I don’t remember where I first heard about Guitar Hero. But, I had a subscription to GamePro when I was an elementary-age kid, so that was probably it. I had amassed a sum of christmas money (2005) and decided I was going to shell out the $70 odd dollars to get the bundle. Neither GameStop in town had it (they were EB Games then) and I ended up calling this independent shop in a neighboring town called Game Freaks. They had it.

I could probably name tons of songs from GH, GHII, and Rock Band. Those three games were my main rhythm-game squeezes, but it was something really special chugging through the Guitar Hero I setlist on Easy mode for the first time. It felt incredible. I didn’t touch the other games on my shelf over Christmas break. Even when I went downstate to visit my grandparents and spend a few nights there, I brought everything along and remember first playing on hard in the upstairs living room there. I was 10 or 11. I was playing Cochise by Audioslave, with the guitar behind my head. I don’t know who lives in that house anymore.

My dad got into it with me a lot more when Guitar Hero II came out. We bought the bundle again, and I remember playing Strutter by Kiss. Of course, it was the WaveGroup Sound cover. In a way, that seems bizarre now that Guitar Hero I and II were nearly all the WaveGroup “As Made Famous By” covers. If I was older, that might have bugged the shit out of me, but I was a little kid, and I only half-knew the scant songs I recognized.

It’s been a long time, but I will occasionally hear a song and have false memories of it, basically because I was familiar with the Guitar Hero version only. I loved playing “Spanish Castle Magic” by Jimi Hendrix, and the first time I heard the original recording, the vocals arrested me. I had no idea that song was supposed to have words.

Embarrassing times were had by all. I remember much later in Middle School flipping through my friend Connor’s iPod on the bus home. He had about 70 artists and 71 songs. They were all recognizably from Guitar Hero. I was incredulous.

“Did you know about music before Guitar Hero? How is this possible?”

Any song on YouTube that was part of a tracklist in a rhythm game was immediately subject to a war in the comments, mostly instigated by people convinced that somebody who heard Frankenstein by the Edgar Winter Group on Guitar Hero and not through classic rock radio was somehow an asshole.

I think for people who were younger around the release of those games, they played a big part in shaping their musical landscape. Especially for kids like me, who didn’t listen to mainstream pop at the time. It was nice to find stuff that was new, or at least recent. Even as a pre-teen, listening to endless Led Zeppelin and the Doors felt like listening to music in a vacuum. I actually got deeply into several different bands featured in the Bonus Songs, most notably That Handsome Devil (who just put a new record out) and Honest Bob and the Factory-to-dealer Incentives. I was so into That Handsome Devil for some time I co-started a lyrics Wikia for them, and helped organize their show in Detroit when they played in Hamtramck. Some of the members knew me by name, and at some point during the night it was a shocking realization that oh, wow: I’m here because I played their song “Elephant Bones” in Guitar Hero II.

…

Rhythm games were it. Aside from Call of Duty, games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band were what I feel to be one of the last huge (recent) gaming phenomenons to come out of consoles. It’s worth mentioning the Just Dance games and the Wii, not as a console in this context, but as a Wii Sports machine. I played Just Dance with my cousin and sister-in-law at some holiday shindig this year, but that isn’t the same as going to someones house for the sole purpose of playing GH/RB and then playing it up until the sun starts poking around again.

Everybody had plastic instruments. I had two guitars from Guitar Hero, incompatible with my guitar, mic, and drum kit from my Rock Band set. I was not in any minority. I would even wager to say that tons of people probably had three or four guitars. God forbid you wanted to play the drums–it guaranteed you buying a newer kit.

With the speed that these games came and went, it sounds as if music games existed in a bubble, even though it wasn’t. It wasn’t like Rock Band 3 shipped and they had to bury a bunch of stuff in a landfill. The games sold. Guitar Hero World Tour sold. The Beatles Rock Band sold. The track packs and DLC sold. It gracefully went away. It was probably because consumers were so vocal about not wanting to buy any more instruments. It had to be obvious to developers/publishers that the market was slowing up.

To the greater public, rhythm gaming died down. There’s still an active community, or so says Nick Chester from Harmonix PR. Additionally, that article states some anecdotal interest in a new Rock Band title from consumers, but it can hardly be inferred from that article that RB4 (or anything similar) is on the way.

The fair-weather, casual gamers who played rhythm games moved on. A lot of the younger kids have moved onto the mobile frontier that has grown so large in years recent. The adults who weren’t gamers but played rhythm games have largely gone back to being not gamers. The gamers who played those games are still gamers. But they aren’t playing games with a plastic axe.

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a music game like those of yore. Frankly, I’d be way into a new one. As a member of the now-current generation of gaming hardware, I would love to have a music game. If Harmonix announced a fat Rock Band 4 bundle tomorrow, I’d double down on that. Sure, I’d have to figure out where the hell I’m going to get the money/where the hell I’ll keep those fake instruments, but I would still love that. It’s surely not as pronounced, but I feel the urge to get a music game the same way I need a good fighting game on a new console, or a good game to wreck a car in.

I’ll never be that kid waking up to grab plastic instruments, and going to bed because I need to put them down. I’ll never spend hours and hours working my way up to Hard and Expert mode, partly because I can still whip through songs on Expert despite the rust around the joints of my fingers. I can never really be that dedicated again, because music games will never dominate my life again. They already did that once when I was a kid. Money can still be made. Improvements can still be made. Music games will never rule the world again, but they could still suck the money out of my wallet once in a while.

I could use some new rhythm games.

(As a side note, while I will continue to post here, I'm going to heed some advice I received from an editor at Kotaku and slowly move to posting solely on a blog of my own. I hope some of you will visit. Thanks for the read!)

