You can't keep a good franchise down, and you can't keep Guitar Hero down either. Activision may have killed off this year's Guitar Hero game, but as Activision's Dan Winters explains to GameIndustry.biz, there's always next year.
Last year Guitar Hero got the axe with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, the sixth major installment of the long-running rhythm game. Four out of five band game fans chose the superior Rock Band 3 instead, leading to Activision giving the next game in the series the more figurative axe earlier this year, along with True Crime: Hong Kong.
Cries of 'Guitar Hero is dead!' rose up across the land, but Guitar Hero isn't really dead. It's just taking a little break. Activision's Dan Winters clears things up in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
"Actually, just to clarify, we're just putting Guitar Hero on hiatus, we're not ending it," Winters explained. "We're releasing products out of the vault - we'll continue to sustain the channel, the brand won't go away. We're just not making a new one for next year, that's all."
Unfortunately the jobs lost due to the shuttering of the Guitar Hero business remain dead, but I suppose that happens when you release an inferior product.
I picked up a fresh copy of Warriors of Rock this weekend in order to take advantage of the music I saved from Guitar Hero: On Tour and Band Hero, and my god it's boring. Hopefully another year of rest will do the franchise good.
Activision: "Guitar Hero on hiatus, we're not ending it" [GamesIndustry.biz]