Harmonix sprinted on multiple fronts, including assembling a wish list of face-melting guitar songs, then seeing which they could afford to license. Original recordings were prohibitively expensive, and some labels didn't return calls, so Harmonix licensed composition rights only and hired a studio to record favorites by Black Sabbath, Bowie, Boston, and other artists. Songs by the bands of Harmonix employees filled out the Guitar Hero playlist.
The only big retailer to carry Guitar Hero when it was released in November 2005 was Best Buy. "I think the first order was for something like 8,000 units," Egozy recalls. "And then apparently, like one week later, they placed a second order for 80,000. Once they placed demo kiosks in the stores, their initial inventory blew out in days."
New games often sell well in November and better in December, then fall off dramatically. January's sales of Guitar Hero were better than December's sales. February's were bigger again. Rigopulos looked at the February data and wondered, What's going on? On YouTube, he typed Guitar Hero -- and thousands of videos that people had made of themselves playing Guitar Hero came up. Something new was happening, finally.
In the last two months of 2005, Guitar Hero did about $15 million in sales, more than the previous 10 years of sales at Harmonix combined. And the train kept a-rollin'. Bars started having Guitar Hero nights. Real rock stars started playing. The raunchy cartoon South Park devoted an episode to the craze titled "Guitar Queer-O." A pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, Joel Zumaya, missed the American League Championship Series in 2006 with an unexplained wrist injury. Yes, he had played too much Guitar Hero.
This, at last, was the bliss. The music industry has been so worried about emerging technologies, but it turns out that fans don't just want to steal MP3 files -- they want technology to transport them deeper inside the things they love. Fantasy sports boomed by letting anyone "own" a team. Blogs allow everyone to be the media. This was music's ride inside.
In 2006, Harmonix and RedOctane released Guitar Hero 2, and the franchise overall did $180 million in sales. That year, the first royalty payment arrived by wire in Harmonix's bank account. Bookkeeper Kris Fell told Rigopulos and Egozy the amount, and they just looked at each other. It was more than they had raised in the history of the company, suddenly just there.
As quickly as Harmonix and RedOctane had come together, they were pulled apart. In 2006, the game publisher Activision bought RedOctane for $99.9 million -- and because RedOctane was the publisher of Guitar Hero, the name went with it. Not long after, Viacom bought Harmonix and placed it in its MTV Networks division. The time was right, Rigopulos sensed. "Not just because of the exit opportunity, the financial factors," he says. When success comes, "you know as an entrepreneur that the category is about to be flooded with intense competitors." He knew he would need a giant partner to stay alive when success came.
He was right about needing a war chest. Later this year, Activision will debut Guitar Hero: World Tour, which will have drums, bass, and vocals, just like Rock Band. Activision this summer released Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. To lock up exclusive use of the Aerosmith catalog in a music game, Activision reportedly paid the band a better royalty rate than it had received for any of its albums.
That can't possibly make sense, but somehow it does. The music labels are calling now. Global music sales dropped 8 percent in 2007, and these games are a safe way for a technophobic industry to sell its classics yet again. A new generation of kids is humming "Iron Man." Songs that have been included in Guitar Hero and Rock Band have surged in sales on iTunes and elsewhere. So, yes, the first Guitar Hero game used remakes of songs -- "as made famous by" Z.Z. Top or Judas Priest. But Rock Band has "Gimme Shelter: The Rolling Stones." Rock Band 2, released in mid-September, has classics by AC/DC and Bob Dylan and included the world premiere of a song from the Guns N' Roses Chinese Democracy album.
Even from the days of The Axe, Rigopulos and Egozy imagined special software-playable versions of songs that might be sold separately. Now, players of Rock Band (and Guitar Hero) can download added tracks to play on their Xbox and PlayStation 3 systems, most at $1.99 per song (twice the price of an iTunes track). Already 21 million Rock Band downloads and 20 million Guitar Hero downloads have been sold. By year's end, more than 500 songs will be available for play in Rock Band. The Who's greatest hits are available for Rock Band, and there are rumors the Beatles' catalog is in play. MTV, which owns Country Music Television, is thinking beyond rock. Egozy envisions a day when all new albums will be released in normal format and a game-playable format. He and Rigopulos will be there trying to make it happen. The money is fine, thanks -- especially given that they get royalties from Guitar Hero -- and they have room to breathe and create without wondering who will pick up the check.
Rigopulos never did get onstage during the concert to thank everyone. The band did it for him, sort of. Townshend snapped a guitar string during his solo on "Pinball Wizard" and got a laugh, asking, "Does this ever happen in the game?" And Daltrey thanked the crowd of Harmonix employees and supporters in his own, emotional way. "We're too old to get on the radio," Daltrey said. "Thank f--- for you lot. Thank f--- for anything where music's getting heard."
Rock is dead, they say. Long live rock.
Don Steinberg is a writer and guitar player who lives in Yardley, Pennsylvania.
