So, the history of the Guitar Hero franchise goes a little like this: Harmonix makes rhythm game software. They want to do a guitar game. Red Octane makes unusual controllers. Harmonix and Red Octane join forces to release Guitar Hero. It does awesome. They release Guitar Hero II. It does awesome. Harmonix has an idea of a little game called Rock Band.
I’m not quite sure how it happened, but they split up, and Red Octane was left with the rights to the Guitar Hero name. Although, from what I gather, Harmonix still gets royalties. Guitar Hero: rock the 80’s or some such thing comes out. No one cares for it much. Guitar Hero III came out. It was…pretty good. The guitar got better reviews than the Rock Band one, which really makes sense since that’s Red Octane’s specialty. But then Rock Band came out, and everyone stopped talking about GHIII. Red Octane was surely feeling pretty peeved. They all gathered around in their meeting rooms and tried to think up the one game that would trounce Rock Band and reestablish their domination of the Guitar-playing game genre.
Here’s what they came up with.
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