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I no longer play Guitar Hero. But that’s due in no part to it being a terrible game. I don’t play anymore because I wrecked my little plastic guitar by playing too much. Strictly speaking my fake guitar still functions, but the strum bar won’t register every single strum anymore; its sensors have conked out due to massive shredding abuse. I love this game so much I literally played my controller to destruction.

But enough about my guitar, let’s talk about the game that needed it. For the benefit of the minute percentage that have not heard of this game, Guitar Hero, made by Harmonix, is another one of those addictive rhythm games. It requires you to hit colored buttons on your guitar that represent frets on a real one, in time with the appearance of these colored notes on screen. You have your regular notes (single buttons) as well as your chords (two or more buttons at the same time). Sometimes you have longer notes that you have to hold down buttons for. The game also requires you to strum the strum bar when it’s these notes’/chords’ turn to be played. You also have a whammy bar to “bring on the funk with.” It’s just like playing a real guitar.

The guitar.

The game.

The series has exploded since that first outing, translating into sequels - Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s, Guitar Hero 3, and a couple of outings on handhelds, an expansion in the form of Rock Band - as well as millions of dollars worth in sales. But I’ll choose to focus on the first game, as it was the one that introduced me to the series and the one that sparked a fire to choose the hardest difficulty I could play.

The original game was released in 2005 and it was instantly a smash hit. No other game at the time allowed you to rock along with anthems like I Love Rock and Roll, You Got Another Thing Comin’, Stellar, Spanish Castle Magic, Cowboys From Hell and Bark at the Moon, among others. This was the first draw of the game: the pulling power of the songs. They were (mostly) famous, tried and true rock and roll hits which already passed the test of time. Almost everybody knew them, if not by heart, then at least they thought so. Simply put, they were great choices for songs.

The next thing that hit you as you looked upon the highly stylized presentation was another factor that set Guitar Hero apart from the other games in its genre: it had its own personality. Other games offered you bright pulsating neon colors to the beat of the song, and possibly abstract visualizations if you were lucky. Still other games took it up a notch by offering vivid and memorable characters (Gitaroo Man, PaRappa the Rapper). Guitar Hero took the cake. You saw it in the rough and edgy fonts. You saw it in the eye-popping colors. You saw it on the loading screens. You saw it in the characters with their eyeliners and glam rock get-ups: this was a game made by rock fans, for rock fans.

A real motley crew.

You could choose from “make as many mistakes as you want” easy up to “please kill me now” hard. This choice available to the players was a good thing, because it added replay value. If you thought you mastered one song already, you ought to try it on the next difficulty level and see if you could still play with the addition of an additional button to the mix. Or even aim for a full combo, which was basically pushing every note in the song at the proper time, and nothing else (very difficult). This range of difficulties made the game accessible to all levels of play, from the casual gamers to the hardcore shredders. It made virtually anyone and everyone be able to rock out with a guitar. Which was perfect, since the game was basically made with multiplayer in mind.

In gameplay is where Guitar Hero shines. Hit the notes correctly and in time, and the crowd cheers you on. Do badly and the crowd boos you off the stage. If you manage to stave off having your show unceremoniously interrupted by angry rock fans and successfully build up your Rock Meter you can unleash Star Power the way all the big rockstars do it: you literally tilt your plastic guitar upward in some sort of rock god homage. Boom, instant double score multipliers. It’s that kind of constant balancing act between epic-ly failing and rocking out massively combined with the tactile sense of holding a guitar in your hands that keeps players coming back.

Star Power: a lifesaver when you’re in a real bitch of a situation.

Learning timing had never been as rewarding as what Guitar Hero made people feel. And that brings us to the main objective of the game in the first place: to offer that sensation of being a rockstar in the comfort of your own living room. And who wouldn’t want that?

The Digital Luddite said it best:

What people look like playing

What they look like in their minds