Guitar Hero Revival Possibly in the Works At Xbox and Activision

A new Guitar Hero game may be in the works as part of Microsoft and Activision’s new partnership. Guitar Hero is one of the most iconic and revolutionary franchises in gaming. The first game in the series allowed players to pick up a replica of a guitar and play along to a bunch of iconic rock songs. The series continued to evolve and grow, eventually being acquired and published by gaming giant Activision. It would later face stiff competition from Harmonix, the developer actually responsible for creating Guitar Hero. Due to various acquisitions, Harmonix was broken away from the Guitar Hero franchise and would instead make Rock Band which, as the name may suggest, encompasses far more than just the guitars. 

Both franchises were juggernauts, but fell off the map for a number of years. Incidentally, both franchises staged comebacks in the mid 2010s and things were ultimately underwhelming on a commercial level resulting in both of them sort of fading into the background. However, as reported by Windows Central, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick held a townhall meeting with the company to speak about the future of the publisher as the Microsoft acquisition reportedly looms closer to closing. When speaking about what Activision looks like under Microsoft, Kotick noted that he’s excited about their technology and extensive research/development teams which he claims will make “the re-emergence of Guitar Hero” possible.

“A big part of what I’ve seen in Microsoft is research. And they do development in areas that are extraordinary. And so being able to tap into their AI and machine learning capability, the data analytics, new ways of thinking about graphics — I just see unlimited potential for what we do,” Kotick explained. “We’re uniquely situated as a company because we have the very best franchises in all of video games.”  […] “The re-emergence of Guitar Hero and other things would not be possible without the different types of resources. And so, you know, just the endless possibilities for the future that are just incredibly exciting.”  

Of course, we have no idea what this might look like. Guitar Hero Live was the last game in the series and was fairly experimental as it allowed you to play “live” concerts with real-life footage that would dynamically respond to your performance. The music genre in gaming is fairly limited when it comes to evolving unless you do something extremely dramatic and risky, but it’s hard to justify that when the cost of the game is usually upwards of $100 to accommodate the hardware that the game requires. Either way, it seems Guitar Hero could be getting resurrected under Microsoft in the coming years which would make for a really exciting Xbox exclusive game.