Making Guitar Hero: Kai Huang Interview

We talk to RedOctane president and co-founder about his remarkable success story, Guitar Hero World Tour, the future of the series and the music game masterplan.

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Kikizo: One of the things that the Rock Band 2 guys have been selling on is the quantity of music that they have, and the fact that they did the whole drum setup thing first. How would you respond to that? Do you have better build quality?

Huang: I would say that we didn't create the music gaming genre, neither did the guys making Rock Band. Music gaming has been out there for many, many years. Most of it started in Japan. What we were able to do with Guitar Hero as a franchise is just take it to a whole new level and introduce it to a true mass market audience - that's never been done before. So Guitar Hero introduced 20 million-plus people to what music gaming is about. What we're doing with Guitar Hero World Tour is expanding that experience and just blowing it up in every imaginable way. Neversoft's done an amazing job of just taking the core of Guitar Hero and multiplying that by 100, with the music creation, the character customisation, with the online play, you know, adding in the different instruments and all the cool new features. We're taking what Guitar Hero essentially created, which is the social music gaming experience, and again just multiplying that out.

Kikizo: But you guys are pushing the fact that you have some exclusive shit that they don't have?

Bright: We do have exclusive shit, we're not ones to rest on our laurels; I recognise that they will have more songs available, that are commercial songs, at launch - yes. But we're going to be supporting downloadable content in a much bigger way than you've seen in the past, going forward. I think we have a big opportunity here, we have 85 master tracks at launch, we have Metallica's full album, we have an REM package, we have some Jimmy Hendrix packs coming, we have a whole bunch of shit I can't t ell you about, and then we have a user community coming, that will have thousands of free songs that will change daily! And that's free - there's no service, it's just free music that's available to use! That's the real point I want to drive home is that we're trying to foster a community of musicians. I mean yes, it's not a real guitar, but we've given you the tools done everything we can this year to make it sound like it is! As with all the instruments we have.

Brian Bright, Guitar Hero Project Manager, Neversoft

[Michael Jackson's 'Beat It' starts to play in background]

Kikizo: Is that one of the tracks that's exclusive?

Bright: Well it's not in anything else you'll find before Christmas I don't think! We've announced a whole load of songs, plus international tracks. We've got Purple Haze from Jimmy Hendrix, Ozzy Ozborne, Everlong from Foo Fighters, Eye of the Tiger, Spiderwebs No Doubt... there's a whole list.

Kikizo: I like the freestyle stuff that you can do, and that you can use it outside of the confines of the game itself. Why do you allow users to escape the game experience like this?

Bright: It's just fun just to make music! That whole recording studio - and all the little widgets we have - has been designed so that there will be bands playing in bars or coffee shops - experimental music, improvising live, with our software. And you're not seeing that with our competition. We're constantly trying to innovate. In future versions of the game, yes, we might have more content available; I guess we could then say we have more content (like our competition) but mainly we're going to constantly be innovating, both on the software and hardware fronts in different ways. The amount of free music and the innovation we're putting into this product, is without parallel in any of our competition.

Kikizo: The extreme level of character customisation also interests me. It reminds me of the new avatar system that Rare developed for Xbox 360. Do you think your character creation could also have other uses?

Bright: I don't necessarily think Microsoft should have come to us for their avatar creator! But I do liken what we've done to a game like LittleBigPlanet, which is getting a lot of buzz for creating gameplay levels that everyone in the community can experience. And not only are you making music on our music studio, you're making gameplay - gameplay for up to four players, to play together socially. I think we're kind of on the bleeding edge of... you know... I'm not going to call it Web 2.0, it's more like... fuck, Games 2.0 or some shit, I don't know [laughter], whatever you'd call it. But you know, there are games like LittleBigPlanet and World Tour that I think are leading the way.

Kikizo: Well I think Phil called it Games 3.0 didn't he, but whatever... the community aspect and how it functions is obviously important...

Bright: That was two years ago, we've put three games out since then! [laughs] We do have a very robust community website, on GuitarHero.com - we track pretty much everything that you do in game - not to the extent that you need to be worried! - but we track all your stats and everything, and we're actually working on trying to get songs that are [created] in GH Tunes outside of the video game environment, and into the web environment, so that they can be distributed in any way possible. You'll be seeing a much larger Guitar Hero community website at launch, bringing out the experience you have in game - stat tracking, competitions and contests online for you to share, and getting the GH Tunes stuff out online is a big priority for us. So there's definitely a web community presence that we're trying to establish. We have close to 700,000 registered users, if not more, on GuitarHero.com - and I think we'll be expanding that significantly with this game.

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