Activision Blizzard boss says the ‘re-emergence of Guitar Hero’ is coming

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Activision Blizzard boss says the ‘re-emergence of Guitar Hero’ is coming.

There hasn’t been a new Guitar Hero in nearly a decade. The last one, Live, launched in 2015. However, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick spoke about a “resurgence” for the series in a staff meeting yesterday (which was hosted by James Corden of Cats fame).

In the early installments of the game, most of the songs included were covers recorded by a music production company called WaveGroup Sound. However, by the time Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock came out on a variety of platforms in 2007 (and featured a Gibson Les Paul controller), the majority of the songs featured in the game were the original recordings. You could also battle Slash and Tom Morello, and later play as them once you beat them.

The very first Guitar Hero was released on the Playstation 2 console in 2005, where players got to simulate playing their favorite rock and metal songs on a toy Gibson SG. The game offered different difficulty levels, and the more advanced levels required players to use more colored fret buttons on the guitar controller. Guitar Hero II came out the following year, and in 2007, Xbox 360 got its own version of the game with an accompany Gibson Explorer.

“A big part of what I’ve seen in Microsoft is research,” Kotick said (as reported by Windows Central). “They do development in areas that are extraordinary. And so being able to tap into their AI and machine learning capability, the data analytics, new ways of thinking about graphics – I just see unlimited potential for what we do. We’re uniquely situated as a company because we have the very best franchises in all of video games.

“We haven’t made a Guitar Hero in a long time, and I think with AI and some of the new technologies that we could employ, we could create a really compelling new Guitar Hero,” Kotick said in an interview with Variety. “But you know I can’t share with you the things we’re working on but we have a lot of new things in production and development that require better mastery of these new technologies.”