A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I joined shortly before GH3 shipped, and just before the first band-specific iteration, GH: Aerosmith, began development. I was hired partly for my passion for the series; I had written a basic 2D clone of the game, which could parse the original note track data from GH1 and GH2.

To digress once again, the reason why ATVI had the GH license, but not the original GH team, more or less falls squarely on ATVI's corporate acquisition culture. ATVI were initially in talks to buy Harmonix (HMX), the original GH developers, outright.

HMX were proud, passionate Bostonians, however, and bristled at ATVI's insistence that the company be relocated to the west coast. "We won't do that," they said, "but we will sell you the GH license." Thus began the long-standing rivalry between GH and what was to be Rock Band.

We turned out game after game. We watched internally at ATVI's hubris, with executives hiring market "experts" to tell them what they wanted to hear, which seemed to be that they could sell a plastic guitar to every man, woman and child on the planet.

Possibly neighboring planets, even, if *only* they could make a band-specific or genre-specific iteration that appealed to them. The idea that some people simply don't like the music/rhythm genre seemed to be entirely absent from the company's line of thinking.

During the development of GH: Warriors of Rock (ostensibly GH6), we were ecstatic when we were told by the studio heads that ATVI had opted not to task RedOctane with making another iteration of the controller, as market research said that everyone who wanted one already had one.

Nobody was shocked when later in development we were told there would, in fact, be another iteration of the controller. Even better, the Wiimote would be mounted facing opposite than before. At the eleventh hour, we had to tweak our motion detection code for invoking Star Power.

More exciting news, though, was disclosed to us midway through Warriors of Rock - that Neversoft felt they were running out of ideas on directions to take the GH franchise. We at VV were going to be the ones to take over the primary SKUs after Warriors of Rock shipped.