Guitar Hero Live: how a UK developer re-envisioned the music gaming legend

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/15/guitar-hero-live-music-gaming-legend

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Looking back, it’s hard to appreciate the impact Guitar Hero made on gaming a decade ago. It wasn’t the first rhythm action game, of course. Konami had already paved the way with its Beatmania and Guitar Freaks arcade titles. But with that huge licensed track list and cleverly designed guitar controller it brought the concept of music gaming into millions of homes, kickstarting a multimillion-dollar industry. Original developer Harmonix would later go on to extend the concept with Rock Band, introducing drums and a mic, but Guitar Hero plucked away for another five major releases, adding hundreds of tracks and enlivening many long nights indoors.

Then it was over. A bloated release list of downloadable content (DLC) and themed editions, together with an ever expanding roster of revised controllers, accelerated the general sense of genre fatigue. People felt they had taken all they could from the idea of copying note sequences from a rolling onscreen display.

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

“We wanted to take it back to its roots,” he says. “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. For me it was taking Guitar Hero 2 around to the family home at Christmas. 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. It was so cool to see. Eventually he even hit a note – though more by luck than judgement.”

They realised, quite rightly, that Guitar Hero is about the liberating fantasy of being a rock star. 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. You’re somewhere else. “It’s about getting into character,” says Jackson. “It’s putting the strap around your neck, adopting the stance, getting ready for the note. All of a sudden your persona changes, it’s physical. It’s not like holding a normal game controller.”

The first thing the team did was rethink the guitar itself, with its brightly coloured line of five buttons along the fretboard. That had to change. “For me, as soon as I had to use my little finger - it all just fell apart,” laughs Jackson. “We found that a lot of people had the same problem – and they stayed at medium difficulty as a result. So we came up with the idea of stacking the buttons into two rows of three. Instead of just speeding up and intensifying the number of notes, we’re getting the player to simulate different chord shapes. There’s this lovely depth to it. 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.”

Apart 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. In Easy mode, you only have to use the bottom three buttons, which align with the three tracks on the highway display. In Medium and Hard, however, the upper three buttons come into play, forcing sometimes complex finger movements and combinations. It’s pretty challenging. The first track I play is Fallout Boy’s My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark, an anthem filled with power chords and rhythmic drum-like stabs. It’s hard to keep up with the constant changes in pace, and to begin with, the guitar noise is a constant wailing dirge of mangled chords, but gradually it clicks into place.

What helps enormously is the new presentation. The game effectively has two modes: Live, which mimics a real-life live performance, and Guitar Hero TV, which lets you play along with the game’s network of 24-hour music video channels.

For the Live option, Freestyle Games has painstakingly filmed real band members performing every song in front of a genuine audience. The player is there on stage, too, experiencing the whole thing through a first-person camera perspective. Again, it’s all about simulating the rock star experience, fulfilling the fantasy. “Seeing and performing music live, which is a totally different experience - it’s a non-produced experience, it sounds different depending on where you are in the audience, or whether it’s the first gig of the tour or the last one. And every crowd adds its own atmosphere. We’re all festival fans at Freestyle and we have a lot of musicians here – we’ve experienced what it feels like to perform.

“I’ve also been fortunate enough to have stood at the side of stages and watched big names go out. When you attend a live gig, you see them on stage and you think they look so fucking cool, but you didn’t see them at the side, going through that human process, throwing up in a bucket, combatting stage fright. Stage fright became a key theme internally, we wanted to give that feeling to our players. To do that, we had to make it first person, we have to have them looking out at a crowd, whether that’s 100 people or 100,000.”

Cleverly, each song has a backstage build up; you walk through the winding corridors, passing groupies and stage technicians, you watch as your bandmates psyche each other up, then you leap onto the stage and begin. But the ingenious part is that Freestyle has adopted a Hollywood camera system to allow both the audience and the other band members to react in real-time to your performance. Play well, and the audience sings along, cheers and holds adoring signs aloft; play badly and your drummer glares at you accusingly and the audience boos.

“We used these big robot cameras called mo-con rigs,” explains Jackson. “We’d watched this documentary on how they made some of the scenes in The Hobbit – they built a life-size hobbit hole and then a child-sized one and they put them side by side on a sound stage; and they used these two robots cameras that make exactly the same movements – they’re based on the robot arms that build cars. These things filmed side by side, they had all the hobbits in one set and Ian Mckellen in the smaller one, so he’s all scrunched up; and then they shot simultaneously. The frame is exactly the same, so it looks like McKellen is in the room with these tiny hobbits. When we saw this, we knew it could work for us.”

