A number of months in the past, a video got here throughout my Twitter timeline, starring one of the nightmare blunt rotations I’d ever seen: Mr. Incredible, Marlin from Finding Nemo, and Spy and Pyro from Team Fortress 2 performing “Carry On Wayward Son.” Of course, this motley crew of cartoon characters couldn’t convene within the flesh; this was a modded Guitar Hero degree.
The clip despatched me down a wormhole of Guitar Hero mods, in the hunt for probably the most cursed groupings conceivable: Kiryu from Yakuza singing “YMCA,” Wallace and Gromit enjoying Steely Dan with Eli Vance from Half Life, Walter White and Saul Goodman doing “Free Bird.” Ever wished to see CJ from GTA or Peter Griffin do System of a Down karaoke, or an outsized Thomas the Tank Engine tackle “Crazy Train”? Well, now you possibly can, even should you by no means wished to.
When I first dove into the Guitar Hero mod group, I assumed it was a leftover relic from an earlier period of the web. Guitar Hero has at all times carried quite a lot of nostalgia for me as somebody who got here of age throughout its heyday. Though streaming was creating all through the 2000s, it had but to utterly reshape the music trade—YouTube and Guitar Hero each first launched in 2005, and I don’t suppose it’s a coincidence that the rhythm recreation increase sputtered out as Spotify ascended to dominance. In that pre-streaming period, Guitar Hero functioned as greater than a recreation; it grew to become a platform for music discovery, and an important gateway for my very own style as a burgeoning music lover.
The branding and aesthetic may need emphasised laborious rock, however Guitar Hero and Rock Band have been each extra musically various than they get credit score for; 2008’s World Tour, for instance, featured every thing from Sublime to Willie Nelson to Linkin Park. The vary of licensed music and the informal gameplay type made the Harmonix and Neversoft video games a uniquely social expertise, and one which’s uniquely suited to enjoying below the affect or in a celebration setting.
I performed Guitar Hero earlier than I ever smoked weed, however years later, I’d really feel the nostalgic pull of the collection and re-experience them as a full-time stoner. There’s the apparent enjoyment of listening to music whereas excessive, however even on a design degree, Guitar Hero is uniquely suited to the aimless pleasures of a lazy Sunday afternoon. There’s no rush to get via the sport, no storyline or cutscenes to concentrate to; I’ve misplaced monitor of what number of instances I’ve spaced out after ending a tune, my blunted thoughts wandering because the surprisingly soothing crowd applause performs on a loop.
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The bizarre world of Guitar Hero mods
Fifteen years later after its launch, Guitar Hero: World Tour has made an sudden comeback, because of a passionate collective of modders and rhythm recreation devoteesMuch to my shock, all the practically one thousand unique creations from the Guitar Hero: World Tour part of NexusMods have been uploaded throughout the final two years—the oldest mods out there, together with Leon Kennedy and Master Chief, have been posted in August 2021. These nightmare blunt rotations exist because of the fan-made Guitar Hero: World Tour – Definitive Edition mod, launched in December 2021, which transforms the 2008 recreation kadinto an ultra-customizable multiplayer expertise.
Even after the Guitar Hero collection light from the mainstream, the sport’s modding group was saved alive by gamers like ExileLord, who graduated from creating customized songs for Guitar Hero 3 to hacking the sport itself. Compared to the cartoonish absurdity of the GHWT Definitive Edition mod, ExileLord’s GH3+ venture is extra about twiddling with the unique engine than including new content material to the sport—his hottest YouTube video explores a bug in Guitar Hero 3 that means that you can play a tune for hours on finish. While earlier modders largely labored with Guitar Hero 3, the Definitive Edition workforce gravitated to World Tour partially due to the expanded options of the sport itself.
“In terms of the Guitar Hero franchise releases on PC, Guitar Hero 3 is much more primitive,” says Dodylectable, a core member of the Definitive Edition mod workforce, in explaining why the group selected to work with the 2008 recreation. “There was a massive jump from 3 to World Tour with new features like Create-A-Rocker and Music Studio, which allows for more of the fun character stuff we have in our mod compared to GH3+.” World Tour had already upped the ante for interactivity and customization, which the Definitive Edition group merely took to the following degree. To hit even greater notes (sorry), modder Zedek The Plague Doctor, reverse-engineered the sport and started sharing his creations with a rising group of fellow rhythm recreation modders.
“I always wanted to mod Guitar Hero games because I thought they deserved custom characters, instruments, and venues, more than just custom songs or texture mods,” says Dodylectable. “Zedek told me how I could make custom character ports, and then showed me what he had in store for the Definitive Edition mod, including different GUI and instruments. I was genuinely impressed and when he asked for help in further developing the mod, I didn’t hesitate to join at all.”
The venture began largely with porting or recreating skins characters from different video games: Dodylectable’s first mod, and the primary publicly out there GHWT mod, was a tribute to Garrett, the protagonist of the Thief collection of stealth video games. Because of its age, there’s a restrict to what modders can get out of Guitar Hero, as Dodylectable explains: “Guitar Hero runs off of a heavily modified Tony Hawk Proving Ground engine, which is reasonably restrictive compared to today’s engines like Unreal. One of my favorite characters I’ve done is Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village, who was a massive pain to port over. She crashed my game over 20 times in debugging, but it raised the bar for people to go and make high-poly model ports.”
But it’s partly the problem that pulls Guitar Hero modders—together with the novelty and meme potential of placing your favorites on the planet of a beloved recreation, in fact. “Porting over characters from other games is mostly easy, but recreating real people requires more effort,” says Dodylectable. “My favorite in that department is actually one I designed of my real life self, which is coming with the update. I’m proud of it because it got me out of my comfort zone and got me to do a lot of things I’d never imagined doing with sculpting and texturing and making models from scratch.” Guitar Hero was already an excellent stoner recreation, however the World Tour mod has taken it to the following degree—watching modded movies of Mark Zuckerberg jamming with anime ladies is just like the digital equal of strolling into a kind of dispensaries with Rick & Morty and SpongeBob cartoons stenciled everywhere in the partitions.
The GHWT Definitive Edition workforce all realized in regards to the recreation’s internal workings from instructing one another, and the collective is consistently updating its mod and creating new options. Their present tasks embrace porting venues and degree design from spin-offs like Guitar Hero: Van Halen and Metallica into World Tour to supply much more customizability and inventive potential. The group has left the Discord door open for another Guitar Hero lovers who wish to tinker with the sport. Its group has grown explosively for the reason that mod’s launch, partially due to how willingly its creators have shared their toolkit and the way lively they’re in protecting the venture alive.
The final downside of a recreation like Guitar Hero is that it might probably by no means actually seize the sensation of truly creating music. Sure, you would possibly be capable of play it, and the peripheral may be formed like a guitar, however on the finish of the day it’s mainly simply cosplaying another person’s work. In its personal method, the World Tour modding group captures the sensation of jamming with different musicians, in a method Guitar Hero and Rock Band may solely ever emulate: Like a band in a storage, they’re a bunch of like-minded artists working collectively to invent one thing unpredictable and new. In true stoner vogue, Guitar Hero was meant to be loved collectively, with the controller handed round like a joint in rotation, and the sport’s modding group has saved that flame alive.
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