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Leaked Guitar Hero 7 Images, Video Showing Setlist/Songs?

3,326 views · Published 16 March 2015 · 2:40 · Indexed 22 October 2026

Channel: Rock N' Roll True Stories · 2015 · Music

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Original article: www.theherofeed.com

The last Guitar Hero we got was 2010's Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. But a source familiar with the series' development says that a Guitar Hero 7 was in development at Activision's Vicarious Visions studio until early 2011 when it was cancelled in mid-development.

Guitar Hero 7 was going to be a bit different and, due to a rocky development cycle, potentially very bad. 

The new console game was going to be solely guitar-based, according to my source, who was thoroughly unimpressed with the development of the game. GH7 would have no drumming. No singing. Both of those elements had been added to the series after the series' original developers, Harmonix, began creating their own Rock Band games for MTV. But a troubled development cycle would see GH7 pare back to the series' roots: playing along to music with a video game controller shaped like a guitar.

My source shared a lot of information about the making of the game, a game which I'd never heard of nor seen. Other industry sources were able to verify the basics of its existence and cancellation, but nothing official, as cancelled games tend not to get discussed much publicly with the press.

An Activision rep was unable to comment about the game or the state of the Guitar Hero series as of the publication of this piece (I'll update it if/when they have anything to share).

My source described development of the game as a "disaster."
My source described development of the game as a "disaster." They did not attempt to disguise their disgust for the scuttled Vicarious Vision project, casting GH7's woes as emblematic of the upstate New York's studio tendency to overreach with its console games.

My own exposure to Vicarious Visions has mainly been to the studio's handheld games which have tended to be technologically exceptional, so well-made, in fact, that the studio was known to have received special, positive attention from Nintendo when the Kyoto giant was looking to show off what their DS or 3DS units could do. (The studio was also working on a Vita version of Call of Duty: Black Ops II before that project, which my source said was flawed, was moved to another studio.)

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Guitar Hero 7's guitar would be its most obvious deviation from its predecessors. It was going to change the gameplay of the series. "This amazing thing was a six stringed guitar," the source told me, sarcastically. "Not a real guitar, or even full six-stringed. It had the classic Guitar Hero buttons on the neck with one extra new button, and six strings where the strum bar used to be. YAY! Now they have an extra button and five more strum bars!"

Some early samples of the new GH7 guitar were even made, the source said, but they weren't up to snuff. "The strings were unresponsive and loose, and the guitars cost a fortune to make. No one could figure out a way to make it so your average Joe could buy one."

"The guitars cost a fortune to make. No one could figure out a way to make it so your average Joe could buy one."
Development of the game had actually started well. My source said Vicarious Visions had begun making the game after Neversoft, which had been involved in some of the earlier games, passed. VV were Guitar Hero vets, too, and created a demo the source said was extraordinary. The demo's "[venue] had camera cuts that were unique to the song being played. The venue was amazing and animated, and each time something in the song changed the venue would also. I didn't even like the song, but the demo gave me goosebumps." The malleability of the venue would be a core idea for Guitar Hero 7. Gamers could play songs in different venues, as they could before, and playing a song successfully in a venue would cause the venue to begin changing in ways specific to that song. "They all had very big ambitions," my source said of Vicarious' team.

Problems plagued the creation of the game almost immediately. The team had decided to create the game from scratch, scrapping legacy characters and making a whole new art style. That left no time to allow for character customization and some questionable aesthetic choices resulted in "characters [whose] necks were over a foot long… They all looked like they were punched in the face."

"I didn't even like the song, but the demo gave me goosebumps."
The morphing venue concept was too unwieldy and the game began to collapse under the weight of the developers' "big ambitions". "They started designing locations," my source said. "A tomb, the back of a moving truck. The locations were going to match the songs. Each song would have its own music video. It was a nice idea, and some of the concepts looked great. Then they realized they didn't have any songs. Everything was being built around 'Turn The Page - Metallica,' and 'A Thing Called Love - The Darkness.' They'd change the venues and animations as the songs came in.

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