Awesome, Dear Boy: When Activision approached tool to see if they can put one of their songs into World Tour, they agreed and license out three of their songs ("Parabola", "Schism", and "Vicarious")... but on the condition that they get personally involved with their own exclusive venue inspired by Alex Grey's artwork.
Neversoft took over the franchise starting with Guitar Hero III, after Harmonix left to create Rock Band.
Also, not counting the ports to less-powered systems, some of the spin-offs were developed by other Activision-owned studios: Beenox did Smash Hits, Vicarious Visions did the On Tour subseries, Underground Development did Van Halen and FreeStyleGames did both DJ Hero games and, later on, Live.
Cash-Cow Franchise: The series broke the $1 billion milestone in 2007 and there was much rejoicing on Activision's part. However; an oversaturation of products released in 2009note GH 5, GH Metallica, GH Smash Hits, Band Hero, and DJ Hero were all released that year across over 25 SKUs (standalone software discs and hardware bundles) hurt sales severelynote Which also affected the sales of Warriors of Rock the following year, with the game failing to reach 1 million sold units across its three platforms, ultimately causing the franchise to collapse. Good going, Activision.
The Romantics attempted to sue Activision over the cover of What I Like About You in Encore: Rocks the 80s, claiming it was "virtually indistinguishable from the original".
Due to the fact that avatars of real musicians could perform any song once unlocked in Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero, resulting in some colorful and often inappropriate performances, Adam Levine and Gwen Stefani sued Activision over the feature. Courtney Love and Dave Grohl also expressed distaste over Kurt Cobain's avatar being allowed to perform any song, and requested that he can only be used on Nirvana songs.
Cross-Dressing Voices: It doesn't matter if your singer is male or female, it'll sing whatever song is selected regardless. Justified because they could just be lip syncing... Handwaved in World Tour, where a microphone was added as an instrument. Averted in the guitar-based entries, where the singer's gender was matched with the song.
Development Hell: Activision claimed that a new game in this series would be released in 2012. Assuming they were telling the truth, and the fact that no Guitar Hero game was released in 2012, it probably fell into this, and ended up being cancelled anyhow. That, or it morphed into Live somewhere during development.
Disowned Adaptation: Charlie Daniels hated the version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” that appeared in Legends of Rock, mainly because the devil could (and often would) win. He said that losing to the devil undermined the whole meaning of the song, and the only reason why it appeared in the game was because he had lost its publishing rights- had he still owned them, he would have never approved of its inclusion.
Dueling Games: with Rock Band. With the death of the GH series, Rock Band appears to be the victor (even though it, too, was affected by the decline of the genre).
2009 saw two well received band-centric titles going up against each other, Guitar Hero: Metallica vs The Beatles: Rock Band.
The same year also saw the duel of the two family friendly entries, Band Hero and Lego Rock Band, sharing several of the same songs to boot.
To an extent with Brütal Legend, a game with similar themes. Though while both Warriors of Rock and Brütal Legend are set in a heavy metal fantasy world inspired by album covers, Brütal Legend is more of an open-world action-adventure RTS than a music game.
Dummied Out: "Trippolette" and "Graveyard Shift" in the original game, which are both accessible through the use of a cheat device. "Trippolette" was planned to be part of the main game, but was cut due to someone in QA sneaking it in at the last second before anyone on the dev team was able to find out.note It's probable that either Andrelia Buch or Aaron Demuth, the respective composers, were responsible. They both stopped working at Harmonix a few months after the game was released.
"Needless to say, he doesn't work at Harmonix anymore."
"Trippolette" was eventually recomposed and released for the Rock Band Network service.
Rhythm Guitar tracks can be found in the files for Guitar Hero: Metallica, suggesting they were going to make a return after being abandoned for mixed lead/rhythm guitar tracks following III. They are unplayable by any means in the official Guitar Hero games, but are fully functional when ported over to Clone Hero.
5 extra songs were found in the files of Guitar Hero 5's Wii version. These songs were "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynrdnote It would later get official chart exclusively for that system, a live version of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog", "March of the Pigs" by Nine Inch Nails, "Bug Eyes" by dredg, and a World Tour medley consisting of "Beautiful Disaster" by 311, "Freak on a Leash" by Korn, "About a Girl (Unplugged)" by Nirvana, "What I've Done" by Linkin Park, "Are You Gonna Go My Way" by Lenny Kravitz, "Feel the Pain" by Dinosaur Jr., "Prisoner of Society" by The Living End, and "Dammit" by blink-182.
Executive Meddling: Minor example: While Guitar Hero: Metallica was in production, Lars Ulrich originally wanted Slayer's "Angel of Death" in the game, but Microsoft objected to the use of the song (and thus threatened to refuse to license the game for the Xbox 360) out of sensitivity for the victims of The Holocaust, forcing Lars to change his choice to "War Ensemble" instead. Justified, as the song is about the experiments of Josef Mengele. It's not that the development team didn't like Slayer's song or anything, it's that they would have had to censor it so heavily they might as well have had an instrumental. Which is funny, considering that the song was in Tony Hawk's Project 8 without much of a problem...
