There May Be a New ‘Guitar Hero’ Game Coming

Attention all you Guitar Hero fanatics who used to spend hours in your bedroom playing until it looked like the walls were rolling (come on, we know some of you can relate) — there may be a new Guitar Hero game coming, as hinted by Activision CEO Bobby Kotick.

Microsoft announced it would be acquiring Activision Blizzard, the developer of Guitar Hero, in January of 2022. Game Informer reports that the deal is set to close on Oct. 13, but Kotick hinted at the future of the company — and the game — during an all-hands meeting that was hosted by James Corden.

"A big part of what I've seen in Microsoft is research. And they do development in areas that are extraordinary. And so being able to tap into their AI and machine learning capability, the data analytics, new ways of thinking about graphics — I just see unlimited potential for what we do," Kotick said [via Windows Central].

"The re-emergence of Guitar Hero and other things would not be possible without the different types of resources. And so, you know, just the endless possibilities for the future that are just incredibly exciting."

It's unclear how a new Guitar Hero game could differ from the previous installments, but Kotick discussed Elon Musk's Neuralink a bit elsewhere during the meeting, in addition to virtual reality technology.

"I talked a little earlier about the physical experience of interacting with something on screen. I think you'll see things like Neuralink — you'll actually be able to interact with things on the screen, where there isn't a controller," he explained.

The very first Guitar Hero was released on the Playstation 2 console in 2005, where players got to simulate playing their favorite rock and metal songs on a toy Gibson SG. The game offered different difficulty levels, and the more advanced levels required players to use more colored fret buttons on the guitar controller. Guitar Hero II came out the following year, and in 2007, Xbox 360 got its own version of the game with an accompany Gibson Explorer.

In the early installments of the game, most of the songs included were covers recorded by a music production company called WaveGroup Sound. However, by the time Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock came out on a variety of platforms in 2007 (and featured a Gibson Les Paul controller), the majority of the songs featured in the game were the original recordings. You could also battle Slash and Tom Morello, and later play as them once you beat them.

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There have been a plethora of other games in the Guitar Hero series ever since, including World Tour, which offered the ability to play other instruments just like the game Rock Band. Metallica, Van Halen and Aerosmith each got their own Guitar Hero game, so most of the playable songs in the game were by each respective artist.

The most recent of the releases came out in 2015 and was titled Guitar Hero Live, which came with a modified guitar controller that featured two rows of three buttons instead of one row of five buttons, making it so that it felt more like playing multiple strings than just multiple frets. It came with a story mode and "GHTV," which allowed players to choose songs from an extensive catalog that had new songs added to it overtime.