Ever since Guitar Hero came to be my reaction to it has been bittersweet at best. On the one hand it was connected to RedOctane, my favorite peripheral company of all time. On the other, there were now thousands of people claiming that Guitar Hero was the best thing since Pong and how it was so awesome that someone had finally done a Guitar simulator. Every time I heard someone say Guitar Hero was the first Guitar simulator and how someone should have thought about it sooner I died a little inside, did they not know about Guitar Freaks?

Guitar Freaks, the legendary arcade and PS2 game that made you rock out with a toy guitar, only 3 frets but a more eclectic music selection, it is the game which inspired Guitar Hero yet it got no respect, until now.

In an excerpt of the book “Inside Game Design” posted at Gamasutra, Iain Simons talks about how Guitar Hero came to be:

[Red Octane] was interested in making a guitar game as they’d seen Guitar Freaks, which Konami had done. So they came to Harmonix with the request, “will you make us a great guitar game for our new piece of guitar hardware?”

And there you have it, finally Guitar Freaks gets a little official recognition, that’s one down, can we now talk about Drumania and how it was a better drum sim? and how you could connect Guitar Freaks to Drumania and have bass, guitar and drums before Rock Band did?

Sure it didn’t have a microphone but making one of your friends sing should be considered a design flaw!

[Gamasutra / Kotaku]