Guitar Hero

Harmonix and RedOctane launched Guitar Hero in November 2005, starting with a modest setlist of classic rock and covers. The concept was deceptively simple: a plastic Gibson SG guitar controller with five fret buttons and a strum bar, wired to the console (wireless guitars came later). As notes scrolled down like a musical highway, you pressed frets and strummed, hitting the rhythm of licensed rock songs from Black Sabbath to David Bowie. It was the intersection of rhythm gaming (a genre that had existed with Dance Dance Revolution) and the guitar fantasy—casual players loved pretending to be guitarists; hardcore players pushed Expert mode difficulty.

The social phenomenon was enormous: friends gathered to take turns, leaderboards exploded online, tournaments formed. Guitar Hero II (2006) expanded the library, but Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007) defined the genre's apex, featuring 'Through the Fire and Flames'—a brutally difficult DragonForce song that became the Mount Everest of video game difficulty and sparked countless YouTube videos of failure and triumph. The plastic-instrument boom it kicked off spawned Rock Band (2007) with drums and vocals, and countless imitators. But by 2010–2011, market saturation hit hard. Consumers tired of buying plastic instruments that only worked with specific games, and the rhythm-game genre collapsed almost as fast as it had exploded. Guitar Hero's golden era lasted roughly 2005–2010—remarkably short but genuinely enormous while it lasted.