Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [231]
Devised by a computer hardware company called RedOctane–partly responsible for an older arcade game named Guitar Freaks, a big hit in Japan, and now looking to produce a home-gaming version – the original Guitar Player game was made for around $1m. The inaugural edition had a metal-style logo on the box and a hand-held controller shaped like a Gibson SG – signature guitar of choice for AC/DC’s Angus Young and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi – and had been an immediate hit, winning awards and glowingly reviewed as ‘probably the greatest rhythm game ever invented’. Realising that the ‘magic source’ – gaming-industry-speak for the extra ingredient that made the product unique and must-have-now-able – was the guitar-shaped peripheral, the forty-seven playable songs the original featured was expanded to sixty-four for Guitar Hero II, the fifth-biggest-selling game when it was released in 2006. Now available for both PlayStation 2 and X-Box 360 platforms, the latter version came with a Gibson Explorer-shaped controller. The key this time, however, was the addition of real-life rock stars such as AC/DC and Aerosmith, Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses. ‘We’d hit the sweet spot,’ said developer John Tam. ‘[The bands] understood that we’re not going to embarrass their music, we’re going to actually pay homage to their music and get it to the point where people are going to understand their music in a totally different way than they’ve ever experienced it before.’
The franchise was now worth hundreds of millions of dollars; rivals were starting to spring up, most notably the MTV Networks developed Rock Band game. It wasn’t, however, until Activision bought RedOctane for $100m, specifically to acquire Guitar Hero, that the game took off outside devoted gaming circles: the extra edge that would power Guitar Hero III being the arrival of an instantly recognisable real-life rock star to front the franchise: Lars’ old pal Slash of Guns N’ Roses (and latterly, his offshoot group Velvet Revolver). Until then, although it featured real songs by real bands, the game had relied on a series of sound-alike avatars with faux rock-star names such as Axel Steel and Izzy Sparks. Slash was the first major real-life star to agree to have himself motion-captured and that image transferred directly into the game. ‘I’m not a real video game guy,’ Slash admitted to Classic Rock writer Jon Hotten. ‘When I signed on to do it, it was only the nerdy kid in me that made me say yes. Everything else about me said, no don’t do it.’
With Slash’s instantly recognisable avatar now front and centre, suddenly the game became an item of interest way beyond its natural demographic of gamers. Released in October 2007, it now featured seventy-three songs, and was available across not just PlayStation and Xbox platforms but also Wii, PC and Mac. It made $100 million in just its first week. A month later it was officially the year’s biggest-selling computer game. Activision could hardly keep up with the Christmas demand. Six months later, it had sold more than eight million copies. By the time the next version of the game was ready to go in March 2009 – with Metallica replacing Slash as the frontispiece – the existing version had exceeded one billion dollars in sales revenue and was said to be the second-biggest-selling computer game of any kind since 1995.
For Slash, who had received a generous but fixed fee and no royalties, the impact this had was about much more than money; already one of the most famous guitarists in the world, Slash’s image now extended far beyond the existing rock-buying audience. ‘I have a specific story that will sort of shine a big bright light on that fact,’ he explained. ‘A friend of mine who’s a producer, he’s got, I guess, a six-year-old little boy. I went over to their house,