About a decade ago, music games were all the rage. There was a time when you could walk into any party and someone would inevitably be flailing around in front of a TV as they played Just Dance on a Nintendo Wii. You could go into any arcade and see someone cutting a rug on Dance Dance Revolution with dance moves of varying quality. Those music games in particular focused on dancing, and most of the time you’d be dancing to a current pop hit. The downside is they excluded the edgy, introverted teenagers of the time who railed against pop music. However, there was one music game that bridged the gap between scene kids, party animals, gamers and even some parents: Guitar Hero.
For anyone who somehow completely missed this early 2000’s phenomenon, Guitar Hero was a series of music games that was pretty simple. To play the game, you threw a plastic guitar controller over your shoulder. This controller was about the size of a real guitar (a bit smaller, you know, for kids), but in place of strings, it had five buttons on the fret board, a strumming switch on the body and a whammy bar for good measure. All you had to do was pick your favorite rock song from the setlist of songs, hit the buttons that corresponded with the colors onscreen and play the song.
It was the perfect party game, simple enough for anyone to pick up and play, but challenging enough so that mastery was a real accomplishment. The real fun of the game, though, was the music. Guitar Hero came onto the gaming scene at the perfect time. Aging bands like Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and AC/DC now had a classic appeal across generations, and music genres like nu-metal, alt-rock and metalcore had created a new subculture of hard-rocking emo kids. Guitar Hero provided wanna-be rockers of all skill levels and age groups the opportunity to feel like they were playing the best of classic and contemporary rock, all without actually having to learn to play the guitar.
The most important part of any Guitar Hero game was the setlist, and in that regard, the game that has always been hailed as the undisputed champion is 2007’s Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. It had everything you could want: classics like “Paint It Black” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” and contemporary hits like “Stricken” by Disturbed and “Knights of Cydonia” by Muse.
Guitar Hero III was my first experience with the series. I played it when I was about 11 years old, and it turned me into a rocker for life. It was the first place I heard music from classic bands like Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Metallica. All it was missing was a classic death metal hit, and it would have been the road map for my entire journey through the genres of metal and rock, from my emo alt-rock days to my appreciation of the classics and my obsession with underground extreme metal.
As a sheltered Christian kid, the game introduced me to a wide variety of rock that I wouldn’t fully appreciate until much later. Songs like Heart’s “Barracuda” and Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover” were easily enjoyable, but hard hitters like Slayer’s immortal classic “Raining Blood” were not only hard for me to enjoy, but were genuinely scary to me. It’s a game that greatly influenced my music tastes, and half of the songs on it are still some of my favorite songs ever.
I think the reason Guitar Hero’s songs have so much meaning to me even now is because of the context in which I discovered them. As much as I love the accessibility and ease of digital music, it doesn’t create a great memory to discover music as you lay on your couch browsing Spotify. Conversely, it’s hard to disassociate memories of Guitar Hero from songs like “Slow Ride,” which was over-played, especially by newbies, or Slipknot’s “Before I Forget,” which never failed to rouse the room into chanting its anthemic chorus. Guitar Hero was a unique, memorable context for me as I discovered music in my late childhood.
However, more powerful than the social memories was the experience of actually playing the game. Playing the songs is ultimately what cemented the warm feelings I have for them. After doing your best and shredding the crap out of your cheap, plastic guitar, the screen would explode in flames as it exclaimed, “YOU ROCK!” And after playing the notes to a song like “Bulls On Parade,” yeah, you really did feel like you rock.
There was nothing like the feeling of doing great on a Guitar Hero song and hearing the cheers of everyone in the room. I was never super good at it. I barley even mastered the medium difficulty, but luckily for me, most of my friends weren’t great at it either, so we were all on the same playing field. However, if you really wanted the room to go wild, you had to hit every note of a song of expert difficulty. It was a feat not many could do, and the ultimate show of prowess was “Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragon Force. With a whopping seven minute run time, several guitar solos and blistering speeds, completing this song even on an easier difficulty was a feat for many players, but if you could beat it on expert difficulty, you were a legend among men.
The clout, the social experience and the memory of discovery are all what make the setlist of Guitar Hero III special to me. I feel bad for future generations that won’t grow up with the game. They’ll never experience the high of impressing everyone in the room with your button-pressing skills, or even having the experience of trying to play along to your favorite rock song on a fake guitar. Thanks to Guitar Hero’s existence, I and tons of other kids got to discover and experience songs in an unforgettable context, and there will never be anything like it again.
