Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, and games of their ilk were the ultimate party games of the last decade, and a lot of their strength grew out of the fun of playing their associated plastic instruments in the living, breathing company of friends. But as Liam Robertson claims in a new YouTube video for Unseen64, for a time we were on the verge of having a massively multiplayer online game called Hero World based on the concept.
As crazy as it sounds, the concept footage Robertson presents shows it might have worked. The idea was to let players act as club managers, and these players would in turn "hire" players from the Xbox, PlayStation, and Wii versions of the game to "perform" by showing off their skills at Guitar Hero and DJ Hero at their clubs. Both players would get in-game cash and points, which they could then use to buy cosmetic items for their clubs.There was even a music discovery element to it, as the concept for Hero World allowed players to upload their own music for play. What's more, you could jump into your club even away from home, as Hero World came with a Facebook-compatible browser element. The concept wasn't terribly different from the skads of other club-themed Facebook games that were floating around at the same time, but the unique Guitar Hero and DJ Hero tie-in could have made it a winner.But Hero World's story is a sad one. Freestyle Games, the developer of the Hero games, had come up with the concept themselves and successfully pitched it to publisher Activision, but they tossed the project over to the relatively unknown Dutch studio Virtual Fairground owing to their greater experience with Flash-based browser games. When Activision started shutting down the Hero games in 2011 following rapidly declining sales, though, Virtual Fairground got caught in the crossfire. Activision only paid them a small amount for the unfinished project, and Robertson says they went bankrupt shortly thereafter when no one else bought the technology they'd worked on for months.It's an all too common story in the volatile games industry. But at least we can enjoy the fascination of what might have been.