Download Guitar Hero 2

[Rocki Eibl]

GuitarHero is a series of rhythm games first released in 2005, in which players use a guitar-shaped game controller to simulate playing primarily lead, bass, and rhythm guitar across numerous songs. Players match notes that scroll on-screen to colored fret buttons on the controller, strumming the controller in time to the music in order to score points, and keep the virtual audience excited. The games attempt to mimic many features of playing a real guitar, including the use of fast-fingering hammer-ons and pull-offs and the use of the whammy bar to alter the pitch of notes. Most games support single player modes, typically a Career mode to play through all the songs in the game, as well as competitive and cooperative multiplayer modes. With the introduction of Guitar Hero World Tour in 2008, the game includes support for a four-player band including vocals and drums. The series initially used mostly cover versions of songs created by WaveGroup Sound, but most recent titles feature soundtracks that are fully master recordings, and in some cases, special re-recordings, of the songs. Later titles in the series feature support for downloadable content in the form of new songs.

In 2005, RedOctane, a company specializing in the manufacture of unique game controllers, was inspired to create Guitar Hero based on its experience creating hardware for Konami's GuitarFreaks arcade game. It enlisted Harmonix, which had previously developed several music video games, for development assistance. The first game in the series was made on a budget of US$1 million. The series became extremely successful, leading to the acquisition of RedOctane by Activision in 2007. Harmonix was acquired by MTV Games and went on to create the Rock Band series of music games in the same vein as Guitar Hero. Activision brought Neversoft (primarily known for their Tony Hawk series of skateboarding games) on board for future development duties. Additional companies, such as Budcat Creations and Vicarious Visions, have assisted in the adaptation of the games for other systems.

The series has twenty-five releases, including the two spin-offs, the DJ Hero series and Band Hero. The Guitar Hero franchise was a primary brand during the emergence of the popularity of rhythm games as a cultural phenomenon in North America. Such games have been utilized as a learning and development tool for medical purposes. The first game in the series was considered by several journalists to be one of the most influential video games of the first decade of the 21st century. The series has sold more than 25 million units worldwide, earning US$2 billion at retail.

Despite early success, the series, along with the overall rhythm game genre, suffered from poor sales starting in 2009. Despite asserting consumer research suggested continued solid demand for the series, Activision later stated that the series was on hiatus for 2011, amid the development of a seventh main installment that was later cancelled as the emerging product was considered to be of poor quality. Activision later shut down sales of the series' downloadable content, although users who purchased material from it previously may still play what they bought.

Guitar Hero Live, released in October 2015, was the first new title in the series in five years, considered to be a reboot of the series and developed by FreeStyleGames, which had developed the DJ Hero games. Following a lukewarm reception and sales, Activision laid off many of the game's developers and sold the studio to Ubisoft, later shutting down the game's streaming DLC service.

Guitar Hero was created from a partnership between RedOctane, then their own company that produced specialized video game controllers, and Harmonix, a music video game development company who had previously produced Frequency, Amplitude, and Karaoke Revolution. RedOctane was seeking to bring in a GuitarFreaks-like game, highly popular in Japan at the time, into Western markets, and approached Harmonix about helping them to develop a music game involving a guitar controller. Both companies agreed to it, and went on to produce Guitar Hero in 2005.[1] The title was highly successful, leading to the development of its successful sequel, Guitar Hero II, in 2006. While the original controllers for the first Guitar Hero game were designed by Ryan Lesser, Rob Kay, Greg LoPiccolo, and Alex Rigopulous of Harmonix and built by the Honeybee Corporation of China, subsequent iterations and future controllers were developed inhouse at RedOctane.[2]

In 2007, Harmonix and MTV Games released a new music title through rival publisher Electronic Arts, called Rock Band. It expanded upon the gameplay popularized by the Guitar Hero series by adding drum and microphone instruments, allowing players to simulate playing songs as bands. Activision followed suit with the release of Guitar Hero World Tour in 2008, which supported multiple instruments. In 2009, Activision tripled its Guitar Hero offerings, and in addition to further continuation of the existing main series with Guitar Hero 5 and expansions, they introduced the titles Band Hero, geared towards more family-friendly pop music, and DJ Hero, a game based on turntablism and featuring a number of mixes. With the release of Guitar Hero 5, Activision considered the series to have moved away from its heavy metal basis into a broader selection of music. Guitar Hero 5 is the first game in the series to use a new version of the series' logo; previous games used a logo in a font with sharper "points" on the letters, which was considered "idiosyncratic with a vengeance" to match the games' emphasis on heavy metal music. Activision used the services of the Pentagram design studio to refashion the game's logo. Pentagram developed a new font, removing some of the "aggressive odd" features to make the typeface more suitable and amendable to design feature incorporation to other games such as Band Hero and DJ Hero.[8][9]

The results of the expanded offerings did not contribute well to the series, alongside the late-2000s recession; sales of most rhythm games including Guitar Hero and DJ Hero did not meet expectations, falling about 50% short of projected targets.[10][11][12] Activision announced it would be cutting back to only 10 SKUs within 2010 instead of the 25 in 2009.[13] Though RedOctane and Neversoft continued to develop the 6th main game, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, until its completion, both studios were later shuttered by Activision, moving key personnel into Activision directly for future game development, and in the case of Neversoft, closing its Guitar Hero division, while transferring future development duties for the series to Vicarious Visions, another Activision studio which had been fundamental in building the Wii and Nintendo DS versions of the games.[14] In November 2010, Activision also closed Budcat Creations, the arm of the publisher that was primarily responsible for porting the Guitar Hero games to the PlayStation 2.[15]

Ahead of Activision's 2010 fourth quarter financial report in February 2011, Activision disbanded its Guitar Hero business unit and announced that it would cease development of the planned 2011 Guitar Hero game.[16][17] Activision cited "continued declines in the music genre" to explain its decision.[18] The closure also affected the DJ Hero series, as Activision stated that there were no plans to publish a music game during 2011.[19] Activision's vice president Dan Winters later clarified that the company was "just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus" and that they were "just not making a new game for next year, that's all".[20][21]

In a July 2011 interview with Forbes, Kotick stated that while the publisher was "going to stop selling Guitar Hero altogether", they were "going to go back to the studios and we're going to use new studios and reinvent" the series,[22] but a former team member of Vicarious Visions stated that as of 2012, all development of Guitar Hero had come to an end within Activision.[23] Another source close to Vicarious Visions had reported to Kotaku that while Guitar Hero 7 was in development under an Activision studio, the game was considered a "disaster".[24] The cancelled game omitted the additional instruments and used only a guitar peripheral, redesigning the unit to include a 6-button mechanism replacing the strum bar; the resulting unit was considered too expensive to manufacture and purchase.[24] The developers had also started the game development from scratch to try to create new characters and venues that would be more reactive to the actual songs being played to give the feel of a music video, but ultimately this proved too much of a challenge and had to be scrapped.[24] Further, with a limited budget, the song selection was limited to "low-budget" hits of the 1990s, or at times reusing songs that had previously been included in Guitar Hero games.[24] Though the team had a two-year development cycle, it was closed down after Activision president Eric Hirshber had seen the current state of the project at the one-year point.[24]

Another potential Guitar Hero project was discovered by the archival site Unseen64 for a game titled Hero World, a massively multiplayer online game that would link the Guitar Hero and DJ Hero games. The game had been developed by FreeStyleGames, sometime after the release of DJ Hero 2, with the main development duties passed to Virtual Fairground, using their platform The Ride, an Adobe Flash-based platform that would let the game be played in a web browser. The game was cancelled in 2011 along with other pending Guitar Hero projects.[25]

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