When Guitar Hero: On Tour was first announced a few months ago, a lot of people were skeptical of how their favorite peripheral-based game could possibly be brought to a handheld. Well, no one was more skeptical than we were when we first started talking about it in early 2007. And that’s a scary place to be when it’s your job to actually make it a reality. But in this case it was also a great place to be – because it meant there was no way we would let ourselves release anything other than a true Guitar Hero experience.
At the start of our initial brainstorming discussions, we had no clue how we were going to be able to pull this off, so we decided not to restrict our thinking in any way. We had very loose goals then, and we purposely left the answers to a lot of the questions we wanted to know blank. Does the game need to look like Guitar Hero? Does the game need to play like Guitar Hero? Does the game need a guitar peripheral to be successful? Is it more important for the player to feel like they are playing a guitar or to feel like they are a rock star? Can you have one without the other? Will we have mobs of angry fans outside our doors with torches and pitchforks?
We actually didn’t want to know the answer to that last one.
Brainstorming involved getting input from every person we could in every discipline, regardless of whether they were on the team or not, and regardless of whether they had played Guitar Hero or not. (Who doesn’t play Guitar Hero?). We had touch-screen only ideas, button-only ideas, touch-screen and button combinations, and we even came up with a couple radical concepts that didn’t even involve rhythm based gameplay!
Once we had a handful of ideas we thought actually might work, we got some engineers and designers together to start rapidly creating the various concepts on the DS. As soon as we were able to start playing the ideas we had, it was very easy to realize which were duds, but harder to determine which were the successes. We were trying things like requiring different directions of strumming, holding buttons on the DS and strumming on the screen, and many other ideas that are just too crazy to list. A lot of these looked nothing like the Guitar Hero you all know and love. We kept building off of what we learned from each prototype, iterating off of some, throwing others away, and still trying to come up with completely new ideas. Some we actually determined were a lot of fun, but none of them felt like they would have any lasting appeal, and none of them felt quite like Guitar Hero.
Despite the fact that Guitar Hero’s most outstanding feature is the guitar peripheral, for some reason a lot of us never really considered that an actual possibility for the DS version. Some of the peripheral ideas first thought of were kind of laughed at and not taken that seriously (some of them were, in fact, ridiculous). But once we actually got to start playing our software-only prototypes, we started to come back to the peripheral ideas because now we could see how they would make the obstacles we were encountering go away. The idea to hold the DS sideways was already a part of some of the prototypes we were trying, but it was our producer, Jesse, who first posed the possibility of a device in the GBA slot with buttons on it. That was around the time we were also thinking about some kind of mini-guitar contraption that would either connect to the DS via a long cord or have the DS mounted inside somehow (not unlike some of the more imaginative guesswork we’ve seen forum users mocking up and claiming were from the development studio – they weren’t). We eventually narrowed it down between two of our better software-only prototypes, this mini-guitar idea, and the crazy GBA slot device we called the “Edge Connector” (thankfully we’re not in marketing).
We had no plan to actually try the “Edge Connector” idea, but during lunch one day one of the engineers, Brian, went out and bought some wires, a soldering kit, and a used GBA cartridge. Later that day he walked over to my desk with the ugliest contraption I’d ever seen. It was a hacked GBA cart with three buttons glued to it and wires sticking out every which way. I was afraid to put the thing in my DS. Luckily I did, and before I even turned it on I just held it in my hand. It was actually comfortable. But I was skeptical of this idea before, and I was still skeptical of it then. I still liked one of the touch screen only concepts (it was one of MY ideas after all). Then I turned it on. One of the first prototypes we ever tried booted up, but was altered to map the different notes to the buttons on the GBA device instead of the DS buttons. You pressed one of the three buttons and used one of our more successful ideas of stroking the screen to strum like a guitar.
I thought “Wow,” and I said we needed to show this to Greg, the lead engineer. We brought it over to his desk and he tried it. “We have to show this to Karthik [the CEO],” he said. We walked (okay, we ran) across the office to Karthik’s office. He was on the phone when we got there. It didn’t matter how important the person was he was talking to, we had to show this to him. So we waited in his doorway, giggling and twitching excitedly like children eager to show their parents their first macaroni picture. He finally hung up the phone and said “Uh oh, what are you guys up to?”
The next day, we dropped all the other prototypes we had in development. We had our Guitar Hero for the DS.
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