The ultimate party game might be making a comeback

Simon Kelly

Getting the band back together.

There’s very few games you’d want on at a house party, aside from the likes of Buzz! and other nostalgic quiz-style games. However, the king of all party games was of course Guitar Hero.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen someone ace DragonForce’s ‘Through the Fire and Flames’ on the hardest difficulty and we think it’s about time we saw a re-emergence of the excellent guitar simulator.

Amazingly, we might be in luck, as Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard (the team behind Guitar Hero) has teased a potential return for the series.

At a recent company meeting, bizarrely hosted by James Corden (we’re just gonna glide over that fact), Kotick spoke about the next decade of gaming, including using the likes of AI and machine learning as new resources for Activision, which is soon to be taken over by Microsoft.

“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.

“The re-emergence of Guitar Hero and other things would not be possible without the different types of resources. And so, the endless possibilities for that future are just incredibly exciting.”

The last Guitar Hero game released in 2015 after a four-year hiatus. However, it never reached the heights of its hey-day and ultimately the days of bashing at a mini plastic guitar at rapid speed was lost.

But Kotick’s name-checking of the franchise has got a lot of people within the industry talking about a possible revival of once the most popular game series of the time.

Guitar Hero

Activision Blizzard CEO teases new Guitar Hero games

Unfortunately, the announcement hasn’t brought universal excitement, and for good reason. If anybody has heard of Bobby Kotick before, they probably are aware that he has a somewhat checkered history as CEO of the company and a revival of Guitar Hero under his watch might not be as exciting as first thought.

Den of Geek report that talks of Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology (the one where you insert a chip into your head) getting rid of the need for controllers in the same breath as a re-emergence of the popular game is cause for concern.

But who knows? We might have some interesting and innovative new version of the game coming our way soon. Or we can just dust off our miniature guitars and get playing the old versions for the sake of nostalgia.