According to Rob Kay, the game's Lead Designer, the idea of
Guitar Hero was directly inspired by
Konami's
Guitar Freaks arcade game, where the player used a guitar-shaped controller to interact with the game. At the time,
GuitarFreaks had not seen much exposure in North America. RedOctane was making
dance pads for games like
Dance Dance Revolution for home consoles and also operated an online video rental service similar to
Netflix. RedOctane's Kai and Charles Huang recognized the popularity of
GuitarFreaks in
Japan through their rental service, and planned to create guitar controllers to bring the game to North America.
Greg Fischbach, one of the founders of
Acclaim Entertainment, noted, regretfully several years later, they had passed on
Guitar Hero, questioning "Who's going to buy a peripheral like that?" The Huangs approached Harmonix, who had previously made
music video games such as
Frequency,
Amplitude and
Karaoke Revolution about making a guitar-based video game for those controllers. With a budget of about one million dollars (which Kay noted was "pretty tiny for a video game"), the two companies worked together to develop
Guitar Hero. Kay noted that "No one had any notions about it being a massive success; we all just thought it would be fun to do." The team quickly recognized that "the controller really was the kind of magic sauce for what we wanted to do". The idea of using the whammy bar to boost Star Power, in addition to altering the
pitch of sustained notes was only realized about a month before the completion of the game. "Gem tracks", the pattern of notes for a song, were developed by a team in Harmonix, taking usually a day to develop the tracks for one song. At the onset of development, the team did not have any idea of what songs would be present in the final game. Kay noted that "We wanted 30 or 40 songs for the game and put a hundred on our wish list."
Marcus Henderson of the band Drist provided many of the lead guitar tracks for the covers. WaveGroup Sound also went to efforts to try to recreate effects for some songs. In the case of
Black Sabbaths "
Iron Man", the team learned that the vocal effects were created by having
Ozzy Osbourne sing from behind a metal
fan. The team sought out the same model of fan through
Craigslist to generate the same effect in the game's cover. Additionally, a "Be a
Guitar Hero" contest was held allowing bands to submit their own song to be included in the game. The winning song was "Cheat on the Church" by
Graveyard BBQ.
Black Label Societys song, "Fire it Up", was included two weeks before the game was completed at the request of
Zakk Wylde. The appearance of Star Power was made to resemble
electricity, both to reflect the use of the electric guitar as well to conceptually demonstrate the excitement of the performance and the virtual audience.
Guitar Hero was initially released to retail stores in a bundle that packaged the game disc and a Gibson SG guitar controller, priced at $69.99. Since its release, stand-alone copies of the games and the guitar controller have been released, including both RedOctane and third-party controllers from TAC and
Nyko.
MadCatz, another controller company that has produced guitar controllers, was set to initially be part of the game's development, creating a version of the game for the
Xbox, but had to pull out due to a lawsuit by Konami; MadCatz's Darrel Richardson stated they had to pay $300,000 to get out of their contract with RedOctane. == Soundtrack ==