The CEO of Microsoft has listed a handful of properties he’s looking forward to working on, including the famed Guitar Hero IP.
If you are little out of the loop, last week Microsoft bought out video game publisher Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Phil Spencer spoke about some games he was looking forward to pursuing.
“I was looking at the IP list, I mean, let’s go!” Spencer said. “King’s Quest, Guitar Hero … I should know this but I think they got HeXen.”
“We’re hoping that we’ll be able to work with them when the deal closes to make sure we have resources to work on franchises that I love from my childhood, and that the teams really want to get,” he added afterward. “I’m looking forward to these conversations. I really think it’s about adding resources and increasing capability.”
Not that we’re counting, but it’s been a good long while since we last got a GH game, with the most recent one being in 2015 with Guitar Hero Live.
The controller configuration for the new game included more frets than previous installments, so if you’re a bit of a traditionalist and don’t like change, then the last old school GH game was Warriors of Rock in 2010.
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The fact that Xbox has bought rights to the IP means that even if a new GH game was on the horizon, there’s a chance it may be an Xbox exclusive, which means that PlayStation and Switch players might miss out on this one.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has spoken to VentureBeat about wanting Microsoft to do something with GH now that the bigger company has the means to do so.
“Phil [Spencer] and I have started riffing on things for the future,” Kotick said. “I wanted to make a new Guitar Hero for a while, but I don’t want to add teams to do manufacturing and supply chain and QA for manufacturing. And the chip shortages are enormous.
“We didn’t really have the ability to do that. I had a really cool vision for what the next Guitar Hero would be, and I realised we don’t have the resources to do that.”
The Guitar Hero series sold more than 25 million copies in its lifetime, with Guitar Hero III being the first video game to exceed $1 billion in sales, according to Activision at the time.
Check out the evolution of Guitar Hero games here:
