You can’t get blood from a stone, but it turns out you can milk rock – to an extent. Activision were apparently planning an ambitious MMO set under the increasingly wide Guitar Hero umbrella before it all went to crap.
The always brilliant Unseen64 report that the project – called Hero World – was originally envisioned by DJ Hero developer Freestyle games, but since they lacked experience in that kind of game, Activision brought in Amsterdam-based Virtual Fairgrounds, who had previous MMO success with a game called Club Galactik.
Hero World was intended to work across all future Hero games, as you created your own avatar and embarked on the exciting journey of a music club owner.
There was intended to be some kind of story, and battles were to be undertaken in rhythm based “dance-offs” because paying your bouncer to break some guys leg’s for doing coke in your toilets would have been too real, presumably.
A complementary Facebook app was also in the works that would have allowed players to host their own music festivals. This never really made it out of the gate, as Virtual Fairgrounds were too busy with the MMO side of things.
The intention was to make Hero World fully compatible across Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox platforms, while earnable in game credit could be spent in the main games on new gear and clothes. On the flipside, bands from the main games could have performed in the Hero World for large payouts.
Sadly, tragedy struck. It’s as if Activision put out way, way too many Hero games and everyone stopped giving a shit. Hang on – that’s exactly what happened.
Naturally, as soon as Activision realised the franchise wasn’t making any money they halted development on all Hero games, and Hero World faded in to obscurity. This also led to the eventual closure of Virtual Fairgrounds, who ended up wasting months on a dead project, which is genuinely shitty.
Check out the entire video below for a full account.
All things considered, it’s probably for the best that the franchise slowed down. I swear we were probably only a few games away from Brass Band Hero.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.