Death of the Air Guitar: How is the Collaboration Between the Music and Games Industries Affecting the Two Mediums?

Quick question for all the music buffs out there: in all of Aerosmith’s thirty-eight year career, what was its most successful week in sales? Obviously, it was a week with a new release, but which release? Was it 1975’s release of Toys in the Attic, which later went 8x platinum? Or maybe it was 1974’s Get Your Wings, which went on to go 3x platinum? Well, no. Die-hard Aerosmith fans might be more than a little shocked to hear that the band’s most successful debut was not one of its singles, not one of its multi-platinum albums, not even one of its greatest hits collections, but a video game. Guitar Hero: Aerosmith hit shelves last July and grossed over $25 million in its first week. Compare this to 2004’s Honkin’ on a Bobo—which only managed to gross $2 million in its first week—and take a second to think about how strange this is. The biggest opening week in the 38-year-long career of one of rock and roll’s biggest bands was a video game. What happened to the music industry? What happened to the days when the cool rockers and the geeky gamers only crossed paths when the former decided to alleviate the latter of their extra lunch money?
Guitar Hero
The answer, it seems, is that the music and video game industries have been building bridges to each others’ markets. And why shouldn’t they? Both are multi-billion dollar industries with millions of customers, so it makes perfect sense that they would want to grow off each other. And, as it turns out, the franchise being used for this bridge-building, Guitar Hero, is the same franchise that has been proving that these bridges are profitable by raking in unholy amounts of cash. Even disregarding the amounts of money being made, it’s still an ingenious idea. After all, it just makes sense to introduce someone to a new medium by combining it with one they’re used to. What better way could there be for introducing gamers to rock than through a game?

Here I’m speaking from personal experience. Before Guitar Hero showed me the light, my iPod was filled entirely with jazz and Jimmy Buffett CDs I found lying around the house, a few CDs suggested by friends, and random songs I’d heard on the radio. So, to put it mildly, I wasn’t exactly a rock fan. In fact, when the original Guitar Hero came out, I completely ignored it for the simple reason that I didn’t recognize any of the songs on the track list. Anyone who’s even mildly familiar with the soundtrack for Guitar Hero will immediately realize how out of touch I was with the music world. The fact that I’d never heard of “Iron Man” or “Smoke on the Water” speaks volumes about my previous tastes in music. Thankfully, a few friends managed to talk me into giving Guitar Hero II a try, and my tastes in music underwent a dramatic overhaul. Now, a quick glance through my iTunes library will turn up everything from Jimi Hendrix to Metallica to Kansas. I won’t say that Guitar Hero has the final say in what I listen to (I’ll eat my hard drive before I use it to store Kiss music), but it is what introduced me to the world of rock music.

The exchange of consumers isn’t a one-sided one, though; the Guitar Hero series is also a great way of introducing video games to demographics who would never even have considered them otherwise. A quick trip to the video game section at Best Buy is all it takes to see this in action. Watch the Guitar Hero and Rock Band demo systems for a few minutes one day, and you might be surprised who you see trying them out. Of course you’ll see plenty of gaming’s largest demographic (i.e. teenage boys) tearing into expert mode, but it’s just as likely a couple forty-something businessmen might come strolling by, hear a song they remember rocking out to when they were younger, and decide to give it a shot. Every now and then, a disgruntled mom might even show up to drag her kids away from the screen only to come to a dead stop when she realizes they were playing through “Free Bird.” I have to say, there are few things more amusing in the game world than watching little kids looking up at their mother and whining, “Mom, it’s my turn now.”

My father in particular is notorious for this kind of thing; when I turned Guitar Hero III on for the first time, he would walk into the room every five minutes or so and stare disbelievingly at the screen as I played through songs he remembered listening to in college. I watched him try to control himself as I played through “Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paint It, Black,” and “Rock and Roll All Night,” and finally got to see him break down when the opening chords to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” drifted across the hall into his office. At that point, he walked into the room and told me I had two options: either I could give him my controller and show him how to change the difficulty to easy, or I could give him his new controller and watch as he learned how to use his new game system. Thirty minutes later, I gave up on playing the game anymore that night, as my father was enjoying revisiting his college record library so much I didn’t have the heart to stop him.

Amazingly, it’s not just rock consumers that are getting into the games; musicians apparently love the idea, and Guitar Hero’s latest renditions are a living testament to that. The Aerosmith release was, apparently, just the tip of the iceberg, as the online gaming community has been buzzing with speculation about what bands will also be receiving the Aerosmith treatment. According to the game blog Kotaku.com, Guitar Hero: Metallica is slated to come out later this spring. What comes after, though, is open to speculation, and, the internet being what it is, rumors about who will be next have been running rampant. Hendrix is apparently a popular bet, but no one has found any hard evidence to back this up. One thing is certain, though: we have not seen the last of artist-specific rock games. The outrageous success of the Aerosmith release virtually ensures that.

Slash’s motion capture work on the game shows itself by capturing the iconic stance he adopts when playing.Even if one was to ignore these artist-specific games, the influx of artists into the series and their (in some cases) extreme interest in it is hard to ignore. Take Guitar Hero III, for instance. It’s not subtitled Legends of Rock without a reason. Tom Morello, the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, and Slash, the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses, both did extensive work for the series. Both lent their identities to bosses in the game and even went as far as writing brand-new songs for their respective boss battles. Slash took this one step further by doing motion-capture work for the game, acting in commercials for the game, and even appearing at an advertising stunt where he played “Welcome to the Jungle” onstage with Bill Gates. Let me say that again: Slash, one of rock and roll’s coolest, grungiest guitarists showed up at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show, and played “Welcome to the Jungle” with the person that epitomizes, more than anyone else, all that is geeky.

Perhaps the crowning jewel in this trend is the recent debacle over Metallica’s new album, Death Magnetic. Having seen the writing on the wall, the band released the entire album for download to Guitar Hero III on the same day they released the actual CD. Not only that, but Guitar Hero players were also given the chance to buy two extended versions of the song “Suicide and Redemption” unavailable to those who just bought the CD6. Here’s the kicker, though: apparently the company that did the sound mastering on the CD distorted the sound so badly that some Metallica fans are turning to Guitar Hero for a higher quality sound. Serious audiophiles are actually turning to games, not music, for their musical fix.
Hardcore gamers are no longer alone in the gaming section at Best Buy, territory they used to rule.So, where does that leave us? Serious gamers are becoming serious rockers, serious rockers are returning the favor, and musicians seem perfectly willing to explore every possibility this new medium has to offer, but what does this all mean for the two industries? Does it mean we’ll start to see better music in games? Probably. Does it mean we’ll start to see more serious gaming-based music? Wouldn’t surprise me. Does it mean we’ll start to see games featuring the off-stage lives of musicians? Good Lord, I hope not; the idea of The Britney Spears Chronicles coming to an Xbox near me is one I’d rather not contemplate. What is far more likely is that as gamers start getting involved in other aspects of pop culture and as more people start to find their way into games, the whole concept of “the gamer” will start to mean less. As more people become gamers, and as gamers become more like everyone else, the phrase, “I play video games,” will start to carry about as much weight as the phrase, “I listen to music.” In other words, it simply won’t mean anything to be a gamer, since games will just become another part of pop culture. The day is coming when someone wearing a Rockstar logo on his shirt won’t draw any more strange looks than someone with a rock band’s logo on his shirt.