In the mid-00s, it was almost impossible to escape the popularity of Guitar Hero.
Released in 2005, Harmonix and RedOctane’s guitar-based rhythm game is considered one of the most influential games of the 21st century, with its early success resulting in a sequel just a year later and a multitude of expansions in quick succession.
However, series sales began to dwindle around 2009, with Activision reporting a decline in music genre sales in the US of 65% compared with the previous year. Activision shuttered Guitar Hero publisher RedOctane shortly afterwards.
But 15 years later, RedOctane has emerged from the ashes as a studio making solely rhythm-based games, and with its first title in the works – but this time, it’s taking a more focused approach.
The rhythm game revival
The new incarnation of RedOctane is officially known as RedOctane Games, and its parent company is Embracer Freemode, which since 2024 has been part of the Middle-earth Enterprises division of the Embracer Group.
RedOctane’s revival as a studio is largely due to the team’s recognition that “the rhythm game community was still very alive and strong,” Simon Ebejer, head of studio, tells GamesIndustry.biz.
“It hadn’t actually gone away,” Ebejer says. “It had just kind of gone more underground. And it wasn’t necessarily niche; it was just more like it was being underserved.”
Ebejer says this was evidenced by Guitar Hero clones like 2017’s Clone Hero and 2022’s Yet Another Rhythm Game (YARG). However, it was the Fortnite Festival that “opened the doors” of rhythm gaming to more people, outside the “core community,” says Ebejer.
“It was kind of very obvious to us that there was space for a new, premium rhythm game that could serve the community and feed that appetite that was still there,” Ebejer continues.
But the approach RedOctane has taken this time toward the development of its new, currently announced game is much more “tight” and “focused” than 15 years ago.
While the Guitar Hero games were initially made with 35 to 40 people, the studio currently has a team of fewer than 20 – a world away from the “hundreds” Ebejer worked with as VP of operations on Diablo 4.
RedOctane’s budget is “not big,” but it’s “not exactly on a shoestring” either, Embracer Freemode CEO Lee Guinchard added via email.
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Ebejer says one of the clearest challenges facing the industry right now is rising costs, but that RedOctane has “accepted that challenge in a different way.”
“We purposely are keeping the team relatively small and very focused,” he explains. “We have a pretty clear vision of where we want to go, and we want to be responsible.
“We want to be conservative with our planning. We don’t want to just be all over the place and inefficient.”
The changes in technology over the past 15 years are helping the studio achieve this goal.
Rather than oversaturating players with new DLC and expansions every year, as it did with Guitar Hero, Ebejer explains that the studio can instead keep updating its game with new content, allowing it to “grow.”
“It allows us to serve the community better, because we can respond to what the community wants in the current game by adding features, quality of life updates, fixing features, or things that maybe the community didn’t respond to in the way that we thought or hoped,” Ebejer explains.
“We purposely are keeping the team relatively small and very focused”
Simon Ebejer, RedOctane Games
“[We can] continue to make the game that’s out there better, instead of being like, ‘alright, let’s create this running list of stuff that we’re going to include in the next game.’ So for me, that’s the big deal.”
Ebejer agrees that part of the reason for this approach is to avoid the fatigue players felt with the Guitar Hero series.
“There will be post-launch content and additions to the game, but I see that as feeding the community,” he tells us. “Compared to the past, [when] we were fatiguing the community. We were wearing it out.”
Does that mean this unannounced game will be more of a platform or live service game?
“We hope for the game to essentially be evergreen,” Ebejer says. “So, yes, in that perspective, you could think of it as a platform where there will be the game that’s there at launch, and then we will add to the game as time goes on.”
Generational mixing pot
Community is at the “heart and core” of RedOctane, says Ebejer – in fact, several of those on the team are active members of the rhythm game community. That includes the studio’s game lead, Alex Jefferys, who created the open-source game YARG after rediscovering his old Guitar Hero controllers in his parents’ house back in 2022.
“For me, working on YARG, it really showed how important the community aspect is when developing video games,” Jefferys tells GamesIndustry.biz.
“Because of how we set things up with YARG, pretty much the whole process was community-driven. There’s this whole pipeline of players suggesting features, and then passionate folks within the community, like myself, seeing those suggestions and implementing them into YARG. I think that our goal is to capture that as best we can at RedOctane.”
RedOctane has already begun gathering community feedback, asking for suggestions and input from rhythm-game fans about what to include in the game.
It’s a modern approach – the result of a generational melting pot on the team. Jefferys calls Guitar Hero “a huge part of his childhood,” and he was ultimately inspired by the series to make YARG. Ebejer, on the other hand, worked on the original series in the 00s as a production director at Neversoft, which he refers to as the time in his career that he felt “happiest.”
