Guitar Hero is dead.
Is this breaking news? No it’s not; in fact many, if not most of you probably heard this weeks ago, but why is it dead?
It seems to me that the answer is fairly simple: sequel fatigue. If you’ll look at all the Guitar Hero music games that have come out over the last few years you’ll be amazed at the sheer volume that Activision shoved down our throats, with the simple fact being that no single one of their new creations was really anything special or dramatically different than the previously released games. The developers saw that the games were popular and decided to bleed the franchise to death over the course of a few years, and now one of gaming’s biggest franchises is dead.
Now I don’t want to knock the sequel; I love sequels, if they’re done right. My favorite movies include Spiderman 2 and The Dark Knight, both of which are sequels that utilize the potential of the sequel to improve themselves over their original in pretty much every considerable way. And, in as many ways as videogames are different from movies, they are also similar. The sequel for a videogame has the basic philosophy driving it as a sequel for a film: the creators want to make more money, and it’s easier to get people to invest in a presold idea than in an original concept. It’s just the way the world works; it’s not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it necessarily a good thing . So I wanted to basically write this article to really say one thing: When creating a sequel to a successful game, or movie, or anything, take your damn time.
