Mobile Entertainment

Most people in the business will have heard of, or even personally enjoyed, the immense pleasures of the Activision-published game. Put simply, it adds an air of undeserved legitimacy to sad air guitar moments by allowing the musically untalented to plug a replica life-size guitar into a console and then jump around in their underpants pretending they are a living rock god.

The original Guitar Hero launched on the PlayStation 2 in November 2005 and received critical acclaim with its unique guitar controller and impressive soundtrack. Guitar Hero II followed a year later to become the fifth highest selling title of 2006, while Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock was released at the end of 2007.

Without doubt it’s a colossal brand. The challenge we faced was: how do we translate a console game with a two foot long plastic peripheral onto the mobile platform? Of course, we know big brands tend to sell well anyway, but there is no guarantee that bringing console quality experiences to mobiles will drive revenue. Simply delivering a big name brand that bears little relation to its console cousin is unlikely to endear gamers to mobile.

On the other hand, a carefully thought out approach that delivers on the spirit of the original title is likely to see uptake of the product. Our recent launch of Guitar Hero III Mobile in the US has proved it’s possible: the response from consumers has blown us and our operator partners away.

We released Guitar Hero III Mobile on one US operator in December. Within a month it had become the third biggest selling game of entire year on that operator alone and one of the fastest selling games in mobile gaming history. A large part of this success is to do with the brand but there are several key features that have kept it true to the original.

The quality of the soundtrack on the BREW version has been outstanding. Using BREW meant that the game’s soundtrack, encoded on PMD, is not compromised – the experience delivered on mobile is aurally identical to the high quality console soundtracks. The increased capacity of the high-end handsets has also allowed for greater flexibility in the size of the game, allowing more sound and stronger graphics.

Aside from this faithful and sympathetic translation of a much-loved franchise the other key to success has been the availability of monthly downloadable song packs coupled with a strong sense of community through online leader boards

By utilising the phones’ connected elements, more than 250,000 songs are played every day by mobile subscribers across the US with over 7.5 million played each month – that’s around 200GB of songs downloaded from our servers every day. There are also over 100,000 users listed on the online leaderboard.

The success of Guitar Hero III: Mobile demonstrates that, done correctly, mobile versions of console games can generate a new wave of players. We were able to deliver top quality sound and graphics, and enabled operators to maximise revenue from mobile players by offering the downloadable songs that have so enthused the players of the console game. We’ll be releasing Guitar Hero III on mobile in Europe this summer. Get ready to rock.