Recently, Chris Faylor of Shacknews was at a Guitar Hero event, where he was able to demo the Vicarious Visions-developed and Activision-published Guitar Hero: On Tour. The event was attended by industry press, and the collective taping and scratch on the game led Faylor believe that this will be a quality addition to the series after all.

Faylor reports that Guitar Hero: On Tour will have the series' difficulty intact and appropriately balanced, while lauding the game's new Duel-Mode, derivative of Guitar Hero III's Battle Mode. The item-based duel mode will be more skillful than the random and luck-heavy battle mode of its predecessor.

In the resulting interview with Vicarious Visions CEO Karthik Bala, they discuss the game's production and the Guitar Grip peripheral that will ship in the game, and slot in the DS's GBA slot. The game came into fruition through the collaborative effort of Vicarious Visions, Activision and Nintendo.

Curiously though:

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As Bala puts it, the whole thing came out of the Vicarious staff playing around to "see if it was even possible to do a really good music rhythm game on a handheld.

No one asked Vicarious Visions to make Guitar Hero for the Nintendo DS. No one at studio owner Activision, fellow Activision subsidiary RedOctane, or Nintendo believed it was even possible.

"People thought it was ludicrous," Vicarious CEO Karthik Bala told me at a Guitar Hero event earlier this week. "It was never in the plan to do that."

As Bala puts it, the whole thing came out of the Vicarious staff playing around to "see if it was even possible to do a really good music rhythm game on a handheld." Twenty-three prototypes and a few cardboard guitars later, a breakthrough came in the form of a "crazy Frankenstein GBA cartridge" wired with fret buttons.

Activision and RedOctane thought it was insane. And when the first prototype was presented to Nintendo, Bala says they were stunned.

But the really, really amazing part? For all the unwieldy-looking peripherals and wacky ads, the Nintendo DS entry, Guitar Hero: On Tour, really is Guitar Hero. It works. It's fun. In fact, I think it does some things better than the console editions of Guitar Hero 3

Akira_EX via shacknews.com »