A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

When Guitar Hero hit it big in late 2005, I saw it for what it was - a creative re-envisioning of the formula that had made GuitarFreaks popular some years prior in Japanese arcades. Even then, I wondered when the eventual drum attachment would hit shelves.

Nevertheless, I picked the game up with an alacrity that I hadn't really approached any other game. I was super-stoked for the release of the sequel a year later, but in the intervening year, I got bored. And when coders get bored, interesting things happen.

I ripped an image of the PS2 game disc, and there was a fairly trivial directory structure within some of the larger archive files, so I first wrote a tool to pull them apart. It was there that I found some .mid files. I threw them at a MIDI player, and got a cacophony of notes.

It only took a tiny bit of research - mainly, throwing these .MID files into a paino-roll-style MIDI sequence editor - to figure out that this was the note data, not the audio. I cobbled together some .VAG decoders, and found the audio. Bingo.

At this point, my attention hard turned simply to trying to get my own music into the game. I succeeded in mid 2006. I encoded a stream of the M&H Band's version of "Popcorn", with about 20 seconds of note data that I'd manually tracked.

I popped into the office where I worked, at the time - EA Tiburon - with a burned disc of the game in-hand, and threw it into one of the PS2 test kits. It booted. Not only did it boot, but I was able to play the song. Aces.

Shortly after this point, production ramped up to critical mass for the shipping of Superman Returns (for anyone who bought the game, I apologize), and so I put my work by the wayside. But during my few spare hours, I wrote my own Guitar Hero clone. No menus, just the gameplay.

It used SDL (v1), and worked reasonably well. Long story short (too late), I ended up departing Tiburon in late 2007, and at this point I had a CV to write. So I threw my experience there onto it, as well as my MAME development experience, and this Guitar Hero clone.

I ended up being interviewed by two companies, one of which I honestly have forgotten the name of, and the other of which was Vicarious Visions. Little did I know that my passion for Guitar Hero must have been why they ended up taking a second glance at my CV.

You see, as it turned out, Activision were in the process of developing what was to become Guitar Hero 3. The following information is all hearsay, but my understanding is that they had offered to buy Harmonix outright, and they quite understandably said "Yeah, no."

Why did they say no? Quite simply, the company was based out of Boston, comprised of a motley crew of ex-Looking Glass alumni and other folks, and they were happy where they were. Activision insisted that they relocated to the west coast. Nothing doing, said the HMX folks.

So Activision offered a counter offer: "Okay, will you sell us the Guitar Hero license?" "Sure," came the reply, most assuredly informed by the fact that they could simply rebrand the engine and add additional instruments, as Konami had done with Drummania.

Thus began the development of Guitar Hero III. I joined Vicarious Visions shortly before it was released, and found that I rather liked what they were about to release. So, too, did many gamers - the title absolutely flew off the shelves, and the bonus bought a coworker a car.

I should clarify at this point that Vicarious Visions were the developers of the Wii version of Guitar Hero. The entire ATVI-based series was based on the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater engine. The Neversoft-developed primary SKUs were on Skate 9, and Wii/PS2 were on Skate 7.

Thus began a long-running saga of VV developing the next Wii version of Guitar Hero alongside Neversoft and Budcat Creations (the PS2 devs), essentially reworking the art assets but backporting as much of the engine code as possible, making use of the Wii hardware as appropriate.

In particular, the Wii version of Guitar Hero: World Tour included a band logo editor that the PS2 did not have (it had simple pre-made designs), and the later versions even included back-ports of certain next-gen UI shaders that could still comfortably run on a Wii.

During this time, there was a hand-over of tech leadership, from the venerable Dave Calvin (who had shipped such titles as Doom 3 on the Xbox) over to Eric Anderson (I wish I could tag him on Twitter, but I can't find any account he has). Eric took things to the next level.

Eric's reign during the later Guitar Hero games - namely Band Hero, Guitar Hero 5, and Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock - marked a sea change in how the coders were treated. Rather than being micro-managed, we were trusted to do the right thing, and largely left alone.

It should be no surprise, therefore, that those titles were some of the only Wii versions to come in on time and under-budget. This bucking of the managerial trend at VV did not make Eric very many friends among upper management.

Towards the beginning of Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, it was announced through an internal meeting that our market analysts had determined that as many people who could buy a cheap plastic guitar, had, so we wouldn't be releasing a new guitar controller with WoR.

Imagine our collective (lack of) surprise, then, when a couple of months before shipping, we were told that RedOctane would in fact be making another guitar controller. Even better, this one mounted the Wii Remote in the opposite direction, so would need special-case code. Great!

Now, towards the end of Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, we had been told internally that the folks at Neversoft were starting to run out of ideas on directions to take the series. As such, after WoR, Vicarious Visions was to be taking over primary development on the series.

Thus began the development of a new title on the down-low, called "Guitar Hero: Phoenix". It was to be a somewhat radical departure from the existing menu-driven UX. You would have your own apartment, and could upgrade/decorate it as you hit it big.

The fixed venues would be replaced with a feel more akin to being on the set of a music video shoot, something which Activision apparently appreciated, as they largely retooled this concept for Guitar Hero: Live some years later.

Lastly - most importantly - there was to be one additional button added to the controllers - a purple button - as well as the addition of a six-string strum attachment on the body of the guitar. A sort of middle ground between Rock Band 3's Pro Controller and the traditional one.

In late 2010, shortly after the release of Warriors of Rock, there was a minor layoff at VV involving about 8 people, one of whom was my good friend, mentor, and long-time associate Mike C. He was a senior designer, and had worked at such powerhouses as Looking Glass in the past.

Fast-forward another couple of months, and in late January, there was an executive review of our progress on Phoenix. It went well. It went so well, in fact, that we were told we would be getting an extra year to polish the game up to a mirror sheen.

Unfortunately, this meant that as our only next release was to be Spyro Skylanders 3DS in September, we would be knuckling down on expenses by way of laying off a bunch of the studio's testers. Thus my other friend and roommate, Bonafede, was laid off as well.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, one cold February morning, an e-mail went out to everyone at the studio from HR: "The Q4 2010 earnings call is today at 4PM (our time). We will have an all-hands meeting in the kitchen at 3PM to discuss what this means for the company."

Anyone who could see the writing on the wall could immediately clock what this meant. Some people were numb. Some were worried. But there were still some folks who wanted to believe that the company would do the right thing.