The Cupertino Courier

News

Photograph by Zach Beecher

Rock On: Ted Lange (left), associate producer for RedOctane, plays a game of Guitar Hero II with employee Daniel Garcia at the company's office.

Video game lets 'guitarists' strum along

By Erin Hussey

RedOctane Inc. is causing the retirement of air guitars worldwide. In fact, the Sunnyvale-based company's video games, Guitar Hero I and II, have transformed millions of guitar zeros into a guitar heroes.

But, like any success story, it took awhile for the 30-person start-up company to really start rocking.

"We started out as a rental company similar to Netflix," says Ted Lange, associate producer at RedOctane.

Soon after the company opened its virtual doors in 1999, it noticed that Dance Dance Revolution was one of the most rented games.

The music video game produced by Konami challenges players to move their feet to a set pattern, stepping in time to the general rhythm of beat of a song. In order to play the game to its full potential, the players must use an electronic dance pad.

"We started renting the pads but found that they were made really poorly," says Lange.

Within two years, RedOctane had developed the first non-slip dance pad.

"We got into making dance pads, then better dance pads, and soon became known for making solid peripherals," says Lange. "And then we decided to go into game-making because we were making all of these dance pads for a game we weren't making."

The company produced a similar dance game called In the Groove.

"It was actually really fun for the hard-core fans, but it was almost too scaled to the hard-core," remembers Lange. "You had to be an expert DDR player to really get into this game."

Although the game proved somewhat unsuccessful, it did launch RedOctane into the game-publishing world and, more importantly, the idea behind the worldwide phenomenon of Guitar Hero.

"With DDR and all the other rhythm games that are out, most have Japanese influence," says Lange. "This was something that you could really tailor toward the American culture."

Guitar Hero I, which was released in November 2005, captured all the sensations of being a rock star: the songs, the fans, the venues and, of course, the guitars, all of which are inspired by real Gibson models.

"A bunch of the guys on the development and production staff all play guitars," says Lange, who also plays. "As they made the game, they sat with guitars and really tried to keep it as true to playing a real guitar as possible."

Similar to DDR, the players must hit the same "notes" on their guitars as those scrolling along the screen.

To play the right note, players must hold down the correct colored button on the guitar neck as they simultaneously strum down on the "strum bar." As the difficulty increases, the number of notes in use increases from three to five and the combinations and chords become more and more difficult to hit.

"It really lets people scale up how they want to," says Lange. "We see anywhere from 7-year-old kids who are masters at the whole game, to grandparents, to whole families that play the game together."

Even without much advertising, Hero soon caught fire and the attention of Activision, the No. 2 development and production company in the gaming world.

The company acquired RedOctane in June 2006, but allowed it to remain as a separate entity.

"People got confused when we got bought out by Activision," says Lange. "But we still run separately."

The majority of the work RedOctane does, including production, testing, sales and marketing, is done in its Sunnyvale office.

Almost exactly one year after the release of Hero, RedOctane introduced Guitar Hero II for the Sony PlayStation video game console. At the beginning of this month the Xbox 360 version became available.

"Right now we are sold out everywhere," says Lange of the Xbox 360 edition. "We initially came out with 400,000 on launch day, and those are pretty much gone. We're turning them around as fast as we can."

In addition to the higher-quality graphics, three updated play modes (career, multiplayer and practice), an additional bass controller and new playing techniques, Hero II offers 74 new songs, which Lange helped select.

"It's a long process," he says. "There are a lot of songs that have 30-second gaps where there is a drum solo or something, so we have to throw those out because all can't have a 30-second gap in game play."

For the most part, the song list reads like a who's who of rock music, including legends such as Kiss, Van Halen, Foo Fighters, Guns N' Roses, Rolling Stones and Rage Against the Machine.

"I always call it rock education because we cover genres from the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and today," says Lange.

There are also a handful of up and coming bands mixed in with the more recognizable ones. And it comes as no surprise that many of them have gained a following by appearing on Guitar Hero.

"We are one of the few game companies that still stick to the fans and reach out to them,'" says Lange. "I spend a lot of time on the message boards talking to fans and seeing what kind of music they want to see in the game."

Currently RedOctane is working a number of new projects including Guitar Hero III, a version for the new Nintendo Wii and more features that make the multi-player mode even better.

"Our goal is to be the EA of music games," says Lange. EA (Electric Arts) is the number one publisher of sports video games.

"When people hear RedOctane we want them to associate us as the leader of the music games."