GDC '08: Guitar Rising First Look

SAN FRANCISCO--Looking oddly out of place among all the advanced computer technology on display at this year's GDC was the GameTank booth. What appeared to be an impromptu jam session was actually a demo for their upcoming rhythm game, Guitar Rising. This game aims to borrow the streaming-note gameplay formula of Guitar Hero, but with one very large catch: You're actually using a real guitar.

Scheduled for release on the PC, with a Mac version still being considered, Guitar Rising will let you plug any guitar of your choosing into your computer with a USB adapter. The one used at the GameTank booth was a regular Line 6 model available at most musical retailers.

Once set up, the game itself can best be described as combining the mechanics of the aforementioned Guitar Hero (or most any recent rhythm game, for that matter) with the look of text-based guitar tablature. There are six lines on the screen that represent the six strings, but instead of notes coming down vertically, they're coming in from right to left, so as to mimic the neck of the guitar. Another difference is that color-coordinated notes have been replaced with numbered ones that tell you which fret to finger.

To give you an idea of how this works, if you see the number seven scrolling across the second line from the bottom, that means you'll need to play an E note by pressing on the seventh fret of the A. Like most rhythm games, it's all about timing these notes when they reach the markers at the end of the line. Guitar players who have spent any time with standard tablature--the de facto notation format for the Internet--will find this to be like second nature, whereas those who've been groomed on the likes of Guitar Hero and Rock Band might see it as a bit more challenging.

GameTank is estimating a final tracklist of about 30 songs, and we got to take a crack at three of them: "Message in a Bottle" by the Police, "Mother" by Danzig, and "The Hardest Button to Button" by the White Stripes. We started on easy and worked our way up to the hard level of difficulty. Unsurprisingly, the tougher the setting, the more you feel like you're playing the actual song. "The Hardest Button to Button," in particular, felt like the real thing on the hard setting. It definitely felt a lot easier and more fun to learn a song this way, as opposed to static tabs found on guitar Web sites.

At this point, GameTank is still unsure whether to implement full chords in the final game (that is, strumming several strings at once) or to just keep things as they are. Currently, the game recognizes the notes only on a one-at-a-time basis, while totally doing away with embellishments such as slides, bends, and so forth.

Although advanced guitarists might not see much to like due to the game's inability to recognize advanced techniques, beginners hoping to build their finger dexterity while learning a few new songs might want to keep an eye out for Guitar Rising. There's currently no specific release date announced other than late 2008, but we'll keep you posted.