TG’s 50 greatest games of all time: Guitar Hero

Here’s 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’s attention.

Very few games become bona fide phenomena like Guitar Hero did. They’ll be studying its cultural impact in the top universities for decades to come. Or at least, they should be. We’ve known about astrophysics and the skeleton for ages now; it’s time to divert some academic resources to what really matters. 

Activision’s 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: Wii Sports). 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 Frequency in 1999 and Amplitude 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. 

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 Guitar Hero’s performance. Effusive reviews from critics everywhere, massive review scores, and – quite unexpectedly – an awful lot of sales. The original Guitar Hero made $45 million in 2005, and spawned 24 subsequent releases. You’ve played all of them at least once. Everybody has. 

The magic, of course, is in getting you to feel like you’re playing a Stevie Ray Vaughan solo on a guitar, when in fact you’re 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.

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.

At least, we were 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’d all heard enough of that Dragonforce song. 

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’s remembered for bringing together a far wider group than games usually corral, and making us all feel like rockstars for three minutes.