Music and rhythm games have been around for a long time. Dance Dance Revolution, Rez, Space Channel 5, and even the mini-game in Ocarina of Time are all prime examples. However, for a very long time they were a niche genre. Unless they were part of a larger game, music games didn't sell particularly well and most didn't consider them to be a part of the enormous pantheon of classic games. Then there was Harmonix.
Harmonix is a developer that deals almost exclusively in music and rhythm games. In the early 2000's, they released Frequency and Amplitude. In the game, the player took control of a weird, futuristic DJ. Using a track-and-button system not unlike their later Guitar Hero and Rockband games, the player would pound out notes using a regular controller rather than an instrument peripheral. The player also controlled every track of the song, rather than one instrument. The games garnered plenty of critical respect and a loyal cult following. A few years later, in 2005, they released the first Guitar Hero game through Activision for the Playstation 2. Obviously, this game came with the guitar peripheral developed by Red Octane. It was, again, a big success critically, but not hugely popular with gamers at first. However, it started to gain traction and by the time Guitar Hero 2 was released the following year, it was huge. Harmonix then decided that they wanted to expand the instrumentation to drums and vocals, as well as the guitars already in place. Activision laughed in their faces, so they left to make the Rockband series.
For a while, in the late 2000's, the Rockband and Guitar Hero series were the best selling games on the market, though they were popular for slightly different reasons. Guitar Hero was slightly more competitive with it's face-off mode pitting two guitarists against one another, while Rockband was symbiotic with everyone coming together to finish a song as a band. Their business models were very different, with Guitar Hero pumping out full-blown and full-priced games multiple times a year and Rockband focusing on downloadable content. After a few years, the market became saturated to the point that no one could figure out any reason to buy a new game. With a full band of plastic instruments cluttering their apartments, people had had enough. It was in this market with this mindset that Harmonix released Rockband 3.
Rockband 3, to its credit, tried to revolutionize the genre. Rather than release a $60 game that could have been sold as DLC and made much more money, Harmonix decided that they were going to actually teach players to play the instruments they'd been pretending to play for the past few years. Pro mode was going to be their crowning achievement and the the ending to an inevitable progression. And there was no way in hell it was going to work.
The drums made sense. They'd released cymbal expansions a few years ago that a person could put on their kit for little more than aesthetic value, so with a quick update, the player could play the drums when the game said drums and cymbals when a new round symbol came flying down the track. The keyboard (a new peripheral) was also fairly easy since the piece of equipment was new and was cheap enough to include in a bundle with the game without being totally inconceivable to buy. Nothing was needed to make the vocals pro, though they did throw in three-part harmonies that no one ever used. The only thing left was the guitar. There were two guitars; a plastic one and a real one. No one wanted the plastic one, because it was stupid. It was a replica of a Fender Mustang that had a button where each fret should have been. It also had less fret than a guitar, so the whole goal of teaching the gamer how to play the guitar was lost. the only option was the real Squire that Fender had made specially for the game. It was cool, though it was over $300 before you bought the adapter necessary to interface with the game. No one was willing to buy a substandard guitar that they could use to play a video game and the whole experiment flopped.
Nowadays, Rockband still quietly sells tons of DLC to people who still enjoy banging away on those plastic instruments (myself included.) The Guitar Hero franchise, which was taken over by Tony Hawk developers Neversoft for some reason, is apparently dead. There are many reasons for this, most notably over-saturation (There were twelve different games released in five years, not counting mobile and portable games,) and a weird decision to add vague story lines and gimmicks to the games. While rhythm games focused on dancing are still seemingly popular (including Harmonix's Dance Central series,) the heyday of plastic instruments seems to be over. The Rockband developers have wisely moved to building their music library and releasing the tracks through digital distribution rather than releasing new games every few weeks.
It had been a long time since I'd played Rockband when I picked it up this week and, to my surprise, it's still really fun. My fingers don't remember the brightly-colored frets of my old, white Explorer controller as well as I'd hoped, but I fudged my way through my Jimi Hendrix DLC and old enemies like "Green Grass and High Tides." There's nothing really to say about Rockband other than it's a great game to play drunk and rowdy with a group of dorky friends. I once saw a man get through "Almost Easy" while he was on acid and I had to wonder if he was the reincarnation of John Bonham. You don't get that same experience out of Halo or sports games. This is less of a review and more of a message that you should try these games again. You may have forgotten how much fun they can be.
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