Guitar Hero Live: Putting On a Rock Show

Guitar Hero Live is a strange chimera of a video game. Taking the mechanics of Guitar Hero, the perspective of a first-person shooter, and the graphical style of FMV games like Sewer Shark means it defies easy definition. During a recent visit to FreeStyle Games studio, we got an inside look at just how the bizarre beast came together. 

Getting the Brand Back Together

The once powerful Guitar Hero brand had lost its luster, so it came to FreeStyle to revitalize it. The studio took a full teardown approach, doing away with most of the game's identity and rethinking several of its staples. The old power-rock logo was gone. Some early prototypes even utilized system cameras like Kinect to base play on air guitar, doing away with the plastic peripheral altogether. The result was, as you might imagine and FreeStyle admits, pretty goofy.

"Early on we tried to remove any preconceived idea of what the game should be," creative director Jamie Jackson told Shacknews. "We even tried stuff where we had no controller whatsoever. We used various console cameras and you could air guitar--we had a whole game about air guitar, where you positioned your hands is where you hit notes. It was an interesting R&D process because it took us away from assuming it had to be the same guitar. If you get stuck in that too soon you're never going to innovate, really."

Ultimately the team decided that carrying a guitar was necessary to the experience, but the designers made a conscious effort to design it less like a classic rock axe. Like the logo, it had to be made more genre-neutral, to accomodate a wide variety of music that was less tied to a singular rock star fantasy. The early controller prototype even had pearl inlays along the frets and gold-colored knobs.

"We started to think, what is the future? How can we make a game that isn't necessarily a yearly release?" Jackson said. "How can we make a better value proposition for the player so they keep playing it? Early on we said, it has to be just one guitar." 

Through iteration it lost many of the showiest features due to materials cost, but one visual distinction remained extremely important: the white and black rows of buttons. The idea was to build a showpiece that players wouldn't mind having in their living rooms, in a clear effort to cut down on fan fatigue for peripherals. Nixing the colored buttons was meant to make it look less toy-like, while retaining its functionality.

Stage Against the Machine

As all this was being settled, the team was also hard at work on just how to represent the rock star fantasy. The cartoon caricatures were eliminated from Guitar Hero as well, and the idea of a first-person perspective was introduced. At this stage, it was code-named "Stage Fright," to represent the rush of seeing a crowd enjoy the music--or the scary jolt of watching them turn against you. The art department created identities for several bands that could represent a broad swath of music, with names like Broken Tide and The Jephson Hangout--the latter named after a park in the studio's hometown.

"For all the bands we went super deep with how we came up with them," he said. "It was all about building these backstories. I'd love to let everyone in on all of the details. Some of them we went too far and should never repeat."

Settling on live actors for this concept meant holding auditions and callbacks much in the style of a TV production, but FreeStyle was unable at first to tell its actors what exactly they were auditioning for. Instead, it told them they were trying out for an "interactive music video." It cast bandmates for each of the musical acts--largely members of actual bands themselves--along with dozens of extras to serve as the cheering or jeering crowd. 

The biggest challenge at this stage was the camera work. Basing the visual concept around full-motion video meant it needed seemless transitions between the positive and negative reactions. Even an impeccable professional cameraman couldn't guarantee that level of precision across multiple takes, so the team naturally turned to a machine.

It used a modified rig from car production called the Bolt, so named because it was so heavy, and moved so fast, that it had to be bolted to the ground. With camera movements based on motion capture and then augmented by animators, it could capture the exact same motions every single time. But, it moved dangerously quickly, so the team had to tape off its range of motion as a "kill zone" to alert actors to stay away as they moved about the stage.

Rock: On

All that work has come together in a package that does away with the cartoons, but is no less cartoonish. The actors in the scenes have a tendency to ham up their roles with exaggerated gestures and expressions, particularly when you're playing poorly. FreeStyle made sure to inject at least a couple of big memorable moments in each performance as well, like a fan running on stage and in a later shot seen being chased by security. It makes the whole thing look novel, even if the effect is bound to wear off in repeat performances.

"Making Live, we learned a lot about movies, and here's the thing about movies: if you've got the right creative vision you can kind of fake anything. Learning about green screen was incredible. The one thing we had to avoid--the only barrier we had--was the robot, the Bolt, was on a huge track. We had to make sure that wasn't in the shot as much as possible. That was the only rule."

The crowd itself is believably drawn too, at least to a point. Having seen the actual green screen shots, it's hard for me not to notice a line of delineation between the handful or rows made from live extras, and the much larger CG crowd that fills in most of the venues. Like the bandmates, the crowd is playfully exaggerated, going from excitedly dancing along to rolling their eyes and talking among themselves if your performance is sub-par. Sometimes the transition is a little jarring, given that they swing so wildly from love to hate, but it works well enough to track your progress.

For Our Next Number

Of course, all that doesn't quite address one of the biggest complaints fans had with Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and the plastic peripheral genre in general. Classy as the new guitar may look, it is still a plastic guitar, and after five or so years players found themselves inundated with too much random junk. Guitar Hero Live aims to see to that too.

"We wanted to future proof the game as much as we could," Jackson said. "I'm not saying we won't release another disc because I'm pretty sure we will release another disc. What I'm saying is, it's not going to be next year. Giving people content like the Live content, I really hope people enjoy that for what we did and want more of it so we can do another disc. But it doesn't mean we're going to do another disc with another guitar in the box. You know, you're going to just go and get the disc and use your guitar if you want.

"I like the option of choice, and I think that's important to give it to the Guitar Hero fans. If they want another guitar so they can have two players, then they can do that. But I don't want to have to force them to do that, year on year. I want to give them content that will keep them interested with that one guitar."

Guitar Hero Live is set to take the stage on October 20.

This Guitar Hero Live preview was based on a pre-release demo of the game at an event where transportation and accommodations were provided by Activision.