A Guitar Hero game every year "a given"

Guitar Hero developer Neversoft has accepted that publisher Activision will release a Hero game every year despite admitting the studio lost its soul competing with rival Rock Band.

"With Guitar Hero World Tour [2008] we kind of lost our souls a bit," project director Brian Bright told Develop.

"We lost that spark by trying to cater to everyone. We were in this arms race with our competitor [Rock Band 2], and in the end I felt like we sold a bit of our souls."

In 2009 Neversoft created three Hero games: Band Hero, Guitar Hero Metallica, and Guitar Hero 5.

"We did make quite a few games last year, and if you count up the sales of all of them it was close to how well World Tour sold," Bright said.

"But the release of all those games split the marketing team's focus, it split our studio's focus."

Publisher Activision will release one Hero game this year: Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, due out in the UK on 24th September.

"We did put out quite a few games last year, and we wanted to make a game that stood out and had its own identity," Bright continued.

"Rather than go head-to-head with our own games and our competitors, we decided we wanted to make something different."

Bright said Warriors of Rock goes back to Guitar Hero's roots, and will be... Ahem... Rock hard.

"What we saw at the end of Guitar Hero 5 is that, after a month of release, about 40 per cent of the audience were playing on expert. The core has got to a pretty high level, so we really want to up the challenge."

But what of the future?

"Is there a danger that the music genre will become saturated? Most certainly," Bright said.

"But I think it's a given that there will be a Guitar Hero game every year. It's just that there were so many last year."