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Guitar Hero Gets New Developer
GameDaily is reporting that the much loved Guitar Hero series seems to have been given over to new developers. NeverSoft, makers of Gun and the Tony Hawk series of games, are now advertising open positions on their Guitar Hero team. Harmonix, Activision, and Neversoft are all mum on the development at this point, but it's hard to argue with a big 'hiring' sign. Notably, Neversoft appears to be hiring for a PlayStation 3 version of the game. From the article: "Neversoft is undoubtedly filled with much talent, but we're not quite sure why RedOctane would give the development duties to them after Harmonix created two hugely successful games. Guitar Hero II really cranked it up to 11 with sales of more than 805 K units in December alone in the U.S. In fact, according to recent NPD data, the game was the fifth best selling game for all of 2006 with 1.3 million units sold in the U.S."
Will this have any effect on quality?
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
BOOOOOOOOOO
*hiss*
Bad Activision. Bad. Take a game from a great developer who basically IS music games that aren't DDR (Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II) on the main consoles, and give it to... Neversoft. Who hasn't made a music game. Who took their successful and great Tony Hawk games and kept grinding out sequels as the series went into the ground, adding in features to make it "extreme" like THUG, THUG2, etc. The games are getting closer and closer to being BMX: XXX.
Bye bye Guitar Hero. You were a great series. I was hoping you'd bring on more music games. Now you'll just be a "what went so wrong" post somewhere by this time next year.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
MTV Bought Harmonix, not to develop games but to help develop their online community. They will most likely not be making any games in the near future.
Now we'll get to play Guitar Hero XTREME! featuring all those terrible punk rock bands you had hoped never existed.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
ARE YOU ON THE LIST?
reading this one's postmortem in Game Developer or gamasutra in 12 months.
"we expect it to be a raging success"
I'm surprised that anyone would be planning a PS3 version of guitar hero any time soon. From the point of view of sales, it is a loosing proposition. I mean, look at the numbers. The sales numbers that TFA claims for GH2 just about equal the number of PS3s that have been sold in total. Assuming that Sony manages to triple the number of PS3s in homes by the time they release the next Guitar Hero, they would still need to sell a copy to 1 in 3 PS3 owners just to equal the first month's sales of GH2. That is not going to happen. For at least the next year, developing for the PS3 is going to be a losing proposition for developers.
Why are they asking "Why did Red Octane give over development to Neversoft?"?
Because Activision owns Red Octane and by extension the Guitar Hero brand. So if Activision wants Neversoft to make a game, then that's what happens. I don't quite blame them seeing as how Activision has in-house development teams.
Plus, would you really want Harmonix to make it, knowing full well they've been bought out by MTV?
I have some faith in Neversoft. They did provide us with the excellent Spiderman game for the PSX.
My twitter
Do we really want a company now owned, unfortunately, by MTV in charge of a game about music?
I'd hate to see our precious Guitar Hero slowly transformed from "All Music, All the Time" into a reality-TV-like Sims starring drunk and likely bi-polar college age kids with little or no personality.
Its best this game stay as far away from MTV as possible.
I'd be perfectly happy if they just made a dozen or more expansions for it. Same exact thing as Guitar Hero II, but with new bands and music. Who wouldn't buy a new Guitar Hero II "rock-pack"(or name it something simmilar - doesn't really matter) every year? New groups, new challenges. Same basic great game. No real need to turn it over to a whole new company, either.
Jet Moto 1 and 2 were made by Singletrac (I think was the company) and were excellent. They were bought out by Sony, who let another team make the 3rd game. It sucked. Why should it be any different for Guitar Hero, who's original company has been bought out by MTV? I think that that was when the series officially died.
Is there any reason to believe that these guys aren't just responsible for the PS3 port of GH2?
They're talking about trying to knock out 3 ports of GH2 this year, and GH3 by the end of the year as well.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's just too much for Red Octane/Harmonix to tackle without a little outsourcing.
Already exists. It's called Frets On Fire. Tons of songs available if you look around a bit, and you can even use a Playstation guitar controller if you get a Playstation-to-USB adapter.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
After suffering through that horrible vocalist, way out of his vocal range, that they used to do the Megadeth covers on GH and GH2, I refuse to buy GH3 if it once again is not the ORIGINAL SONGS by the ORIGINAL ARTIST.
God, it's fucking horrible the way that poser vomits the end of Symphony of Destruction. If it ain't got Dave Mustaine's voice, I don't want anything to do with it.
If I'm paying 3 times the cost of a music CD for the game, I damn well expect real versions of the songs on it. Cheap ass bastards.
According to this article at GamesAreFun (which cites GameSpot as its source) Activision recently filed for trademarks for "Guitar Villain" and "Drum Villain."
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