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Guitar Hero was where the music video game went to find an audience and it was where the music video game went to make money (for a while, at least). While Sony's PaRappa the Rapper had a certain Sesame Street hip-hop chic and Beatmania appealed to the Japanese arcade showboater, it was only in Harmonix's take on rock pantomime that the emerging genre found a stadium-sized crowd. The game, which soon inspired a generation of copycats, brought the showmanship of the concert into the living room. Players, with a Fisher Price plastic guitar controller dangling over their midriff, could pose in front of onlookers, who, in turn, would belt along to the classics. Play became performance. The recipe proved powerful. Guitar Hero took music games into the mainstream, and made Harmonix, for a time, rich. Nevertheless, there were many who mourned this change in direction, one that took music games away from the studio's earliest work, 2001's Frequency and its magnificent follow-up, Amplitude.
Why? Because, in this pair of games you were responsible, not only for proving the guitar lines in a piece of music but every other instrument too. You raced down a neon-lit musical stave, tapping buttons in time with the pulse. Then you would snap between the drum lane into the keyboard lane, and from there onto the bass track, the vocals and every other kind of rhythmic fizz and whir. With each transfer you'd trigger samples, building the song up to its full orchestration before working to keep it all rolling along at full volume.
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