in Kentia Hall, you know, in among all the porn games, Broadway dancing simulators and odd things from Korea; it was quite a scene.” LoPiccolo was on the development team for both Guitar Hero and Rock Band with British designer Rob Kay, who has since left to work on a new game at AiLive, codeveloper of Wii MotionPlus.

“The success of music games blew us all away at Harmonix,” Kay recalls. “The first Guitar Hero was seen as a fun side-project for us. Nobody, including me, expected it to actually sell well. We poured ourselves into it because we wanted to play it ourselves. We playtested the game, of course, and wanted it to be easy to pick up and play, but only because were trying to be good professionals and make it fun for our families and friends – there wasn’t some master plan.” The absence of an underlying scheme didn’t hinder its popularity, with Guitar Hero going on to sell 1.5 million copies and spawning a very successful sequel. It was the kind of success that gets major studios excited, and Activision purchased RedOctane and the Guitar Hero name for $100 million in June 2006. A few months later, MTV Networks announced a deal to acquire Harmonix for $175 million.

The passing of the Guitar Hero reins to Neversoft can be seen as a prologue to the now two-year-long rivalry between two franchises. For lead designer Alan Flores at Neversoft, it rapidly became clear that the next Guitar Hero had very big shoes to fill. “It was pretty intimidating,” admits Flores. “I think we were afraid to screw it up, which made us work extra hard to try to get it right.” There was, he says, a certain feeling that made it feel like Guitar Hero, and that was what the team wanted to capture. “If we didn’t get that feeling, I think we would have blown it. When people heard we were taking over the franchise, a lot of them expected us to screw it up. That helped fuel us. We didn’t want to screw it up, we wanted to show these people that we knew what we were doing and that we were doing something awesome – there was a lot of fear there.” The massive success of Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock – which would go on to be the first game to make $1 billion in sales – was more than enough to put those fears to rest.

In November 2007, Harmonix replied with Rock Band – the logical next-step for the Guitar Hero concept, and the first in the ongoing tit-for-tat battle between the franchises. According to LoPiccolo, it wasn’t an easy task. “There were two main things to consider,” he begins. “First off, the straight-up logistics: we need to develop a drum controller, fix the singing gameplay, jam all the different stuff on the same screen, developing and sourcing the hardware. Getting all the pieces together wasn’t easy. Equally difficult, but more fun, was getting the sense that this was a communal experience. It was a real challenge to try to build the visuals and mechanics that would connect people, and in the end it worked really well.”

Rock Band was an immediate success, and the extent to which Harmonix provided ongoing downloadable content support was becoming a significant advantage over its great rival. Among the more serious gamers, this is still seen as a major strength for the franchise, with the Rock Band store approaching 600 available tracks.

It came as no surprise when Neversoft released Guitar Hero World Tour last October. In its first take on the full band experience, Neversoft once again set out to improve the quality of the instruments. The main talking point, however, was the introduction of a recording studio. “We thought it would be great to give the player the opportunity to create their own music,” Flores explains, “giving them the tools to make any song that they want and share it online.”

For many, though, GHMix was an ambiguous pleasure – you either fully embraced it, or simply didn’t want to make the effort. First released in the States late last year, Rock Band 2 improved the experience offered by its predecessor in more subtle ways. It also allowed players to translate all content they’d purchased for Rock Band, giving its sequel the largest music library of any rhythm game on the market. “It really is our ambition to have [Rock Band] as an ongoing platform, on which all of your songs and peripherals work and will continue to work in future,” says LoPiccolo.

However, a question mark hangs over the direction of the genre from here, not least because its two dominant franchises are, by necessity, very similar to each other. They do, after all, share DNA on the most fundamental level. But even if both had been developed in a vacuum, there’s a strong argument to suggest they would inevitably have travelled in the same direction. The question is, will the constant tit-fortat, the slight improvements to instruments, and the DLC tug of war, be enough to keep the genre fresh?

The very presence of that need to maintain an edge over the competition made the developers we spoke to reluctant to reveal their future plans in any real detail. Even so, our suggestion that a stalemate between the two franchises was in danger of emerging was greeted with confident disagreements.

Having experience of working in both camps, Rob Kay believes that “in the long run, the better stewards of quality and innovation will win out in the battle between Guitar Hero and Rock Band. When two worldclass developers like Harmonix and Neversoft go toe-to-toe, everyone wins. That said, Harmonix rules, and I’m a Rock Band man through and through. Whatever the balance of power, though, I can’t see a stalemate. The competition so far has only helped shift people’s attention onto music games, and that benefits everyone in the music game space.”

