[ClemFandango]

I play guitar/bass, and I’ve played in bands and by myself, but this represents an entirely different and interesting skillset. Rhythm games are a skill in their own right, the visual element of what they’re simulating is somewhat inconsequential - the guitar controller could just be a stick or even a regular controller and the gameplay is roughly the same. Maybe the drum controller for rock band(?) is a close analogy, but it misses the point so to speak

[lloeki]

IIRC the Rock Band team was borne out from part of the GH team that had a different view of the game. It's all in the title: Rock Band vs Guitar Hero. One is collaborative, the other competitive.

The RB team had this vision that the game was a mind trick to maybe get people into music, with a low barrier to entry, ramping up all the way to RB3's pro guitar (the one with 6 strings and the full fret board, that ends up showing actual chords on screen), pro keyboard, pro drum set, and so on. Of course it's useless to pretend this makes you learn the real instruments, still you get to approach key things like pacing yourself, rhythm, strumming, song structure, pattern matching, rehearsing, talking to your band members... all while having a damn fun time.

And dare I say, this was a success, at least for one of my friends and his family. I showed him RB1, he enjoyed it so much that the next day he bought a X360+game+accessories, started playing it, and pulled along his wife and two daughters, where they rotated instruments in turn. As they ramped up through the whole RB saga up to RB3, they thought "it's so fun playing this game together, kinda like being a band!". Next thing you know they picked up real instruments and started an actual band.

I myself picked up the guitar much more easily, not because of any technique learned (because the game is incredibly different from the real thing still) but because it made me raise in confidence that this was approachable.

[LocalH]

The Rock Band team was pretty much the Guitar Hero 2 team. Harmonix made Rock Band because Activision chose to hand GH3 development to another team. Activision even had the option to use the Harmonix engine under license, and chose to allow Neversoft to fork the Tony Hawk engine and bolt a beatmatcher on top (which they did horribly, by the way, ExileLord has some videos on YouTube discussing some of the more egregious bugs).

It's entirely possible that, had Harmonix developed GH3, it may have been a full-band game. We do know that they considered drums as early as post-GH1 development, there exist a whole array of drum gems in the 4-song OPM GH2 demo, as well as some leftover code fragments (for example, there is an entire DrumTrackWatcher class with several functions like AddFills and AddLanes, and the OPM demo build itself actually also at some level checks for Konami/Topway drums for PS1 DrumMania, and has controller detection script that recognizes Topway drums).

GH2 also has leftover "band_version.dta" files that, across all builds of GH2 and GH80s that we have, always contains the same contents: "Build: 060302_A" (HMX dated these builds YYMMDD, best we can tell). band_version.dta is the file later used in the Rock Band series to contain the build date. There is also a separate file "gh2_version.dta" that is different between PS2 4-song, PS2 10-song, PS2 retail, 360 retail, 360 10-song, PS2 GH80s press review, and PS2 GH80s retail. I'm pretty sure there exists within Harmonix, a disc with that very build date written on the label (including the A, which I feel signifies that they'd burnt a second distinct build that day), and my feeling is that if we had that disc, it would have whatever drum support active that they had at the time. Perhaps 060302 doesn't have drums active, but 060302_A was a branch that did? No way to know unless someone steals those binders from HMX and leaks them to us (fat chance lol) or HMX themselves decide to open up their archives to our dataminers.

[chaps]

Interestingly, you could buy a midi adapter and hook up something like a roland electronic kit. Kind of a learning tool.. just that it wasn't good at teaching good habits.

[bananamerica]

I actually prefer Guitar Hero with a PlayStation controller.

[LocalH]

If the 360/PS3 controllers didn't absolutely blow for the purpose, I'd suggest checking out Rock Band 2 Deluxe and the "pad is guitar" modifier we added, which restores GH2-style gamepad play for guitar (and for shiggles we added another that does "pad is drum", although button mappings are kinda funky).

[bananamerica]

I was actually thinking of the PS2 controller, where I used to play Guitar Hero back in the day.

That's cool. Uh... Who's "we"?

[LocalH]

Yea, I knew that. I was mentioning that it's possible to play RB2 in the same fashion.

"We" are a small team of people who make mods to older Harmonix games. RB2 Deluxe is a free patch for modded 360/PS3 that adds a lot of quality-of-life features to the game. https://rb2-deluxe.neocities.org/

[bananamerica]

That's great ;)