
How The Huang Brothers Bootstrapped Guitar Hero To A Billion Dollar Business - aaronbrethorst
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/how-the-huang-brothers-bootstrapped-guitar-hero-to-a-billion-dollar-business/
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dfan
I was one of the primary developers on Guitar Hero. It is hard to explain just
how weird it was that that game became a massive hit. We had already made a
couple of music games that only sold modestly, and expecting people to buy
this toy plastic guitar on top of that was borderline ludicrous. I lobbied
unsuccessfully to cut multiplayer mode, because what were the chances two
people with these guitars were ever going to end up in the same house? We
heard stories that retailers loved it when we showed it off to them, but I
already worked on multiple games with big buzz and lukewarm sales, so that
didn't mean much to me. I was already pleasantly surprised when it became a
modest success, much less the monster hit it eventually became.

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Isamu
Hard to know in advance what elements might gel to make a great game. Care to
add more of your thoughts about this?

Guitar Hero taps into everyone's dream of becoming an overnight rock star, so
it has sort of an archetypical experience going for it.

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dfan
Well, we knew it was a lot of fun; it was just a question of convincing
everyone else. Plus the high price (because of the peripheral) made for an
even higher barrier to entry.

It's easy in retrospect to say "Everyone wants to be a rock star, so sure it
was going to be a hit!" but that need wasn't obvious. (And in even more
retrospect, the need only lasted a few years, so it was kind of fragile.)

I guess one lesson is that just making the best product you can increases the
chance of it catching on; we certainly were all passionate about it and tried
to perfect every facet of it. Once we got to the point where the second-to-
second experience was really satisfying, we knew we were making a great game,
but honestly we were still rolling the dice.

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CrazedGeek
For an alternate look at this from the perspective of Harmonix, the developer
of the first couple Guitar Hero games (and currently the developer of Rock
Band and Dance Central):

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131210/book_excerpt_in...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131210/book_excerpt_inside_game_design_.php)

[http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/smallbusiness/harmonix_rock_...](http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/03/smallbusiness/harmonix_rock_band_startup_story/index.htm)

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WalterBright
Think about this when people ask the question: "What will people do when
robots can make all our needs without needing human labor?" All that does is
enable people to work on things like games, art, science, archeology, movies,
etc.

None of those endeavors would be possible without labor saving machines
enabling production surpluses freeing up labor for such non-essentials.