So, it really becomes a question of how developers go about distinguishing their games from each other – by the way in which they either tweak the current formula or bring about totally new ideas to sway gamers. “That’s why we’ve innovated in this way,“ explains Flores, “like putting GH Tunes in there to make the game have unlimited playability, and making the double bass stuff and drumming more authentic. I think there are things we can do to refine the formula, and there’ll certainly be innovations down the line. People always ask about new plastic instruments, possible keyboard stuff – we might do that in future if it’s a compelling enough feature – but I think there are lots of things we can keep adding and doing.”

For LoPiccolo, the well of creation that first birthed Harmonix’s success is by no means dry. “I can tell you that we have a huge variety of ideas,” he reveals. “Our problem is that we don’t have enough time or resources to pursue all the different ideas we have, so from our perspective the genre is far from played out. We feel like we’re just getting started.” It’s arguable that, when comparing Guitar Hero and Rock Band, another thing that might eventually make a difference in the evolving tug-of-war is how the music is distributed. While both the major franchises have DLC for all their titles, Rock Band’s platform approach to the game – all content is backwards compatible with all the previous games – is an attractive one. With Guitar Hero, each new game is a standalone product, which has lead to some criticism of Activision for ‘milking’ the brand name and oversaturating the market. According to Flores, the team has good reasons to prefer to do each game separately.

“There are technical issues there and music licensing issues as well,” he comments, “but when we go and do something like Aerosmith or Metallica, we try to make it as high quality a product as possible. And part of that is added motion-capture animations of the full band, and really making it specific to that game. There is a lot of animation and stuff that you can’t just put into another game.” Rock Band, in turn, has attracted criticism for not going that step further with content creation.

Whichever side of the Guitar Hero/Rock Band divide you fall on, it’s clear that music games are now playing a huge role in both videogame and music culture. All the lead designers on both franchises are musicians, with a great desire to see that music shared with as many people as possible through their games. This seems to be one of the biggest contributions to popular culture that the music genre is making; acting as a cultural repository for older music.

Andrew Missingham has been a music expert for over 20 years – as an artist, producer and lecturer, before taking a post as director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and eventually starting his own music consultancy. Missingham conducted research on the influence of music games on the musical tastes of children, and his results contradicted the beliefs of the genre’s detractors. “I know,” he says, “via both research and anecdotal evidence, that kids will get on their parents’ PCs and ask ‘Can I get on iTunes and download Led Zeppelin?’ And their parents will ask, ‘Where did you hear about Led Zeppelin?’ To which the kids reply ‘Guitar Hero’.”

These games are drawing people towards music they wouldn’t otherwise have had the opportunity to hear, and that’s something that the designers on both titles see as important. “I think it’s fantastic,” says Flores. ”I’m a big music historian. After Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock came out I remember going to a frozen yogurt place and they were playing Slow Ride by Foghat. I had a proud little feeling that I was part of making people understand what an awesome song that was – people shouldn’t forget.”

Greg LoPiccolo feels much the same way. “One of the most rewarding aspects of our job is that we get to do that. It’s a natural human tendency that, if there’s something you love, you want to show it and introduce people to it, and we get to do that on a grand scale.” For LoPiccolo, the added bonus of seeing children introduced to their parents’ music, and then seeing those parents being introduced to and playing music games with their children, makes it pretty much the perfect gig. When asked how he feels about having helped shaped so many people’s musical choices, Rob Kay agrees, saying: “It’s a beautiful thing, and it validates music games as a way to experience and listen to music.

When I play a song in Rock Band, I get more emotionally invested in it than when I just listen to that same song. It says a lot about the wonderful medium of videogames that they can host another medium – in this case music – and transform it in the process.”

As an outsider looking in, Missingham has an even clearer view of things: he believes that the music game genre will develop far beyond anything Guitar Hero and Rock Band are currently capable of. “In 20 years’ time these games will be seen as Pong,” he explains, “as very two-dimensional, very simple, and that’s great because it means that they will have moved in quantum leaps in what they can do.” In the end, however, it is the music and the way that people play together that will be best remembered. “Absolutely,” Missingham agrees. “Of course, because what people want are experiences and relationships.”

Franchise wars come and franchise wars go, and one or other of the two major players will come out on top. But the most important thing either franchise needed to achieve has already been accomplished: to prove that videogames can have a profound effect on another fully developed medium. In this instance, the true winners are all the people who get to play the games and experience great music in such a unique way: you and every gamer to ever grasp that iconic plastic guitar.