Guitar Hero 7 Was Set to Go Back to Its Roots Before Development Was Cancelled in 2011

Activision effectively killed the Guitar Hero franchise after Warriors of Rock was released in 2010. However, a report by Kotaku has revealed, via an anonymous source, that a seventh entry in the main series was in development before the plug was well and truly pulled in 2011.

The Vicarious Visions studio game was planned to go back to its routes as a guitar-focused game and discard the drum and microphone peripherals. The development of Guitar Hero 7 was said to be a “disaster”, as the anonymous source wasn’t too impressed with the new guitar peripheral that was set to come out with the game – a good ol’ fashioned six string.

“This amazing thing was a six stringed guitar. Not a real guitar, or even full six-stringed. It had the classic Guitar Hero buttons on the neck with one extra new button, and six strings where the strum bar used to be. YAY! Now they have an extra button and five more strum bars!”

Apparently the brand new plastic instrument was very expensive to produce and the strings felt “unresponsive and loose”. Previous developer of several Guitar Hero games, Neversoft, were originally set up to be developing the title and then the game switched over to Vicarious Visions. One of the game’s biggest problems was said to be ambition, funnily enough. Venues were said to change in a dynamic fashion, with each song having a different effect on the arenas, themselves. It was also decided to start the game from scratch, disregarding all previous assets, which lead to some dodgy character models. The ever-changing performance areas also gave the studio a host of problems, as the source explained;

“They started designing locations. A tomb, the back of a moving truck. The locations were going to match the songs. Each song would have its own music video. It was a nice idea, and some of the concepts looked great. Then they realized they didn’t have any songs. Everything was being built around ‘Turn The Page – Metallica,’ and ‘A Thing Called Love – The Darkness.’ They’d change the venues and animations as the songs came in.

When the songs started coming in, a great sense of dread came about everyone with an active brain. The game had all of the worst hits from the 1990’s. They realized that, with our lack of budget and time, they couldn’t get quality music so they bought bargain basement music like ‘Closing time’ and ‘Sex and Candy.’ There were some songs in there that had been used at least three times in the GH franchises before.

They realized that with a setlist of over 80 songs, a music video unique to each song was out of scope as well. So pretty much every song was in the tomb or the back of the moving truck, with different lighting and camera cuts, and maybe a little graffiti. So they had a game that looked bad, had bad music, had very limited venues, and more was getting cut as time went on.”

Halfway through Guitar Hero 7’s development, Activision president Eric Hirshberg went to Vicarious Visions and shortly after that, it was decided that Activision weren’t keen on prolonging it any further and members of the developer were relieved of their duties.

There are probably a number of reasons why the plastic instrument have been gathering dust in many front rooms lately. The market became over saturated and people grew tired of the concept, is one and arguably, the one that has the most weight behind it. Will Guitar Hero 7 ever come out? Possibly. Activision has only placed the “hiatus” status on the series, so who knows?