R.I.P. Guitar Hero
In an earnings call today Activision announced that it is disbanding their Guitar Hero business unit. It was also specifically noted that no Guitar Hero game would be released in 2011 if ever again. In fact, Activision specifically stated that they were releasing no rhythm games in 2011. That means DJ Hero has also been axed. This will be the first time there hasn’t been an annual GH release since the franchise’s launch in 2005.
Why the sudden abandonment of a formally top selling game? Obviously the franchise had stopped being profitable. The most recent title Warriors of Rock sold a dismal 86,000 copies during its release month. Blame it on market saturation, blame it on the economy, or blame it on the novelty wearing off of playing plastic instruments, but for the foreseeable future Guitar Hero is dead. Having been a huge fan of the franchise since its launch, I am a little heart broken. Sure it had its ups and downs since Harmonix left, but year in and year out, I enjoyed having a guitar game or two to blaze through.
It introduced me to new music, taught me that my pinky is useful and killed hundreds upon hundreds of hours of my life. It will be missed, at least by me it will. Once something crosses the threshold of pop-culture phenomenon as deeply as Guitar Hero did, the only way for it to go out is to crash and burn. Guitar Hero did just that. Getting more and more ridiculous as the years went by, Guitar Hero represented Activision at its worst. Bleeding each of its franchises annually to comfort investors while simultaneously destroying the quality of the property in the process. It happened to Spiderman, Tony Hawk, and now Guitar Hero. Look out Call of Duty…I promise you, you will be next.
I touched on this in my Rock Band 3 review, but last year really seemed like the last hurrah for music games in general. Harmonix took the kitchen sink approach and crammed as much content and as many ideas as possible into RB3, not knowing if they would ever get to release another title in the series, and Neversoft clearly ran out of ideas when making Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. DJ Hero 2 the odd man out, had a strong year quality wise, but its popularity never took off.
With the recent selling of Harmonix to itself and the dissolution of MTV Games, it looks like the Rock Band side of the genre will be shrinking as well. The real poetic thing about this entire journey, is that it was started by Harmonix, an independent developer of niche music games. Now that the era of rythmn games is over, the only team still carrying the torch is Harmonix a now independent developer of newly-niche music games.
Rest in Peace Guitar Hero, at least until the inevitable reboot happens.
