I played Guitar Hero the first time it was released when it was called Guitar Freaks
Matt posted in Games on April 25th, 2006

Firstly, Guitar Hero is an awesome game. There’s no denying that. What I can’t understand is why people praise it’s innovation and uniqueness when it is essentially Konami’s Guitar Freaks released in America. Guitar Freaks is exactly the same only its guitar has 3 buttons for your fingers instead of 5 (although some of the 3^rd party guitars have more buttons, possibly mapped to chords), and instead of a whammy bar, it has an effects knob. (I have to give Harmonix credit: a whammy bar is way more appealing than an effects knob, that’s for sure)

Guitar Hero was nominated for a Game Developer’s Choice award for its unique controller. It’s too bad Game Developer’s Choice awards aren’t truly international because Konami missed out in 1998 when they created the innovative arcade game and in 1999 when they ported it to Playstation. In the postmortem in February 2006’s Game Developer Magazine, Harmonix shows a picture of guitars they used to develop the game before Red Octane finished their hardware. One might wonder why someone would create a Playstation Guitar controller. Well wonder no more! It was created for Guitar Freaks. That’s a clear indication that they knew about Guitar Freaks when creating Guitar Hero. I found it even more bizarre that in the postmortem, Harmonix said We asked for the tilt sensor and whammy bar well before we had any clear idea of how they would be used in the game. The tilt sensor is used in EXACTLY the same way that it was used into Guitar Freaks.

Again, I’d like to reiterate that Guitar Hero is a great game. There was a void of guitar based games in America. Red Octane and Harmonix created something to fill that void, and they have been rewarded financially for it. It’s a shame that Konami, the real innovators in music based games, was not rewarded for actually innovating the genre. Konami has created a drum game (Drummania) that links to Guitar Freaks and a keyboard game (Keyboardmania) for a whole band. If Harmonix ever does this, please remember that Konami are the true innovators that thought up this delightful idea.