Interviews// Guitar Hero 5

SPOnG: You’ve added a few things like the ‘drop-in at any time’ party mode and the new challenges. Did player feedback and fan requests play a part in implementing any of these new features?

Brian Bright: We take our ideas and things from everywhere – we scour the forums, I read a lot of different forums that talk about music games, not just the official Guitar Hero ones. We take all the discussion from people who have played the games on board and that helps us to understand what we need to do to make it better. A lot of it comes from reviewers and journalists who talk to us, a lot of it from local fans… we also do a lot of research on the game’s history and the music industry, so those who ask us very specific questions and things they would like to see we can take on board and improve.

Of course, we play the game ourselves too, so just taking it home and giving it a good go with friends and family helps us understand people’s plus and minus points too. I played a lot of Guitar Hero: World Tour with my mum, dad and son and that was somewhat painful. (Laughs). Many times we were setting up and going “Push Red, push Red, ah no shit you went back, push Yellow!” It’s something that was just not fun, especially when you work on the game. You have to watch and tell your friends what to do in the menus! A lot of the party play in Guitar Hero 5 came out of that.

Other people have had similar experiences too, which I read in the forums or I’m told about – where someone got the game for Christmas, and they say they loved this and that, but this thing bugged them and that wasn’t very cool. So we take inspiration from all over.


SPOnG: There are a few new challenge modes in Guitar Hero 5, can you just expand on some of those and explain what you do in them?

Brian Bright: All of the songs are unlocked in Quick Play, Party Play, Online and the Challenge modes, and the Career mode is still structured as it has been in the past, where you unlock songs by playing through the different setlists. You get a certain amount of stars upon completing each song, and you need those to unlock more venues.

There’s also a Bonus Challenges for each song, like a note streak challenge. There are different parameters based on difficulty, so you can either get a Gold, Platinum or Diamond challenge and from that you’d either have to do 100, 300 or 500 note streaks respectively. Completing those tiers gets you an extra star on your performance.

We have unlockables specific for every challenge too, so if you do the 300-note streak you might get a new outfit for Lars. There’s loads of instruments, secret characters, costumes, venues and cheats that we’ve put in there so you can unlock them in the Career mode.

The beauty of the challenges is that we’ve incorporated the jump-in, jump-out play into that as well – there may be a challenge that you want to try on a downloaded song and it’ll say ‘Get one million points’, but say you can’t do that on your own. You can get a buddy to get on board and work together, or you can instantly ask anyone to come in online and help you win the challenge. Even if it’s something like a singing challenge and you hate using the mic, if your friend online jumps in and sings while you work the guitar you can both earn the reward.