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Activision Axes Guitar Hero
jtillots writes "Activision Blizzard has canceled the Guitar Hero franchise, citing 'declining revenue of the music game genre.' Also on the chopping block was DJ Hero and True Crime. Fat_bot put it best — it's the new Day the Music Died."
This comes only a few months after Viacom dropped Rock Band developer Harmonix for similar reasons, and less than a week after they closed MTV Games altogether.
Gee, in most race car games I've seen, you can sideswipe the walls, crash into other drivers, spin out, etc, and you aren't immediately disabled, dead or permanently out of the race. The game is forgiving -on purpose-. And by they way, in GH and RB, if you don't push the buttons, the tune does NOT keep on playing. Your errors screw up the music you hear, until eventually the performer 'fails' and the band is booed off the stage. Of course it's artificial - doesn't mean it's not fun.
Your Race Car Hero game sounds a lot like Dragon's Lair, which boiled down to nothing more than 'push the correct button at the beep'. Yet that game did pretty well for it's time.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
This is true, 100 times over. The key has always been Harmonix: Harmonix developed Guitar Hero 1 and 2, which were great. Activision then bought the franchise, ditched Harmonix, and released a barrage of crappy Guitar Hero games. Harmonix went on to create Rock Band, and Activision copied the band concept. The only reason Activision had a few sales successes after ditching Harmonix is because they were literally riding the reputation Harmonix had built for the series with the first two incarnations.
It simply can't be said enough - Harmonix knows how to make appealing music games, but Activision has nearly run the entire genre into the ground.