Just when you thought that there were no heroes left in the rhythm game genre, along comes a feat of guitar heroism so bold, so beautiful, so utterly rocking that it turned the entire genre on its head and made it (dare we say it?) accessible. Guitar Hero's release in late 2005 was an out-of-left-field success if there ever was one. Here was an upstart publisher in RedOctane, previously known only for churning out knockoffs of Konami's various rhythm game staples, trying to bring its own version of Guitar Freaks to the US market. Guitar Freaks never came out in North America, and perhaps with reason. It's a tough sell to get people to pay extra money for a peripheral controller that will probably be useful for only one or two games in their lifetime, let alone one with such inaccessible Japanese music as what Guitar Freaks offered. To the hardcore that previously imported Guitar Freaks, Guitar Hero must've looked like a lousy knockoff of the game they already fell in love with years ago on the PS. To everyone else, it must've just looked weird and unwieldy. So how on earth did it succeed?

Kick it like rock...death.

Two very distinct, and very excellent, things set Guitar Hero apart. One, it was developed by Harmonix, the brains behind classic PS2 rhythm titles like Amplitude and Frequency. Taking the same sort of onscreen display used in those previous titles, Harmonix tuned the gameplay wonderfully to mesh with the crazy guitar controller used for the game. Harmonix's previous works had all revolved around the four trigger buttons on the PS2 controller. Here, the developer took this crazy guitar, with its color-coded fret buttons and a main strum button, and broke down every single note from some of the great rock-and-roll numbers of the last 40 years, thus turning each song into a rhythmic puzzle of epic proportions.

The other thing that Guitar Hero did right was its music. Whereas Guitar Freaks settled into its groove with purely esoteric Japanese pop, Guitar Hero is as American as a pick-up truck painted in red, white, and blue. You start to look over the track list, and it immediately makes sense. Ozzy Osbourne? Check. Motörhead? Excellent. Judas Priest? Delightful. Jimi Hendrix? You got it. But then, it starts to get a little weird. Sum 41? The Donnas? Incubus? Sure, these are some good, solid rock songs, but do they really stand up against the measure of Jake E. Lee's fiendishly evil solo in Bark at the Moon? Or Clapton's deftly nimble work in Crossroads? Once you pop the game in and start playing all these songs, though, it starts to make sense. The mixtures of note-heavy solos, fast chord strumming, and copious amounts of whammy bar spread throughout the game's set list creates a great variety of tunes and play styles.

Never has the art of the power chord been so much fun.

It's also worth mentioning that Guitar Hero has some of the most accurate cover songs of any rhythm game out there. The game does have a number of original songs included, but none of them are the main draw songs; rather, it's a bunch of unsigned artists and bands that RedOctane and Harmonix employees are in (including longtime Harmonix game mainstay, Freezepop). All the main tunes are played by studio musicians, and though these versions are imperfect (as it is with any cover song), the attention to detail, especially in the guitar tracks, is really something to behold.

It's fair to say that Guitar Hero really rejuvenated the rhythm genre upon its arrival. Awash in a sea of DDR clones and sequels, the genre as a whole was slowly dying a painful death, that is, until a hero of rocking proportions flew onto the scene and rescued it from obsolescence. Guitar Hero is the kind of game that could make the most conservative of folk throw up the devil horns with tongue flailing and head banging in excitement. For that feat alone, it deserves to be ranked with the biggest and best the rhythm genre has ever seen.

--Alex Navarro, Associate Editor

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