The History

Guess this one should have been my very first blog lol


Guitar Hero was created from a partnership between RedOctane, then their own company that produced specialized gaming controllers, and Harmonix Music Systems, a music video game development company who had previously produced Frequency, Amplitude and Karaoke Revolution. RedOctane was seeking to bring in a GuitarFreaks-like game, highly popular at the time in Japan, into the Western markets, and approached Harmonix about helping them to develop a music game around a guitar controller. Both companies agreed to it, and went on to produce Guitar Hero in 2005. The title was highly successful, leading to the development of its successful sequel Guitar Hero II in 2006.

Both RedOctane and Harmonix were experiencing changes in 2006. RedOctane was bought by Activision in June—who spent $100 million to acquire the Guitar Hero franchise—while it was announced in October that Harmonix would be purchased by MTV Networks. As a result of the two purchases, Harmonix would no longer develop future games in the Guitar Hero series. Instead, developing would go to Neversoft, a subsidiary of Activision known for developing the Tony Hawk's series of skateboarding games. Neversoft was chosen to helm the Guitar Hero series after Neversoft founder, Joel Jewett, admitted to the RedOctane founders, Kai and Charles Huang, that his development team for Tony Hawk's Project 8 went to work on weekends just to play Guitar Hero. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick believed that Neversoft would help them bring great games to the series, but on reflection, regretted their decision to not explore Harmonix further as a continued developer for the series. In addition, Activision began seeking other markets for the game; a Nintendo DS version of the series was developed by Vicarious Visions, while a Guitar Hero Mobile series was created for mobile phones. The company also began considering the expansion of the series to band-specific titles with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Later, in November 2008, Activision acquired Budcat Creations, another development studio that had helped with the PlayStation 2 versions of Guitar Hero III and World Tour, announcing that they will be helping to develop another game in the Guitar Hero series.

In 2007, Harmonix and MTV Games released a new music title through rival publisher Electronic Arts, called Rock Band. It expanded upon the gameplay popularized by the Guitar Hero series by adding drum and microphone instruments, allowing players to simulate playing songs as bands. Activision followed suit with the release of Guitar Hero World Tour in 2008 which supported multiple instruments. In 2009, Activision expected to triple its Guitar Hero offerings, and in addition to further continuation of the existing main series and expansions, introduced the titles Band Hero, geared towards more family-friendly pop music, and DJ Hero, a game based on turntablism and featuring a number of mixes. With the release of Guitar Hero 5, Activision has considered the series to move away from its heavy metal basis into a more rounded selection of music. Guitar Hero 5 is the first game in the series to use a new version of the series' logo. Previous logos for games used a font with sharper "points" on the letters, which was considered "idiosyncratic with a vengeance" to match the emphasis on heavy metal music that the previous games had. Activision used the services of the Pentagram design studio to refashion the game's logo. Pentagram developed a new font, removing some of the "aggressive odd" features to make the typeface more suitable and amendable to design feature incorporation to other games such as the upcoming Band Hero and DJ Hero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero