

In Medium and Hard, however, the upper three buttons come into play, forcing sometimes complex finger movements and combinations. In Easy mode, you only have to use the bottom three buttons, which align with the three tracks on the highway display. The challenge is to get your fingers into the correct position rather than just running them up and down the neck as fast as you can.”Īpart from that, the action is similar to the original games: a highway of notes appears on screen and you select the correct fret button, then hit the strum pad in time to the music. Instead of just speeding up and intensifying the number of notes, we’re getting the player to simulate different chord shapes. So we came up with the idea of stacking the buttons into two rows of three. “We found that a lot of people had the same problem – and they stayed at medium difficulty as a result. “For me, as soon as I had to use my little finger - it all just fell apart,” laughs Jackson. The first thing the team did was rethink the guitar itself, with its brightly coloured line of five buttons along the fretboard. It’s not like holding a normal game controller.” All of a sudden your persona changes, it’s physical. “It’s putting the strap around your neck, adopting the stance, getting ready for the note. “It’s about getting into character,” says Jackson.
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When you reach a certain level, there are moments in the best songs, when you forget you’re playing a plastic guitar in front of a TV screen. They realised, quite rightly, that Guitar Hero is about the liberating fantasy of being a rock star. Eventually he even hit a note – though more by luck than judgement.” I said to my Dad: ‘you have to play this, it’s got The Who.’ He refused, he said: ‘I don’t pay games.’ But I showed him what to do and five minutes later he’s posing like Pete Townsend with that wide-leg stance, strumming wildly. For me it was taking Guitar Hero 2 around to the family home at Christmas. “We asked ourselves, what is it about Guitar Hero that resonated in the first place? So we sat around a table telling each other about our favourite experiences. “We wanted to take it back to its roots,” he says.

A small R&D team was formed with creative director Jamie Jackson at its head. Not long after, Leamington-based studio Freestyle Games, previously responsible for the spinoff DJ Hero series, was tasked with rethinking the whole concept.
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A few months after the release of 2010’s Guitar Heroes: Warriors of Rock, Activision announced it was putting the series into temporary retirement.
