Where The Rhythm-Action Genre Can Go Next

10 Mar 2010 at 00:00:00 by Tim McDonald

The most exciting news out of GDC so far, for me, is the Rock Band 3 announcement. Now, I've been playing rhythm-action games – or music games, if you prefer – for about as long as they've been around. I bought Guitar Hero on it's European launch. I played Frequency before that. Before that there were, of course, Dance Dance Revolution and Parappa the Rapper. Hell, although it's not a game, I'm pretty sure I had a copy of Jeff Minter's Psychadelia floating around somewhere back in the 80s. So yeah, you could say I've been following the genre for awhile, and that's extended past games and light shows so far that I've got a copy of the Korg DS-10 Synthesiser for the Nintendo DS in my house.

While Dance Dance Revolution was one of the first rhythm-action games to create a craze, it was Guitar Hero and Rock Band that took the genre and ran with it for the first time since DDR's late 90's launch. What started as strumming away on a plastic guitar to covers of music became a massive industry in its own right, with the plastic guitars being expanded to plastic drums and microphones, and the covers being replaced with unreleased singles from huge bands. DLC took off in a big way, and while there are still a few hold-outs (yes, Led Zeppelin, I'm looking at you) it's become an industry in its own right.

But as my colleague/arch-nemesis Andy pointed out last week, we're on a bit of a downward spiral. Activision has been shitting out approximately six hundred Hero titles a year, and if you think I'm joking bear in mind that last year saw Guitar Hero 5, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, Guitar Hero: Metallica, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits, Band Hero, and DJ Hero - and those are just the console games, ignoring portable, mobile, and arcade releases. Ludicrous.

This is having a knock-on effect in the industry. Sales of games in the genre have dropped significantly, and while there are likely a variety of causes – let's not forget the recession, after all – over-saturation has to take a large part of the blame. To me, this means that for franchises like Guitar Hero and Rock Band to remain popular, something has to be done. I can see three feasible avenues of action.

The first is, essentially, to create new franchises and add in new instruments. (Look, I never said these avenues of action were good ideas, did I? I just said that it's feasible.) We've already seen this attempted with DJ Hero and we've seen that it won't necessarily work, due to the piss-poor sales. A shame, as DJ Hero was surprisingly entertaining, and that's speaking as someone who would normally rather jam screwdrivers into my ears than listen to actual DJs. Besides which, what instruments are there left? Don't get me wrong, as I'd love to see Piano Hero or Keyboard Hero (Great Balls of Fire, anyone?) but it's not something that's going to support hefty expansion or draw people in. If anything, the prospect of having yet more plastic instruments cluttering up the house is likely to put people off.

Er, anyway; the second avenue of action is to drag people in with really, really big bands, which also won't work. For fuck's sake, we've seen Metallica and The Beatles get their own games, and while both did respectably, neither Saved Music Gaming As We Know It. We can expect this to continue, though, as we've got – and here I repress a shudder – Green Day: Rock Band on the way, and while I doubt there are many bands with music varied enough to form a good game on their own, that won't stop developers from signing big names. Queen and Led Zeppelin are two of the few remaining bands which I think could manage this, but I wouldn't be surprised if I saw U2: Rock Band or Guitar Hero: Muse announced in the near future.

Which leads to the third avenue of action, and the one I both hope and suspect developers are picking up on: change the way it's played. I don't mean this in terms of changing the note charts in some way, or adding in The Beatles: Rock Band's vocal harmonies into base Rock Band for all songs that could support them. I mean really, really change it. Teach players how to play instruments properly.

Does that sound insane? It's really not. While conventional rhythm-action games have focused on getting the “feel” of playing right – and Harmonix has, at this stage, mastered this – there are plenty of little indie projects working on this already. Check out Guitar Rising or Jam Origin, both of which, as I understand it, aim to let you plug in a real guitar and play real notes in a Guitar Hero fashion, while Power Gig looks to mix this with the option to play like current rhythm-action games and throws in drums and a mic for good measure.

Note, too, that Dhani Harrison said as much when he unceremoniously announced Rock Band 3 back in November of last year: “I'm working on 'Rock Band 3' and making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game.” I have no doubt it's going to require you to buy more peripherals, because learning how to play a real instrument on the plastic toys of Guitar Hero and Rock Band would be impossible, but it's exactly where this genre needs to go.

Games – or interactive media, if you want to don your wank hat – are more than games. They can tell stories, they can make us feel emotions, and they can act as cunningly-disguised educational tools. This is exactly where the rhythm-action genre needs to go, and by all accounts it looks like it's happening. Rejoice. Rhythm-action is far from dead.

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