New XBox Guitar Hero Melts Face Off Old School Rockers

Guest Post by Zack Urlocker

Update: At CES this week, Microsoft announced it is working with Activision to add exclusive features for the XBox 360 version of Guitar Hero: downloadable songs, more online interaction and Deep Purple.  Remember what downloadable content did for iTunes?  This is disruptive.

If you thought all the gaming action this holiday season was on the XBox 360 or the Nintendo Wii, you might have missed that one of the hottest games was Guitar Hero II on the Sony Playstation 2 console.  Despite the fact that Sony shipped its new and long awaited PlayStation 3 in November, the six year old PlayStation 2 remains a cash cow and is currently the best-selling game console on the market. 

While you might be tempted to dismiss Guitar Hero as just another amusing diversion (which it certainly is), its impact on the industry is potentially significant.  After all, even rockers like Korn's Jonathan Davis and Incubus are seriously into the game. Guitar Hero could cause gaming to become more mainstream and also impacts other industries around it.

Since the gaming industry is enormously derivative, my guess is that dozens of execs are banging their fist on the table this week at  the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas asking what its going to take to ship their own Guitar Hero clone in 2007.  Violence is out and guitars are in!  But unless there's some new innovation, Guitar Hero has won the first round. 

Duelling heros: Two guitar-hero dudes perform Black Sabbath's Iron Man.

So what is Guitar Hero?  Basically, it's playing "air guitar" to classic rock songs to earn points.  What makes Guitar Hero unique (and fun) is that instead of using a traditional game controller or joystick you use a 3/4 scale Gibson SG guitar replica with color-coded buttons instead of strings. Don't worry, you don't need much musical ability; but you need rhythm to be sufficiently coordinated pressing the fret buttons on the neck of the guitar with one hand while hitting a strum bar with the other.  Hit the right notes and you'll hear a great guitar solo and cheers from the audience; if not a chorus of boos. 

The original Guitar Hero included 47 songs ranging from everyone's first guitar riff "Smoke on the Water" to more challenging songs such as David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust" and Edgar Winter's face-melting difficult "Frankenstein."  Guitar Hero II adds better multi-player challenges, bass riffs and more than 50 new songs including classic rock oldies as well as more recent songs by bands that old-fogey parents have never heard of.

Other than being another wannabe guitar player, I wouldn't have taken much interest in Guitar Hero, until I saw a couple of kids playing in a local Fry's electronics. They were rocking out to Boston's "More than a Feeling" (a song that was written before they were born) and hitting every note.  "We played all summer," they told me.  So I bought Guitar Hero II for my pre-teen nephews for Christmas and they were jamming to Cheap Trick's "Surrender."  That is, once they could wrest control from the adults.  So what exactly is disruptive about all of this?

Guitar Hero meets several of the criteria of a disruptive innovation by creating a new market:

• Defies traditional gaming software category
• Provides a new way to interact with music
• Adds new life to older music titles
• Builds on something people already do (play air-guitar)
• Appears initially inferior to real guitar technology
• Improving technology

Consider this: When was the last time parents and kids both had fun playing a video game together (without violence)?  And when was the last time both groups thought the same music was cool?   I've never heard so much Cheap Trick in more than twenty-five years!  Surrender last charted in 1978, but I bet it was number one for a lot of families over the holidays.  (You can find the iTunes iMix of all the Guitar Hero songs on Apple's iTunes store.) 

You could argue that MySpace and YouTube have become new media for younger kids to get access to music, so why not Guitar Hero?  Unlike YouTube, Guitar Hero actually licenses the songs and pays royalties to the artists. 

Or consider this: If you're Robin Zander of Cheap Trick aren't you glad they picked your song instead of something by Eddie Money?  And how much would you pay for a Guitar Hero Now! bundle of a dozen favorite air guitar classics from the Stones, Santana or U2? (My guess, based on the level of interaction is probably more than you'd be willing to pay for a comparable set of songs on iTunes.)

Right now, Guitar Hero is only available on PlayStation 2, but the publisher says it will be available for all popular platforms in 2007.  No doubt seeing a lot of profit potenial in the Guitar Hero franchise, Activision snapped up the original publisher Red Octane last summer for a cool $100 million.

As the franchise expands, it raises some interesting questions for product development:

• What advantage can Nintendo carve out with a motion-sensitive guitar controller or drumsticks for the Wii? 
• How much money can be made by upselling instantly downloadable Guitar Hero songs from XBox Live?  What if you could jam with friends in different locations over the internet? 
• What kind of virtual world experience could be created with a combination of Guitar Hero and something like Second Life?  Is there a market place for add-ons like guitar effects, drum tracks and custom animated band videos? 
• What other industries or entertainment forms could be disrupted for these sorts of advanced simulation games?  Music training and theory? Military training? Medical training? Music Videos?
• What happens to MTV if kids decide that its more fun to create their own videos than to watch them on the tube?  (Note that MTV bought the original Guitar Hero development studio Harmonix for a whopping $175 million, their third gaming acquisition in the past year.)

It will be interesting to see what happens over the next five years as Guitar Hero's players start spending their own (or their parents') disposable income.  Guitar Hero features exclusively Gibson Guitars with nary a Fender Stratocaster in sight.  My nephews already think electric guitars are cool, but the only brand they're aware of is what they see in Guitar Hero.  Smart move by Gibson to lock out its competitors and influence the next generation of rockers. 

Zack Urlocker is a software industry executive. He writes about open source software at www.TheOpenForce.com. 

Interested in writing a guest-column on disruption? Contact The Disruption Group here.

**Other Information**

Wall Street Journal: Why Being a Fake Rockstar is Better Than the Reality

BusinessWeek: The PlayStation 2 Still Rocks and New medical training using games.

Military Training Technology: Army Games For Good; Gaming is becoming a disruptive training technology, according to this Whitepaper (pdf) by U.S. Army Chief Scientist for Training & Simulation, Roger Smith.

Books: Got Game by John Beck and Mitchell Wade and Growing up Digital by Don Tapscott look at how business is changing due to new technologies favored by youth.

**Videos We Couldn't Resist**

Child hero: Five-year old boy plays Surrender, as made famous by Cheap Trick

Real thing: Cheap Trick plays Surrender, live at the Budokan in Tokyo (1978). Tell your kids you were there.

** Other news at the Consumer Electronics Show **

Bill Gates is now talking about about the new Xbox Live features and surprising new IPTV service, reported by Engadget and Joystiq. Paid Content says the Xbox and IPTV service is a natural and we can expect HDTV on Xbox by next Christmas.  The Wall Street Journal says Microsoft's IPTV could undercut cable companies.

Live Digitally says Netgear scores at CES.

Robert Scoble says check out the small companies at CES for the real developments.

New York Times' new blog - Bits - has daily updates from the tradeshow, while media frenzy writer  Richard Siklos previews the Super Bowl of the gadget industry.