Today, Activision announced that an Aerosmith-themed* edition of Guitar Hero, the cleverly titled Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, would be available in stores come June. The press release heralding the game’s launch contained a baffling quote from Steven Tyler, who said: “Any band that can go from ‘Don’t Want to Miss A Thing’ (Aerosmith’s #1 smash hit) to the ass-kicking ‘Sweet Emotion’ to the cheekiness of ‘Love in an Elevator,’ to the classic ballad ‘Dream On’ shows why Activision chose us to headline this game based on the diversity of the Aerosmith catalog. Not only is songwriting a bitch, but then it goes and has puppies.” Odd dog-related metaphors aside, what is up, Mr. Tyler, with naming a freaking Diane Warren track before anything else from your catalog? Clearly you need some help picking the right songs for your game, so after the jump, I’ve selected five songs that are definitely ripe for inclusion. (And no, “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way” aren’t on there because we pretty much can figure that the songs you trot out for every TV appearance will be front-and-center, probably in multiple versions.)
Ed. note: Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on the Billboard Hot 100 in the latest installment of “100 And Single”:
“[A]s I type, playlists are returning to normal, and that plus the inevitable comedown in digital sales will make next week’s chart rather topsy-turvy.” So said I, with hope in my heart, last week in this space.
What the hell was I thinking?! One week later, Billboard‘s Hot 100 couldn’t be any snoozier, with a virtually static Top 10 and only marginal movement farther down the chart. Chalk it up to early-winter doldrums, distraction from the presidential primaries, or some kind of Jedi mind-trick Flo Rida’s “Low” is performing on this great nation’s populace, but right now, it feels like no one’s buying or listening to any new music. Or maybe folks are just too busy playing with their little plastic guitars…
What with video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band becoming higher-profile vehicles for rock bands to hawk their wares than old-fashioned music-centric venues like radio, the effects of the games’ song choices are of keen interest to music-industry observers. So last week Ars Technica did up a graph showing that certain songs featured in Guitar Hero 3–including Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” and the Strokes’ “Reptilia”–saw large sales jumps, percentage-wise, after the game hit store shelves. Quoth Ars: “The week GH III was released, ‘Reptilia’ sold 127 percent more digital copies than it had the week before. The following week saw another 96 percent jump in sales. That number stayed high the next week as well, as the song saw a modest 3 precent [sic] increase.” All well and good, but it’s hard to figure out just what, exactly, these sales increases actually mean, given that the numbers Ars threw around were percentages and not hard totals. That 127% gain for “Reptilia” would have meant a lot more if it had sold, say, 3,500 copies in the pre-GH week than, say, 1,000 or so. Ars’ graph after the jump.
So YouTube has been invaded by Guitar Hero 3 demo clips in anticipation of the game’s release next week, because what’s more fun than watching other people be pretty good at video games that you’ll probably suck at while you’re stuck in front of a computer? More »
The tracklist for Guitar Hero III is rumored to include “Kool Thing,” “Cherub Rock,” “Raining Blood” (yes!), and, as we suggested a few months ago, “Cult Of Personality.” Also “Anarchy In The UK,” the inclusion of which serves as the 50,097th piece of evidence that punk is capital-d dead. More »
The tracklist for Guitar Hero III is rumored to include “Kool Thing,” “Cherub Rock,” “Raining Blood” (yes!), and, as we suggested a few months ago, “Cult Of Personality.” Also “Anarchy In The UK,” the inclusion of which serves as the 50,097th piece of evidence that punk is capital-d dead. More »
Tucked at the bottom in this Billboard item on the new Aerosmith record–the details of which are completely up in the air, save for the fact that it’s eventually going to be recorded–is this curious quote from Joe Perry on the next edition of Guitar Hero, which will apparently be a classic rock… More »
The cover of Danzig’s “Mother” you hear coming from your neighborhood bar might not be by a Danzig tribute band like you’d secretly hoped. Nope, the New York Times is here to inform you that Guitar Hero, the video game that you previously enjoyed in your living room, is making its way into the realm of public drunkenness. And what better way to prepare you for your future annoyance than an article with the title “Virtual Frets, Actual Sweat”?
If you’ve ever wondered what accounts for the sudden, occasional dips in quality on this site–why posts take three hours to show up, or why there’s a sudden surge of “look at this funny photo!” entries–there can be only one explanation: Your Idolators are off playing Guitar Hero. Now officially the eleventh-greatest thing ever to happen in the history of mankind (following such heavy hitters as oxygen, waffle irons, the fall of Communism, and season three of The Wire), Guitar Hero is the first game to combine our collective need for communal self-expression with our collective need to eat pizza and play “Smoke On The Water” eleven times in a row. Badly.
Next month sees the release of Guitar Hero II for Xbox, but we’re already thinking about the still-in-the-works third edition. So we hereby present our 30-song wishlist for Guitar Hero III jams–the songs that we hope to be playing along with in the near future. We’ve even included MP3s with our top ten, so you can get a head start on your neighbor.
A few months ago, MTV purchased Harmonix–the video-game developer that produced the shred-’til-you’re-dead title Guitar Hero, and its sequel–for $75 million. More »
