What Ever Happened to Guitar Hero?

Oh where art thou, Guitar Hero with your clicky guitars and awesome local multiplayer?

The Guitar Hero franchise, that later branched out to include Dj Hero and Band Hero franchises as well was a huge phenomenon selling millions of copies and a ton of additional expansion track packs, was originally developed by Harmonix in 2005 and published by RedOctane.

The original Guitar Hero was a huge success which led to the sequel Guitar Hero II. Then came the first step in Guitar Hero’s decline…

Activision Purchases RedOctane

Publishing giant Activision purchased RedOctane for the Guitar Hero Franchise. Harmonix was acquired by MTV and they went on to develop Rockband while other developers at Activision, notably at Neversoft, were assigned to the next Guitar Hero games.  

But it what it really boils down to is that …

Rhythm Games are a fad

And quite an expensive fad too! You could literally spend hundreds of dollars for some of the later controllers, which had no other purpose than to be used with Guitar Hero. Many gamers, myself included, were perfectly happy with just one guitar thank you very much.

So after going strong from 2005 to 2009 where Activision reported a massive decline in sales, potentially due to market saturation. They tried to get creative with the monster known as DJ hero.

DJ Hero had a ton of legal trouble after a lawsuit from Numark, after Activision acquired Studio 7 the original developers of Scratch: Ultimate DJ! and attempted to have Scratch delayed so that DJ Hero would come out first. 

This didn’t help sales and in 2011 Activision announced the Hero franchise was on indefinite hiatus. 

So there you have it, Guitar Hero became too popular, market saturation meant that Activision wasn’t selling as many units as it would have liked, tried to get creative with a product that was more gimmick than fun and plagued with legal issues, so they canned the franchise.