So Guitar Hero Live uses the same principle: the band and crowd are filmed several times by a large robot camera rig fitted onto a track, each time expressing a different set of emotions – but because the camera shots are all identical, the game is able to switch between emotions on the fly. “The band had to rehearse carefully, making sure they knew the moves,” says Jackson. “The mo-con rig weighs a ton, so if it had hit anyone it would have done serious damage; they had to be perfect. We actually managed to film it without killing anyone.”

The whole thing was filmed on a large sound stage in Oxford. The team brought in around 200-400 extras a day for the crowd, mostly employed from casting agencies, though on the days they needed a goth crowd, they’d go into Camden and recruit directly on the street. “For the band, we had a call-up for individuals musicians and auditioned them,” says Jackson. “Then we did callbacks and built bands up ourselves, they all mimed to the songs – it was a bit Simon Cowell.”

Every song included on the disc, and there are hundreds, had its own dedicated filmed performance, with the musicians miming to that track. The player will be on stage with a variety of different groups in their career, as well as progressing from flea-pit dive bars to major festivals. It’s not clear yet whether there will be any licensed real-world venues, although there were pretty strong hints in my demo that a 120,000-capacity festival in the game was modelled on Glastonbury.

The other way to play Guitar Hero Live, away from the gig locations will be Guitar Hero TV, the in-game music video service. Players will have access to a programme guide which lists a variety of themed music video shows: you pick one, and whatever’s playing at the time, you join in on. “The idea is if you hit this button anywhere in the game you’ll go straight to it,” says Jackson. “It’s a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week music network. Whenever you jump in, it’ll take you to the channel you were in previously and, just like TV, when you come in you’ll be put into the show currently playing.

“It’s also a massively multiplayer element. You’ll be able to compete against people online or against your friends on highscore challenges. If you don’t like that programme, you can hit the button, bring up the guide and choose something else. There will be genre type shows, top tens, ‘most played’ shows … It’s going to be very broad. Then, if you still want to play something different, you can come out into our songs section and play any of the tracks currently on there, on demand.”

The thinking behind this new way to play the game is obvious. Freestyle has looked at the way people consume television and music these days – not through terrestrial regimes, not through specific boxed purchases, but through digital services such as Netflix and Spotify. “GHTV is totally about discovery,” says Jackson. “You’ll be able to go there and find something new. But we want classic stuff on there too. We’ll continue to update it without you having to go and buy another disc. When you buy Guitar Hero, you get the guitar, the tracklist and you get GHTV. We’ll continually put new stuff on there. At E3 we’ll be able to talk about how much and how often. We’re working with major labels, we’re working with some great indie labels, we want to make sure we’re able to give you a broad range of music.”

In an era of paid-for downloadable content, getting so many tracks for free sounds suspiciously generous. But later, Jackson refers to Guitar Hero Live as a platform, and there are elements in the user-interface that suggest some sort of monetisation potential. That may well be premium channels on GHTV, or extra downloadable music tracks for the live mode. What Activision promises, however, is that you won’t be buying new discs or instruments. “For us, the intention is, this is the guitar you’re going to need for the rest of Guitar Hero,” says Jackson. “We want you to buy the disc this year, and our current plan is not to try to sell you a disc next year. We want to stay relevant through GHTV.”

More details are set to be revealed at the giant E3 video game event in June. There must be specific features to support YouTube and video streaming – a major gaming culture that has arisen since 2010. The big question, though, is whether Activision can once again build a mass audience around this very familiar format. The updates are interesting but this is still, fundamentally, the rhythm action experience we know and played to death: a highway of notes travelling into the screen, and a novelty peripheral to tick them off with.

But that was five years ago – lifetime in the games industry. And Activision isn’t the only publisher sensing that this is a good time to reform: Electronic Arts has announced an autumn release for the fourth title in its multi-instrumental series Rock Band. Interestingly, it looks like that title will support the old controllers and possibly song collections, making for a cheaper transition for fans.

But then Freestyle Games says this is the only Guitar Hero controller you’ll need – which indicates that there will be no surprise revelations about extra instruments. “This one, for us, is all about guitars,” says Jackson. “Right now, that’s it. But I don’t know what the future holds.”