If they had, it might have come out something like GH5's version of Iron Maiden's "2 Minutes to Midnight." No cuss words in the song, but apparently the anti-war message was just too vivid and the result is a lot of censorship, ironic given Maiden's view on those issues. The bigger problem with censoring this song, though, were the implications of children abuse (like when the chorus says "to kill the unborn in the womb", the "to kill" is omitted), so it came off whitewashed and with a rather broken message.
The very first game had "Spanish Castle Magic" by Jimi Hendrix, but the lyrics were removed because Hendrix's estate didn't want an impersonator.
Fandom Life Cycle: Started at Stage 0-b for the original game; after the original became a Sleeper Hit, its sequel quickly catapulted the series to Stage 3, if not Stage 4, the series reached Stage 5 when Guitar Hero III was released, slipped to Stage 6-a with the series' over-saturation in 2009, and slipped further to Stage 6-b when Activision shelved the series.
Originally of Guitar Freaks (where RedOctane got the idea from the guitar peripheral), and later, of Rock Band, from World Tour on. They were planning on making a separate drum game, and eventually integrate them - but MTV offered Harmonix the chance to do it all in one shot, so...
Warriors of Rock is accused of cribbing its aesthetics and themes from Brütal Legend. Ironically, Activision tried to rebrand the game as Guitar Hero Adventures when they inherited the publishing rights from Sierra/Vivendi, but Double Fine refused.
Franchise Killer: Though its not one specific game responsible, the absolutely ridiculous number of released titles since Activision took over on the franchise in 2006 (and especially so since they booted Harmonix, who co-created the series in the first place, out of it in the next year - 13 new titles in the years between 2007 and 2010) have been pretty much confirmed to be the cause of the killing of at least the franchise, if the not the the whole band game genre.
Activision then attempted to revive the franchise with Guitar Hero Live. However, its own poor sales, alongside divided reactions among the fanbase, only managed to kill it even more conclusively.
Keep Circulating the Tapes: Barring the delisted DLC, there are two other instances that makes playing the game cost as much as a real guitar.
There exists another variation of the chart for "We Three Kings" in III that for unknown reasons was replaced with the more common version that re-arranges some patterns and removed three notes (hence, the first revision is known as the "1100 version"). Those who already own the previous version will still keep it even after it was replaced.
Though you can find the main console version in just about any used game store, the same can not be said for the PC version of World Tour, which costs way more in comparison (assuming you can actually find a copy).
No Port For You: Guitar Hero III, Aerosmith and World Tour were the only games in the series to see a release on PC and macOS; the rest were exclusive to consoles and/or mobile devices.
Promoted Fanboy: After Activision bought the series and it lost Harmonix, Neversoft stepped up to the plate as developer, saying they played it on breaks while making Tony Hawk games.
Many custom note chart authors from the Guitar Hero fan community were also picked up by Neversoft to write charts for their game. Of course, these were the sort of players who were already very, very good at the game and wanted to write harder charts to challenge themselves, which carried over directly to Guitar Hero 3...
The release of Guitar Hero caused a massive spike in sales for real electric guitars, and especially electric guitar lessons. Many a guitar player in the mid-to-late 2000s wouldn't be seen as all that odd if they cite Guitar Hero as a reason they got into the instrument.
Lots of bands saw a spike in sales of any song featured in the series, leading to many new fans of old school rock and metal like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Kiss and Rush, to name a few. Power metal band DragonForce cite Guitar Hero as a huge contributing factor to their popularity, and their song "Through the Fire and Flames" remains the band's most popular song more than ten years after Guitar Hero 3 made it famous.
Revival by Commercialization: The runaway success of the Guitar Hero franchise in the mid-to-late 00s exposed many young people to classic hard rock and heavy metal songs. As a result, the genres of hard rock and heavy metal returned to a level of mainstream popularity they had not seen since probably the early 1990s. Many of the songs that appeared in the games became popular downloads from digital music services such as iTunes.
Sleeper Hit: The first game, released in late 2005 to little fanfare, became critically lauded and gave rise to a fad that lasted the remainder of the 2000s.
Some cheat-sharing sites falsely claim that Guitar Hero: On Tour has four additional bonus songs: "Crazy Train", "Dani California", "Master of Puppets", and "Welcome to the Jungle", unlocked by getting 5 stars on certain (or all) songs on all difficulty levels. Some sources also claim that you need to be playing on the original "Phat" DS, and not the DS Lite. The only bonus song in the game is "I Am Not Your Gameboy".
Rumors persisted for a while that The Rolling Stones' live DLC was recorded at their infamous Altamont, CA concert, with "Under My Thumb" being the song where Meredith Hunter was killed. It's actually from Get Yer Ya-yas Out, their live DVD which was recorded at Madison Square Garden earlier in 1969.
