CES 2009 - Industry insider Activision
via Team Sushi
I attended the industry insider presentation by President and CEO of Activision, Mike Griffith. He talked about a number of things, but mostly he focused his talk on the phenomenon call Guitar Hero. I know Guitar Hero well, having made a PSP homebrew game based on freetar, called Gunnar Hero (which I should add Frets on Fire support to). At any rate, I listened carefully to what he had to say, and to his insights into what is driving gaming.
On that note, the presentation started off with a video of a guy on a bicycle, playing Guitar Hero in the real world, including bonuses and road markings.
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Once Mike Griffith reached the stage, he made some bold claims about what Guitar Hero is doing to the gaming industry and how it is affecting things. In fact he spent a lot of his talk discussing the effects of Guitar Hero and of course boasting about how popular Guitar Hero really is. He pointed out things like how Guitar Hero 3: Legends of Rock is the first ever game to sell over $1 billion worth of copies, and how over 50% of Guitar Hero players are female (breaking the typical profile of the classic gamer).
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He talked about how the Guitar Hero guitar controller and the Wii remote are changing the way people play games compared to the paddle, joystick or gamepad of previous game systems.
He couldn’t say enough about Guitar Hero. Not only does the Guitar Hero game make people play games more, but it is attributed to increase the sales of actual guitars and other musical instruments. Recently a survey showed that 3 out of 4 players say that they are more likely to learn to play a real instrument and two out of three musicians are more likely to practice as a result of playing Guitar Hero. In fact, last year there was a 27% increase in the sales of real guitars last year. Kind of intriguing since analysts speculated a year or two ago that it would decrease interest in real instruments.
Meyitzo asked me to post some videos. Here is a performance by some staff from Neversoft who are working on a new Guitar Hero: Metallica with song. It works with four players (guitar, bass, drums and singer):
