{"id":1875292,"date":"2026-04-10T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1875292"},"modified":"2026-04-10T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T21:00:00","slug":"tgs-50-greatest-games-of-all-time-guitar-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1875292","title":{"rendered":"TG\u2019s 50 greatest games of all time: Guitar Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Here\u2019s the plan: round at ours for drinks starting at seven-ish, ring of fire, Guitar Hero, taxi into town at 10. You might as well have carved those words into a giant granite tablet and leaned it up against the side of your house circa 2007, because if you were a living being on planet Earth, that was absolutely how every night out you were going on would begin for the foreseeable. Friends, supermarket beverages, a CRT telly with the volume up in the 80s, and a clackety guitar controller capable of holding a whole room\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n

Very few games become bona fide phenomena like\u00a0Guitar Hero<\/em> did. They\u2019ll be studying its cultural impact in the top universities for decades to come. Or at least, they should be. We\u2019ve known about astrophysics and the skeleton for ages now; it\u2019s time to divert some academic resources to what really matters.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Activision\u2019s hit game arrived at a time when guitar music was riding high, and when the allure of a new peripheral was absolutely magnetic (see also:\u00a0Wii Sports<\/em>). Rhythm-action studio Harmonix had spent the late 1990s and early 2000s experimenting with a game concept in which you tapped the buttons of your controller along to the beat of a song, releasing\u00a0Frequency<\/em> in 1999 and\u00a0Amplitude<\/em> in 2003. Meanwhile, Red Octane was created in 1999 to make hardware for arcade beat-matching games, of just the kind Harmonix had been tinkering with. You can see where this is headed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Inspired by Japanese arcade games, the two worked together on a console title in which the player uses a bespoke guitar peripheral to play along with backing tracks. If the two studios had any expectations for success, they were considerably eclipsed by the reality of\u00a0Guitar Hero<\/em>\u2019s performance. Effusive reviews from critics everywhere, massive review scores, and \u2013 quite unexpectedly \u2013 an awful lot of sales. The original\u00a0Guitar Hero<\/em> made $45 million in 2005, and spawned 24 subsequent releases. You\u2019ve played all of them at least once. Everybody has.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The magic, of course, is in getting you to feel like you\u2019re playing a Stevie Ray Vaughan solo on a guitar, when in fact you\u2019re standing in front of a TV screen holding a 3\/4 scale plastic toy, pressing one of four coloured buttons. An incredible level of disbelief is suspended when you hold that miniature Gibson SG, so much so that not only do you feel that you were somehow supernaturally able to play face-melting solos, but everyone watching does too.<\/p>\n

Think about that. Think about the inherent absurdity of gathering round to watch somebody stand there with a little guitar toy strapped over their shoulder, clicking buttons and thwacking away on a pretend plectrum, and being captivated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At least, we\u00a0were<\/em> all captivated. The law of diminishing returns applies to this series as much as anything else, and much like Livestrong wristbands, Von Dutch caps and the Chrysler PT Cruiser, the sun eventually set on its moment in pop culture. At some point between My Chemical Romance getting booed at Reading festival and the disappearance of HMV from high streets, Guitar Hero stopped being cool. People no longer gathered around its players as they would around David Blaine. We\u2019d all heard enough of that Dragonforce song.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But what a legacy it has left. Not just in CEX stock rooms nationwide, where its controllers gather dust and reminisce with each other about the good old days. But in gaming consciousness, too, where it\u2019s remembered for bringing together a far wider group than games usually corral, and making us all feel like rockstars for three minutes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s the plan: round at ours for drinks starting at seven-ish, ring of fire, Guitar Hero, taxi into town at 10. You might as well have carved those words into a giant granite tablet and leaned it up against the side of your house circa 2007, because if you were a living being on planet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-1875292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1875292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1875292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1875292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1875292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1875292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}