2007: The Year in Games

Join us as we take a look back at all the big stories that made 2007 one of the most exciting yet for games.

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April

Guitar Hero rightly built up a massive fan base around the world thanks to the skill of developer Harmonix. So when the team said that it would be moving away from Activision to MTV, people took notice. In April, the mystery surrounding what the team would be getting up to came to an end as Harmonix announced its new game, Rock Band, which builds on the foundation laid in Guitar Hero, adding drums and singing into the mix. The game was recently released in the US and is planned to come out in Europe in early 2008.

Also coming soon in 2008 is another game announced in April: Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix. As the more-than-a-mouthful name suggests, this is a complete revamp of the classic arcade fighting game, which is being given a fresh lick of high-definition paint.

One of the early boosters for high-definition in gaming was Gears of War, the gorgeous Xbox 360 shooter. Makers Epic and publisher Microsoft butted heads in April over the first downloadable content for the game. Epic wanted to give it away for free, something the company has a long history of allowing, but Microsoft insisted that that people pay for it.

Microsoft wasn't in everyone's bad books, though, thanks in part to the revelation that the Halo 3 multiplayer beta trial would be coming in May. Halo 2 had been released years before and people are still playing it online to this day, so there was more than a little excitement as people wondered how the game would be.

Also rearing their head in April were rumours that World of Warcraft creator Blizzard was up to something. Quite what that something was, no one was ready to confirm at the time, but the heavy favourite among internet speculators was that it would be something related to StarCraft.

One announcement that was made but probably shouldn't have was that Nintendo was working on a sequel to so-so-received racing game Excite Truck. What looked like an official press release from the company actually turned out to be a fake, but that didn't stop numerous publications from running with the news anyway.

Hardware was still very much in the news as spring broke and foremost on the minds of many was the issue of a price cut for the PlayStation 3. This was seemingly confirmed by a top Sony executive, who said that the company was planning to lower the cost of entry, but company representatives later said he was being misunderstood. The PSP, however, did get a price cut, which would help to lift sales of the portable.

The biggest bomb-shell was the news out of Sony that Ken Kutaragi would be leaving Sony. Kutaragi was the man who started the PlayStation project at Sony during the early 1990s and who went on to oversee the launch of three generations of hardware. The talk was that Kutaragi was being edged out because of the unsuccessful debut of the PlayStation 3, but that's not how the company couched the words.

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