I get my chops busted by people who don't believe that our company inspired guitar hero etc... I think it is time to set the record straight. While we were at Warthog, there was a small team in Austin that had lost their contract with Ubisoft, they were making a real cool combo game where you controlled two characters at once and could switch back and forth...it was called Wrath and Skeller, but they also had developed a bit of tech where they had turned the controller into a guitar by playing chords. After they lost their contract they were going under, so I convinced our board of directors to buy them and add a 2nd team to our studio. We did this and set to work on the music game Johnny Whatever. During this time we were in negotiations with both MTV and Coca Cola to put them into the game as a product placement type of deal, and with MTV as a possible marketing partner. Here is the original demo posted by one of the key creatives on YouTube. <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g1zQ77L7UA8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/g1zQ77L7UA8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> It was on an original XBox and we began pitching it around to various publishers, to a huge response. Gizmondo saw this, and based a lot on the creativity of our demo, they bought the company and killed any of our deals with publisher to finish the game. The actual demo, I still have and it is playable, about an hour of game play, with WAY more than what you see on the video....even a boss monster fight....after completing about 5 missions to get into the Krash Klub. Anyway, Gizmondo was good for us in a sense in that those of us who owned stock in Warthog made some money, but creatively it was not great because we were going to have to shoe horn our ideas and games onto a tiny hand held device. Here is the marketing demo for Johnny Whatever - it is much shorter. <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/J3NsGqrwr44&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/J3NsGqrwr44&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> MTV had the demo, and part of our demo was a bar where you earned "Street Cred" by playing up on stage to recognizable tunes. Now, I am not saying that Harmonix could not have come up with the same idea we did for Guitar Hero, but we did find it incredibly telling that their game came out after ours, and with a lot of the same mechanics, and later had heard from people that left MTV that they showed it to Harmonix. Is there any proof? No, not really, but I do feel that we came REALLY close to having a massive game changing hit, probably the best game I have ever worked on in more than 20 years in the industry. A very talented team (we actually had to combine teams to get the missions into it), but still a great great concept, and obviously we were onto something cool. I would still like to make this game, as it was basically GTA the musical in our world where music was magic......but alas, I think this will go down in the anals as.......a........ "We were this close" moment. DD PS. I still have the story, concepts, and design doc, and one day hope to resurrect it for the next generation.........never give up the dream.
collective conscience I believe most of us could probably relate events of ideas we had or even pitched prior to subsequent alternate launch of a similar idea hell, i even pitched one to you dd that i later saw in a store and i believe is still selling well for the target market
when i was 13 me and my buddy would play duke nukem via dialup modem. At that time thought there should be an online community for people to hookup and play games. Damn you valve and Steam!!
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My opinion, for what it's worth. Seems like a cool game, and something that would still be worth playing today. That being said...I don't see the similarities so much to guitar hero. You're right, it's much more of a sandbox gta-ish game. And rhythm based gameplay has been around forever. My first one was Parapa (sp?) on PSX. Secondly, it's played on a controller. I don't know if you had designs for a guitar controller but it's part of the huge appeal. The main problem that keeps it from being a game changer like guitar hero is that it actually seems to be a game and it has depth. What makes guitar hero so popular is that anyone can get right in and start playing it for a song or twenty. Girls and older folks and young kids can just go at it easily enough. The mechanics are pretty straightforward as well so there was barely a learning curve as to how to play. Anyway, I think it would be a good and fun game but not have any of the kind of impact GH has had.
Yeah... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_freaks Note the release date on that: 1998. That would put it very obviously before this.
