Remember music games? While the sharp decline in the genre's popularity caused Activision to leave its Guitar Hero franchise on hiatus, we have some idea of what would have come next for the Guitar Hero franchise had it been allowed to continue.

Kotaku reports that Guitar Hero 7 was in development at Vicarious Visions. It would have stripped away the drums and karaoke aspects added in post-Rock Band games, and have returned to playing with a guitar. A new guitar peripheral would have accompanied this release: a six-string to further flex those finger muscles.

"The strings were unresponsive and loose, and the guitars cost a fortune to make," said the source in the report. "No one could figure out a way to make it so your average Joe could buy one."

Other features are said to have included more dynamic camera angles and more animated venues with reactions tailored to songs. Then the problems started. The team reportedly devoted a lot of time to an entirely new art style, and had the ambitious idea of creating custom locations for individual songs. But that meant they'd have to create new locations as they got the rights to songs, which became too unwieldy. The source also criticized "bargain basement" music since they couldn't get high-quality music that hadn't been in the series before.

The report states that GH7 was canceled in early 2011, after publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg visited the studio. That aligns with what we know about Activision closing its music games division around that time.