Ebejer explains: “It is a fantastic melding of people with a lot of experience, who have been there, who were making those games back in the day, and these really talented, really passionate developers and members of the community who, in many ways, came up on those games that we were making, who then turned around and went, ‘Wow, I want to do this too. I’m going to, like, do my own version of that,’ like Alex did with YARG.”
Guitar heroes
While RedOctane can’t share many details of the game it’s working on, there are some hints that it might not be far off from the plastic guitar experience Guitar Hero offered.
Earlier this year, controller manufacturer CRKD, which is also under the Embracer Group umbrella, announced the release of two new Gibson Les Paul-inspired guitar controllers.
The guitars, which are compatible with Fortnite Festival, were released just two days after RedOctane’s revival announcement, with CRKD sharing a YouTube video that heavily implies the controllers and RedOctane are linked.
RedOctane has been somewhat coy about its connection with the CRKD guitars, but Guinchard confirmed to GamesIndustry.biz via email that the studio’s games will feature peripherals and that CRKD will be their official manufacturer.
Ebejer also confirms the studio’s new game will use peripherals and says we can “safely assume there will be guitar gameplay” based on the CRKD connection.
Unsurprisingly, given the guitars’ compatibility with Fortnite Festival, CRKD guitars have no exclusivity with RedOctane, Ebejer says.
“Beyond that, we’ll talk about that at a later date,” he teases.
CRKD’s Les Pauls are $114.99 (for the multi-platform version) and $124.99 (for the Xbox-licensed version).
While RedOctane won’t go into specifics on pricing for its new game or any potential peripheral bundles, Ebejer does confirm that peripherals won’t be mandatory and that the team wants to ensure “the community is able to play the game without having to mortgage their house.”
But do peripherals still have a place in modern rhythm games, which have seen a significant shift to PC and mobile in recent years?
“There are many different ways to play different rhythm games, so it kind of depends on exactly what sort of style of game you’re going for,” Jefferys says.
“I always think that having access to new hardware is amazing for the whole rhythm game community. Controllers are what players use to interact with the game, so the better the controllers, the better the overall experience. But you know, that being said, there are plenty of ways that that can be done.”
“We want the game to be accessible,” Ebejer adds. “We want people to be able to play it however they want.
“We do acknowledge, though, that in this game, as is the case with many rhythm games, generally, the best way to play it is with quality peripherals, but we won’t force players to do that.”
The opening chord
Integral to this project, much like Guitar Hero, is the music. Ebejer says that the studio is still “pretty early on in the music licensing process,” but has begun having conversations with record labels.
With so many community members embedded in the team, the studio has been able to filter community song requests through them, while also pursuing the songs the internal team wants in the game.
But the gaming landscape has changed since Guitar Hero’s heyday. At that time, there was still a degree of uncertainty from the music industry about allowing their songs to be licensed for gaming.
That didn’t stop Aerosmith from reportedly making more money from Guitar Hero by 2015 than it did from any one of its albums.
Nowadays, music licensing can cause serious issues for streamers, with legal permissions needed to, for example, play a game that has a Beatles song in its soundtrack.
But Ebejer says things are actually “a little better these days than they were back then.”
“The music industry understands streamers, and they understand what the communities are trying to do. And so there are going to be songs that potentially a streamer can’t stream, probably, but it won’t be, it should not be, a universal problem across the board.”
Closing bars
Seventeen years ago, the Guitar Hero franchise broke industry records by surpassing $1 billion in North American retail sales in just 26 months. When we ask Ebejer whether RedOctane is targeting that level of success again, his answer is to the point: “No, it absolutely isn’t.”
“I mean, is anybody going to be upset if you make a billion dollars?,” he continues. “Of course not, but that is not in any way, shape, or form what’s driving us.
“I hope […] it’s just simply seen as a studio that serves the community that was responsible for its creation”
Simon Ebejer, RedOctane Games
“The wind beneath our wings is getting the game out there that we believe the community has been hungry for for some time. And whatever that means when it comes out, is what that means in terms of commercial success.”
So, where does he hope to see RedOctane in five years?
“That is a really tough question,” he says. “Five years is a long time, right? I won’t specifically say, ‘in five years, this is where I want to be.’
“I think, for me, the future for RedOctane that I hope for is that it’s just simply seen as a studio that serves the community that was responsible for its creation in the first place. And hopefully that means that two, three, five, more years down the road, the studio is still making games, or continuing to serve the game that we’re making right now for that community.”
