Bobby Kotick held a giant all-hands meeting as CEO of Activision Blizzard King, where he brought up the canard of reviving the music game franchise, Guitar Hero.
As reported by Windows Central, Activision hired no less than James Corden to facilitate the all-hands meeting. James did not even name drop Guitar Hero directly when he interviewed Bobby.
However, Bobby himself fell into talking about the franchise, while discussing emerging future technologies, such as AI art, Neuralink, and more.
“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.”
Interestingly enough, all the way back in May, we reported that Bobby had already brought up the idea of reviving Guitar Hero. Bobby believes that AI could be used to revive Guitar Hero, though he didn’t really elaborate further on any tangible plans to do so.
Guitar Hero wasn’t actually started with Activision Blizzard. The idea originated from RedOctane, the company making the guitar and drum peripherals. RedOctane were themselves the manufacturers of guitar controllers for Konami’s arcade game Guitar Freaks, and commissioned Harmonix to make a new rhythm music franchise, and bring it to consoles.
After the success of the first two Guitar Hero games, RedOctane and Harmonix split as they were acquired by Activision and MTV Games, respectively. Harmonix would go on to make a new music franchise of their own, named Rock Band.
But Activision saw incredible success with the Guitar Hero series, lasting two console generations and creating its own innovation in video game DLC. Activision attempted a franchise revival with Guitar Hero Live in 2015. However, that game’s failure would lead to Activision selling off the developer, FreeStyleGames, to Ubisoft.
Activision also slowly shut off servers for Guitar Hero Live, and that seems to have been the end of the franchise as a whole.
It isn’t clear what Bobby sees that AI has that could make Guitar Hero a viable game franchise again. Will Activision start making AI songs for fans to perform? Will they use AI to make it cheaper to produce the game by automating making the game’s art assets?
But for those hardcore Guitar Hero fans, it is at least something that Activision still has an interest in bringing the franchise back. Maybe there is a way to make the game viable again if it is being produced by Microsoft. And, like with Call of Duty, Microsoft would have the motivation to get new Guitar Hero games on as many platforms as possible, including cloud gaming. But we’ll just have to wait and see if all this talk amounts to anything.
