I missGuitar Hero. I think about it at least once every few months, which is more than the average working adult with responsibilities and taxes thinks about Guitar Hero, a franchise whose last game came out in 2015 and servers have long since shut down. I played a lot of Guitar Hero World Tour as a child – I didn’t have great social skills, and playing the same songs over and over in my basement was an acceptable way to mitigate risk when hanging out with other kids. Less talking, more screaming Paramore into a microphone.
Guitar Hero World Tour introduced me to Nirvana, Tool, Foo Fighters, and Modest Mouse, developing my love for rock music from an early age. It supplemented my musical knowledge in a household where my parents mostly listened to The Beegees and Mariah Carey. I still know all the words to Monsoon by Tokio Hotel by heart because of this game. I have vivid memories of shredding No Sleep Till Brooklyn with such enthusiasm and at such a high volume that my neighbours knocked on the door to beg my parents to reel their over-enthusiastic child back in.
Guitar Hero is the perfect game for me, even now. Back then, I was using it as a buffer so I wouldn’t have to socialise – now, it would be the reason I socialise. It can be hard to get all my friends together at one house to hang out, especially considering the rising price of taxis, but if I had Guitar Hero, it would be settled. It’s done. We will be meeting every two weeks, with a set calendar invite, to bash at some pretend drums, play some pretend guitar, and shout-scream classic rock songs into a microphone with way too much reverb. Never mind that most of my friends are musicians in actual, real-life bands, this way I can join in too without having to have any real talent whatsoever.
So imagine my delight when I learned thatActivision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick started talking about a “resurgence” for the game series in a staff meeting yesterday. Finally, my dreams were coming true! Maybe they’d put an Olivia Rodrigo song in there. This is going to be my only hobby for the next half a year. I had many thoughts and feelings about this. And then I learned that Kotick somehow also believes that AI will be what resurrects the series. He reiterated this sentiment yesterday, saying that Microsoft will allow Activision to “tap into their AI and machine learning capability” and that “the re-emergence of Guitar Hero and other things would not be possible without the different types of resources”.
My colleague Ben Sledge has already written a scathing and objectively correct piece about howAI will screw Guitar Hero up, and I can’t help but agree wholeheartedly. The point of Guitar Hero is not that it replicates a song exactly and maps notes to specific buttons, but that each song and each difficulty is carefully designed to be fun for different skill levels. An AI, at this point, is not going to be able to map any song you pop into it onto a Guitar Hero controller, because it doesn’t have the intelligence to do game design. Also, I’d rather people get paid to do that than it get outsourced to AI that will do it worse.
I can’t believe somehow Bobby Kotick has turned something I’d have been thrilled for into something that makes me roll my eyes, but here we are. We could be bringing Guitar Hero to a whole new generation of kids, except it’ll be subpar and inherently unethical because Kotick can’t help but want to put AI into everything.