Fantastic article/story/thing as usual! I've been trying to find a copy of Rock Band 3 and a keyboard for a half decent price lately to no avail.

@regularassmilk If you need a new rhythm game may I recommend the free Stepmania? You can play it with a dance pad like normal DDR or with WASD and there's tons of songs for it floating around, though most of it is Jpop and eurobeat which I have no clue if you like.

Ya, I got into Guitar Hero late. It was Guitar Hero III I think, on PS2. The one with the classic rock in it. I really liked that game and also Rock Band 2 I think it was.

I didn't play much of the other ones because I didn't see the point in buying any of the others (especially considering most of them didn't have music that appealed to me other than those two). What's funny is I had always wanted them to add a larger Slipknot catalog to their downloadable catalog, but by the time they did I had already stopped playing Rock Band 2 for the most part. The biggest reason being that the guitar controller I had didn't work correctly anymore, but on top of that I had other games I wanted to play or I didn't have time.

I'm not big on rhythm games, but for a time those were some fun ones.

I didn't get into these games until one of my friends introduced me to Guitar Hero 2 on the 360, but it seems like we had a similar experience. Great era of gaming. I just picked up Rock Band 3 again a few days back, and I just wish my old RB2 guitar registered button presses better. Game's still fun.

Guitar Hero is the reason I got into Muse, Smashing Pumpkins, and Lacuna Coil.

So I'm thankful for that.

The original Guitar Hero was a big contributor to me starting to play the real guitar. The song selection was absolutely spot on, covers or not.

I played guitar before the first Guitar Hero, so I had a real elitist attitude toward it. Then I played Cowboys from Hell and found how much fun that sort of thing could be.

Guitar Hero III had a guitar that could be played with a pick, so I put in a few hundred hours there. By the end of it, I had way better control of my picking on the real thing. Getting 100% on Knights of Cydonia actually translated to endurance and speed when I needed to take my playing to another level. I still find it kind of insane that the game and its peripheral came to me at just the right time.

Then I had a couple months of unemployment when Rock Band came out, which led to some basic drumming skills and a newfound appreciation for how drum parts are laid out.

So in conclusion, the games didn't get me into a lot of new music. But it took my own music to brand new places.

@regularassmilk: Have you tried out Rocksmith 2014?

Guitar Hero absolutely had a positive effect on my music interests. For one, it exposed me to a bunch of great older bands I wouldn't have otherwise heard, many of which I still enjoy today. Mostly though, it just got me interested in the idea of music as something to put time into, other than just hearing it on the radio. My interest in KPOP and JPOP (and my thread on it) are directly a result of my original love of GH, as weird as that may sound.

These games absolutely had a huge effect on my musical tastes, since I was playing them as a teenager. They got me into a classic rock phase, an indie rock phase, a metal phase, etc. And they introduced me to some of my current favorite bands like That Handsome Devil.

Really, I ended up liking the Bonus Tracks in early GH/RB games more than the main setlist. Great, underrated gems in there.

Weirdly enough, Rock Band Blitz ended up being my favorite in the series because I got too lazy to bring out all the instruments. I do miss the Face-Off competitive modes though.

This was my experience. I miss the music genre games because it directly introduced me to artists that I never would've given the chance or would've discovered.

I would still be buying Rock Band DLC weekly if they were still making it. It deeply saddens me that Act II by The Protomen was never released on RBN. =´[

Is your name Regular-Ass Milk or Regular Ass-Milk?

I've always wondered.

Great read, man.

I got into the first Guitar Hero based on the Kentai Hall coverage of it, and being a guitar player for a long time, I was hyper curious about it. It was mainly because the first game had Stevie Ray and Pantera, which seemed awesome. I really enjoyed it, though I felt it was stiff to play. Then again, I played on Medium.

With Guitar Hero 2, I challenged myself to get better at the game. I eventually used Rage Against The Machine on it to get up to Expert level, and then started using Shadows Fall and All That Remains on there to just get better in general. Eventually, we started having in-house competitions on the songs in our store between myself and a few others who also wanted to get better. We'd get crowds of people watching. I knew I had to get to the point where no one could challenge me again. Therefore, I learned how to play Dick Dale's "Miserlou"...on Expert...with the cheat code that took the notes off the screen...and with my back to the screen...at more than 80% accuracy.

My highest accuracy was 92%. No one challenged me again after that. = (

I got Guitar Hero III on Wii, played it all day and all night. I liked the changes they had made to hammer-ons and pull-offs. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I pretty much only played In Flames "Take This Life" over and over until I found An Endless Sporadic's "Impulse." Eventually, that led to people challenging me again. I didn't go for the "back to the screen" thing again, just so I could continue to compete.

When World Tour came out, I took to the Tool songs (naturally, as they are my favorite band), but my favorite to play was Steely Dan. I began using nothing but the touchpad on that guitar to strum, and yet again, no one challenged me anymore...but they thought that shit was cool as hell.

Aerosmith seemed overly complicated on Expert, so I barely bothered with it.

Guitar Hero 5 and Warriors of Rock are two of my favorites, as they had EXCELLENT tracklists. Moreover, "Holy Wars." I mean, it's fucking "Holy Wars," the song that the community was asking for since FOREVER! Played the shit out of those games. It also introduced me to RX Bandits, and I immediately bought the Mandala album (and still don't regret that purchasing choice).

Guitar Hero has a lot of good memories for me, and I can confirm at least three people from our store that learned real instruments because of those games (and they are exceedingly good at those instruments). It also got me to pick my guitar back up after almost five years of not playing, so I thank it for a lot of things.

Keep on rockin', man.