The now-cancelled Guitar Hero 7 would have featured dynamic venues, unique music videos for each song, and a new six-button guitar controller with strings instead of a strum bar, while removing drums and vocals. Your mileage will definitely vary on whether this would have been a good direction, especially given the route they did end up taking the series in with Guitar Hero Live.
Warriors of Rock was originally going to include, among other things, the song "Deliverance" by Opeth. They decided against it due to disc space issues.
In the time between Guitar Hero II's release and Harmonix splitting off from Activision, there were talks of a Guitar Hero animated series being pitched to MTV, among other names. Of course, given MTV's direct involvement in the series direct competitor after the Harmonix/Activision split, the kibosh was quickly put on this idea.
The Bow Wow Wow cover of "I Want Candy" was going to be in Encore: Rock the 80s, and even appeared in some preview builds of the game, but was removed for undisclosed reasons. Because It's Midnite was originally going to be a bonus track like "Trogdor" was in 2, but was ultimately moved to the main setlist to replace it.
Activision and RedOctane had applied for numerous trademarks that were probably meant to be used for more games, including Guitar Villain, Drum Villain, Drum Hero, Keyboard Hero, Sing Hero and Dance Hero.
There was also meant to be a fourth band-centric game based on the Red Hot Chili Peppers that never materialized.
As mentioned above, when Activision had the publishing rights to Brütal Legend, they tried to rebrand it as a spinoff, Guitar Hero Adventures, but the developers Double Fine refused, leading to them seek EA as a publisher instead.
The songs discovered on the Wii GH5 disc, especially the Led Zeppelin one due to their stinginess about licensing; see Dummied Out above.
The final version of the drum chart for "Scatterbrained (Live)" we see in Guitar Hero 5 is actually a nerfed rechart after Neversoft decided the original chart was too difficult. The result is a ridiculously undercharted drum chart missing tons of ghost notes that's rated a 10 in terms of difficulty, but in practice is closer to an 8 or 9.
An avatar for Jon Bon Jovi was planned in GH5, but he refused to license his image after he discovered he could be used to play any song.
The alpha build for Guitar Hero 1 not only had a radically different UI and color palette for the frets, but their cover of "Spanish Castle Magic" had lyrics!
Band Hero 2 was in development and was planning to follow a storyline similar to Warriors of Rock, if unearthed graphics in WOR's files were anything to go by. A partial setlist was also leaked and would've included songs from David Bowie and Lady Gaga; additionally, according to Neversoft charter Chris Vance, his team also really wanted "Hocus Pocus" by Focus, to the point of having already charted the song, but were unable to get it because the masters were lost. However, layoffs within Neversoft ultimately led to the game's demise; according to Vance, the game never made it far into development before its cancellation.
At one point, Neversoft pitched a band spin-off focusing on The Beatles to celebrate their iconic legacy. For reasons unknown, this never got picked up, but Harmonix was still able to realize this idea with The Beatles: Rock Band.
Miscellaneous Trivia
The Sex Pistols actually reformed and recorded new versions of two of their songs ("Anarchy in the UK" for GH3 and "Pretty Vacant" for World Tour) specifically for the game (the original multi-track masters were not available; the band's theory was that they were stolen). Well, for this and for the same reason bands always reform.
Living Colour also re-recorded a new version of “Cult of Personality” for Legends of Rock, which would later be used for Smash Hits. Strangely, the original 1988 recording would be used in Live and Rock Band.
Hyperspeed was originally included as a joke, like the giant heads "cheat". Yeah, let's make the charts scroll twice as fast! Then people started using it, and noticing the faster speed makes them much better at the game than without.
Guitar Hero Smash Hits (Beenox) and Guitar Hero Van Halen (Underground Development) were handled by third parties, which would explain some of the chart discrepancies between those games and earlier appearances. In the case of Smash Hits, it's mostly because masters were used instead of covers, and because some note types weren't in the older games (tapped notes, extended sustains, open notes on bass), but for Guitar Hero Van Halen (which has Hot For Teacher, which appeared on World Tour but didn't export, and was essentially the same base game), there really isn't much of a reason to change the chart itself if you're using the same masters.
You know that tiny print on the Guitar Hero II newspaper screen? Someone found exactly what it says. It's the Arts and Entertainment column from the March 13th, 2004 issue of the Palos Verdes Peninsula News.
The Guitar Hero 3 DLC track "Putting Holes In Happiness" by Marilyn Manson is not the original version, but instead a remix by Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
As for the originals present in Rocks the 80s, since both "I Wanna Rock" and "The Warrior" end in fade-outs, the in-game versions also end in fade-outs. Harmonix's later Rock Band series and later games in the GH series that use masters let the songs run past the fadeouts or constructed original endings from the masters, so it's likely Harmonix was rushed for a summer release, didn't care since this was their last game before Activision hijacked their own series from them, or simply hadn't thought of doing that yet. "I Wanna Rock" later reappeared in Smash Hits and "The Warrior" in Rock Band 4 with full endings, allowing both songs to be played on a five-fret chart without fadeouts.
by Van Halen was found on the disc of III.
