Scenes from GDC

Entry #1, 10:59 a.m.: The Guitar Hero That Could Have Been

The 800lb gorilla, creatively if not commercially, at this year's GDC is Guitar Hero. People are talking about it in the halls of San Jose's Convention Center and from behind its podiums. It's the game that has publishers smacking their foreheads for not discovering and developers beaming with pride at what the industry is still capable of discovering. You're not likely to sit through a lecture or roundtable without hearing its name mentioned.

So the crowd is particularly ebullient when two of the guys from Harmonix introduce a seminar on experimental game design by talking about a feature that was cut from Guitar Hero shortly before it shipped. Until late in the development process, there was a solo mode. The fret buttons and the strum bar would play guitar sounds as you worked them. Actual notes and chords and such. But you could also just thrash the strum bar quickly and the game would play sampled riffs appropriate to the particular song. If you held the guitar vertically, the tilt sensor would cause it to play a distorted feedback effect. When the Harmonix guys demonstrate, the crowd goes wild. Someone even holds up a lighter.

However, the feature was cut for various reasons. It would have been hard to fit all the sampled riffs onto a PS2 disk. There was no clean way to transition in and out of solo mode. It was pretty much impossible to score it. But the main reason it wasn't included was because it just didn't sound very good. One of the developers, a musician to boot, manages to improvise to the backdrop of Sharp Dressed Man, but it's not the sort of thing you'd want to actually, you know, listen to. You can imagine the awful wail and screech of from someone who otherwise makes a great show on Easy mode.

Still, the crowd is thrilled to see what could have been, even if it is better off undone. And everyone loves a winner, particular a winner who lets us all play the rock gods we know we could have been.