Guitar Hero: Van Halen to be 100% Hagar, Anthony-free

During last week's Electronic Entertainment Expo, Activision ran a brief trailer for Guitar Hero: Van Halen on the side of its massive booth. The trailer revealed that the game will feature 25 tracks from the hard rock supergroup, as well as three playable solos by its famed guitarist, Eddie Van Halen. The game will also feature 19 other musical acts, including (as previously announced) Queen, Weezer, Blink 182, The Offspring, and Queens of the Stone Age.

Besides divulging this information, the trailer showed the game with the band configuration featured on the quartet's 2008 tour: Eddie Van Halen on guitar, his brother Alex Van Halen on drums, his son Wolfgang Van Halen on bass, and original frontman David Lee Roth.

Over its 37-year existence, Van Halen has had three lead singers and two bassists, most notably Sammy Hagar on vocal from the mid-'80s to mid-'90s and Michael Anthony on bass from 1974 to 1996. Now, after declining to comment since the game's announcement in May, Activision has confirmed neither will appear in the game whatsoever.

"Only David Lee Roth and Wolfgang Van Halen will be in the game," a rep said when asked about members besides the Van Halen brothers.

The exclusions of Hagar and Anthony are apparently the latest snub in the internecine conflict between the two ex-band members and the House of Van Halen. The pair left the group in the 1990s to pursue collaborations, such as the Waboritas and (most recently) Chickenfoot, only briefly reuniting with the Van Halen brothers for a 2004 tour. This year, Eddie Van Halen and Anthony traded accusations by proxy, with the former telling Rolling Stone the latter quit the group, and the latter telling MusicRadar that he was kicked out.

Hagar, meanwhile, has been amassing a large fortune outside of music. In 2007, he sold a controlling stake in his Cabo Wabo tequila business to Gruppo Campari for $80 million.