Intergalactic space operas, we need more of 'em

Last week's post marked the first in my proposed copy left series. Today I'm going to continue giving away ideas while clearing out some backlog in the process. You see, I had this notion a while back that developers were being rather limited in their thinking about what could be done with Guitar Hero controllers. Yahtzee posted about this issue as well about a year after I started babbling about it to my colleagues (my friends and colleagues have to put up with a lot of this sort of thing).

I picked this largely unrelated (but otherwise irresistible) image out of Blossom_Morphine's photobucket (click to go there).

More about why Croshaw and I stumbled across the same general idea, and a few specifics after the jump.

Quick disclaimer: This post is not about how I came up with the idea first. Having a guitar shaped peripheral around with only rock star themed games is just a design challenge calling for answers. I'm sure that Ben Croshaw and I are not even the only people to have had the thought that there are other possible games to be made using a guitar controller, it's just a feature of the design space within the ecology of video game play and production.

In my case, the inspiration for a different style of game using a guitar controller came from Kazuhisa Takenôchi's Interstella 5555. I was introduced to it by my departed friend Joel Starr, and I have to take this opportunity to plug his post mortem cd Interstellar Mode. Back to the matter at hand, if you've seen Interstella 5555 my point of departure for envisioning this game is probably obvious. If you haven't, click on the pic below to watch the first song. If you're too short on time for that, it's basically an anime space opera with a Daft Punk libretto. It also features a guitar shaped space ship.

A still shot from One More Time in Interstella 5555, follow the link to watch on YouTube

Playing a regular guitar rhythm game with an awesome theme and meaningful narrative would of course be the easy approach, provided one could write or license IP like Interstella 5555. However, there are other approaches that could push a little harder on the boundaries of design. As Yahtzee noted an RPG would be a very viable format for a rock opera game. While he envisions something Brutal Legend'esque, I could equally feature a more traditional RPG in which the player negotiated the map using the d-pad or by flipping through options to set a course or some such. Friendly encounters could be talked through using a decision UI coded to the buttons on the neck, while conventional guitar hero game play is always there for regular combat and boss battles.

There are of course other possibilities. Before we had guitar controllers, we already had rail shooter rhythm games and imho this genre deserves to be explored more thoroughly. In fact, any game that's on tight enough rails could potentially be approached using a guitar controller including shmups and simple platformers. Regardless of the genre chosen for subversion, designing for a guitar (or drum) controller could potentially drive the deployment of rhythm game mechanics in richer narrative contexts, and that's something I'd like to see happen.