Guitar Hero Arcade is hitting whatever bars, cinemas and whatever dusty arcades are actually left in the world early next year, and it's been developed in partnership by Activision, Raw Thrills and... Konami.
Yep, the old music peripheral king and Activision rival has buried the hatchet and started work on Guitar Hero, says MTV.
"Basically, Konami approached us with the deal," Raw Thrills VP Andrew Eloff told MTV. "It shocked the hell out of me. [laughs] I was thrilled. The thing with 'Guitar Hero' that's so frightening is there's so much licensing associated with it. We're not set up to do all that. When Konami came to us, asking us if we wanted to develop 'Guitar Hero,' we felt like this was a perfect symbiotic relationship."
"It's kind of one of the weirder things in the world, right?" he said. "It's Konami and Activision and Raw Thrills all working together. Konami has all this experience with doing coin-op games and Activision has the number one domestic music game. So, I think it's kind of a match made in heaven. It makes a lot a lot of sense."
Guitar Hero Arcade is based on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, but has still taken influences from just-released World Tour. The guitar peripheral that Raw Thrills developed for the game, created in conjunction with Konami and Red Octane, is based on the design of World Tour's guitar but does not feature the slide mechanic. Eloff describes it as a "hybrid" of the two.
Some features, such as character customisation, have been streamlined for the Arcade audience, and the machine even features downloadable content for future song updates.
The machine's due to hit Arcades in North America - and hopefully Europe - in January. Expectedly, Raw Thrills man Eloff is quite excited: "We have more pre-orders on this game than ever, than we've ever seen - ever," he said. "It's amazing. It's doing very, very, very well."
These are certainly the sorts of games that could make arcades popular again, though never to the early 90s stature of course - yes, we can get these on home formats, but they can be costly for some, especially if we're talking the whole set of band instruments.
Plus, we're getting wider ranges of audience who now might be inclined to venturing into arcades if they see the likes of this.
Oh Konami, had you bothered to call Guitar Freaks something better and bothered to release it in Europe then it could have been you in Activision's position.
Put this machine in pubs and it'll make a fortune.
There are a few pubs that are holding 'Karaoke & Guitar Hero' nights these days - I was hoping to catch one at some point...who knows, maybe I'll even treat the audience to my rendition of 'Cliffs of Dover' from GH3!
As stated above. This will make a fortune in pubs etc, plus could also help kickstart the Arcade industry off again if more of these type of games appear. Oh I miss the good old arcade days. I grew up in em
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