Accolades

Virtual Frets, Actual Sweat
By Katie Zezima, Cambridge MA- Sunday July 15, 2007

Kevin Doyle and Ivan Wine strode to the front of River Gods and picked up the guitars with the confidence of two guys who had played this bar and those instruments many times before. [READ MORE]With their wives watching from a nearby table, Mr. Doyle, 30, a software consultant clad in a Dewar's Scotch T-shirt, and Mr. Wine, 32, a graphic designer with an unruly goatee and thick black glasses, strapped on the guitars and chose a song from the list on a projection screen.They planted themselves in position as the first plodding strains of Black Sabbath's head-banging heavy-metal classic "War Pigs" emanated from the speakers.

As the song's tempo increased, they frantically fingered the multicolor buttons on the necks of the guitars, hitting them with authority in time to the song's signature "dun-dun-dun" riffs. But the two men were not showboating. They were actually concentrating, biting their lips and staring almost trancelike at the screen, watching colored balls falling toward them on an electronic fretboard. When Mr. Doyle and Mr. Wine finished the last riff, the audience whooped and cheered. The newly minted music gods offered high fives as they returned to their seats. "We rocked the song," Mr. Wine said. This is Guitar Hero night, where curious bar patrons, self-styled bad boys and video game addicts, all usually a drink or two deep, play the game Guitar Hero on a big screen, and fulfill their dreams of being a preening, prancing rock 'n' roll frontman. Bars from Roanoke, Va., to San Diego are offering Guitar Hero nights, some providing players with big-hair wigs, Viking helmets and other colorful garb to help them complete the momentary illusion of being Eric Clapton or Lenny Kravitz.

Others serve as hosts of competitive tournaments where the winners receive real guitars. Players come because, for most, it's as close as they'll get to being an actual rock star. "The audience cheers and it's almost like being onstage," Mr. Wine said. "You don't get that playing the game in your living room."Within the past year, bar owners and managers have introduced the game, usually played in basements and bedrooms, into their locations to spike business on otherwise slow nights. Now they say Guitar Hero night is the new karaoke night - without the embarrassment of atrocious vocals."It's for people like me, who can't play guitar but want to," said Jasper Coolidge, the head talent booker at Pianos, a downtown Manhattan bar that features Guitar Hero night every Tuesday. Mr. Coolidge said business on Tuesdays had tripled at the bar, which typically attracts a post-college crowd, since the event began in April. "We wanted some sort of quirky thing that wasn't your typical New York dance-club house music night," he said.

At River Gods, where the crowd is filled with high-tech workers in rock T-shirts, blue jeans and Converse sneakers, bar regulars and bewildered patrons who just stopped by for a drink, some of the players take it much more seriously. "There are a couple of people who are these cartoon-character version of nerds," said Jeff MacIsaac, the entertainment producer here. "They're playing their Game Boys until Guitar Hero starts. They're actually playing video games before the video games start." Guitar Hero requires dexterous players to press buttons on a plastic guitar in time with a song chosen from a library of familiar rock tunes like "Message in a Bottle" and "Sweet Child O' Mine."

As the player watches colored notes scroll down a television screen, the object is to hit the corresponding colored buttons (along with a second strum button) in time with the notes to score points. The harder the level, the faster the notes fall and the more complicated the chords.The original version of Guitar Hero was developed by Harmonix, a company that creates musical-theme video games, and released by the software company RedOctane for PlayStation 2 in 2005. But it was not until the release in late 2006 of a sequel, Guitar Hero 2, which featured a larger catalog of songs ("Killing in the Name Of" by Rage Against the Machine, "Heart-Shaped Box" by Nirvana) and a new head-to-head play mode, that the game found its way into bars.

About three million copies of Guitar Hero 2 have been sold for PlayStation 2 and Xbox 360, according to Harmonix and RedOctane. No one knows how many copies are being featured in bars. Greg LoPiccolo, one of the creators of Guitar Hero and a vice president of product development at Harmonix, said the game was created to help people experience the thrill of performing in a club. But he didn't anticipate that it would actually catch on in bars."We never intended for it to happen," said Mr. LoPiccolo, who usually selects Stevie Ray Vaughn's "Texas Blood" when he plays the game. "But once we saw it take place, it was kind of perfect, really."Prowess at Guitar Hero doesn't necessarily equal expertise on a real guitar. At River Gods, Ben Azar, a 27-year-old guitar student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, eyed the game's guitar controller skeptically when it was handed to him. Just press the buttons to the beat of the song, he was told by one of the event's organizers.

As Van Halen's "You Really Got Me" started, Mr. Azar watched the screen as his fingers worked the frets, but he often looked confused, unsure why a note was missed or exactly what rhythm the guitar line was following.After finishing his song, Mr. Azar said that using the Guitar Hero controller forced him to concentrate more on pressing buttons than preening like a rock god. "It's very different," Mr. Azar said. "It's like making love to a rubber doll."Even though the game doesn't accurately simulate the mechanics of playing a guitar, players said that the lure of Guitar Hero lies mostly in the mythology of the instrument - one that for every rock fan conjures up images of Pete Townshend smashing his guitar on stage or Jimi Hendrix setting his aflame."When one thinks of rock 'n' roll, the first thing to come to mind is usually someone wailing away at a guitar," Mr. Wine said later in an e-mail message. "The guitar is at the heart of almost every rock band out there that is or has been." Others players, like Shandi Sullivan, a former contestant on "America's Next Top Model" and a regular at Pianos, appreciate Guitar Hero more for the experience of dressing up and performing for a live audience.

After discovering the game in April at a friend's apartment, Ms. Sullivan started coming to Pianos every Tuesday, and she even bought a PlayStation 2 to practice with in her apartment. At the bar's weekly Guitar Hero party, she assumes a different rock 'n' roll alter ego each time. She has been both Pat Benatar and Elvis Presley. Given her choice, though, she still prefers to rock out to Megadeth, and the game has turned her on to contemporary heavy-metal acts like Shadows Fall. "I can't wait until the '80s version comes out," Ms. Sullivan said. "Eighties music is my life." When Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, a sequel featuring the music of such nostalgically coiffed artists as Twisted Sister and Flock of Seagulls, is released on July 24, it will be the last collaboration between Harmonix and RedOctane. Last year, MTV purchased Harmonix, and RedOctane was acquired by the video game publisher Activision. But the Guitar Hero franchise will rock on.

Later this year, RedOctane and Neversoft, a video game studio owned by Activision, plan to release Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and Harmonix will start Rock Band, a Guitar Hero-like game that will also allow players to become drummers, bassists and vocalists. RedOctane is sponsoring a stage at the Family Values Tour this summer, which includes rock and heavy-metal acts, and it will hold Guitar Hero contests between sets. The winner will receive a guitar autographed by Jonathan Davis, the frontman of Korn. As with real rock stars, there is plenty of rivalry and ego to be found among the players of Guitar Hero. Mr. Coolidge, the Pianos talent booker, and Caroline Enright, the manager of River Gods, have thrown down a challenge: a New York vs. Boston Guitar Hero competition, preferably to be held when the Red Sox are playing the Yankees."We're going to have a tournament here to decide who is going up there," Mr. Coolidge said from New York.