A source has come out and said that the canceled Guitar Hero 7 game was a disaster in the making. Vicarious Visions had taken the reins on this thing and, first things first, they decided to ditch the drums and vocals in favor of concentrating on the guitar.

But they had developed a new guitar peripheral that was fraught with problems. "This amazing thing was a six-stringed guitar," the source sarcastically relates. "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!"

The source also says that the early models of the guitar were bad in other ways. "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 oculd afford to buy one."

The source did say, however, that the early demo's ambitions were extraordinary, with venues that changed in the middle of the song, corresponding with song changes. The source says, "The demo gave me goosebumps."

Of course, there's more negatives to go along with that. Vicarious Visions had developed all-new "characters [whose] necks were over a foot long...they all looked like they were punched in the face."

Then there were the songs, of which there were little. "When the songs started coming in, a great sense of dread came about everyone with an active brain," says the source. They were using some songs that had been used before and started digging into B-list songs from the '90s such as "Closing Time" and "Sex and Candy." 

Their ambitions started to overwhelm them as well, as they wanted to essentially have a music video with a different dynamic venue for each one (the back of a moving truck or a tomb, for example) and with 80 songs it just wasn't going to happen. So they started to cut corners and everything ran together. Pretty much every song was in the back of the truck or the tomb with some different graffiti, lights, and cuts. 

When Activision President Eric Hirschberg visited the developer in 2011 and saw all this, he shut the project down immediately and that was that for Guitar Hero. Of course, there's still a chance that it will be reborn one day.

[Via Kotaku]

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