|
Game On: How Video Games are Rebooting Hard Rock
'Guitar Hero' and 'Rock Band' transform the gaming world and
redefine music careers
By Jonathan Zwickel
Special to MSN Music
To the untrained eye, it appears to be another heavy metal guitar solo played
by another long-haired guitarist. Herman Li of DragonForce is posed atop a center-stage riser at White
River Amphitheater near Seattle, Rapunzel-esque locks set a-blow by an
industrial fan at his feet. He leans into a dizzying, whammy-barred barrage,
cueing thousands of black-T-shirted teenagers to bring up hands into a classic
pantomime. But to anyone paying attention, the audience response is something
new: These DragonForce fans aren't playing air guitar, they're playing air "Guitar Hero."
This summer, the "Guitar Hero" phenomenon burst from the world's sports bars
and dorm rooms onto the main stage at the 29-city Rockstar Mayhem festival. Each band that led the North
American tour -- openers DragonForce and Mastodon, plus co-headliners Slipknot and Disturbed -- has a song featured in "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock," released by L.A.-based
Neversoft in October of last year. It's sold more than 8 million copies and just
as many plastic guitar controllers since then.
Together with "Rock Band," the competing title unveiled last year that's
moved 3.5 million copies thus far, these games have changed the landscape for
both the gaming and music businesses, replacing the mayhem of multiplayer
shooter games with virtual power chords and pantomimed string-bending. Both
games have drawn heavily from rock standards to provide their songbooks, with
the games now emerging as a new platform for promoting new releases: This summer
saw a reunited Motley Crüe debuting its new single on "Rock Band,"
bypassing radio entirely, while Metallica, which has seen sales of earlier classics
rekindled by "Guitar Hero" placements, is making its new album, "Death Magnetic," available as a download through "Guitar
Hero III."
Exclusive: Watch Metallica interviews on the making of
"Death Magnetic"
Listen to "Death Magnetic" in the Listening Booth
Watch "The Day That Never Comes"
The cultural ripples sent out by "Guitar Hero" are coming back in waves, and
it's the modern-metal contingent that's making the most. The head-banging,
ax-shredding Rockstar Mayhem fest was sponsored by an energy drink, but "Guitar
Hero" might as well have been behind it.
Slipknot and Disturbed can be classified as old nu metal; both have been in
business for more than a decade and have sold millions of records. (Disturbed,
in fact, claimed their third consecutive Billboard No. 1 debut this
past June, the seventh band ever to do so.) DragonForce and Mastodon are more
recent arrivals, previous denizens of the metal underground who have seen
increased interest in their music thanks to "Guitar Hero III." For them and
other upstart metal bands, the overwhelmingly popular game couldn't have arrived
at a better time.
"'Guitar Hero' is a good steppingstone to get your name out there, especially
for a band like DragonForce, who got major exposure off of it," says Dan
Donegan, guitarist for Disturbed. "You might not normally hear of bands like
that."
DragonForce is poised to lead the pack of gamer/hesher crossbreeds. The U.K.
sextet plays a grandiose, overdriven sort of meta-metal, or maybe gamer-metal,
once described by guitarist Li as "Journey meets Slayer." Li acknowledges the influence of classic Nintendo
and Sega music on the band; their hyper-driven epics could provide the
soundtrack to some outer-space fantasy shooter. It's triumphant stuff, full of
double-time kick drums, major-chord synthesizers, and minutes-long dueling
guitar solos, and Li is quickly gaining notoriety as one of rock's newest
technical wizards. Not surprisingly, DragonForce's "Through the Fire and Flames"
is said to be the most challenging song on "Guitar Hero III."
"All the pieces kind of fell together at the same time -- the "Guitar Hero"
game, the music, the song, the audience that listens to us," Li says. "Taking
guitar as a whole -- not just playing rhythm as a background instrument --
guitar has been kind of missing in metal rock music for a while. (Story Continues On Next Page...) |
Hotmail
