Remember Guitar Hero, that once great franchise that ended in 2011? Well, it almost didn't according to a new report from Kotaku. Vicarious Visions was supposedly working on the next installment and but it had a very rough development cycle and was canceled by Activision in mid-development.
According to the report, Guitar Hero 7 was going to be guitar only, eschewing the popular drums and singing that rival Harmonix had created with their equally popular title, Rock Band. This game would take Guitar Hero back to the beginning, when all players had was a guitar and some tunes. Speaking of only a guitar, this is where the story gets interesting. Guitar Hero 7 would have an all-new, six string guitar. According to the source, "Not a real guitar, or even full six-stringed. It had the classic Guitar Hero buttons on the neck with one extra new button, and six strings where the strum bar used to be. YAY! Now they have an extra button and five more strum bars!"
That’s pretty insane and apparently early peripherals were made but turned out to be junk and costly. According to the source, “The strings were unresponsive and loose, and the guitars cost a fortune to make. No one could figure out a way to make it so your average Joe could buy one."
The development cycle was reportedly disastrous and the developers got their ambitions in the way of reality. They started the game completely from scratch, which was a problem in itself, before realizing what thousands of other people had realized already: they had used all the good songs in previous games.
All in all, this is a brief glimpse into what happens when a game gets too ambitious for its own good. If you want to read the whole article, you can find it here.
