1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JUNE 25 | VIDEO GAME MUSIC FESTIVAL
Rhythm Thief Reinvents the Character-driven Music Game
Cover Story: Sega’s latest could help bring character-driven music game back into vogue.
T
he rhythm music genre of video games has gone through a lot in the past seven years; at least enough for a tumultuous VH1 Behind-the-Music special to call its very own. If such a program were recorded, it would go something like this: While the genre happily existed for a long time with occasional character-driven hits like Parappa the Rapper and Gitaroo Man, after 2005 everything changed. That year, co-developers Red Octane and Harmonix engineered Guitar Hero and gave players a fun, skill-focused way to interact with their favorite rock music. Their work became an instant success; one that drew both mainstream attention and record profits. While it expanded an existing subset of rhythm-based video games, Guitar Hero quickly overshadowed everything else available in the genre at the time.
Although character-driven rhythm titles continued to exist in some form, efforts like the excellent Elite Beat Agents simply couldn’t compete with the guitar-shredding popularity found in their instrument-based counterparts and slowly dissolved from the public eye. However, a funny thing happened by 2010: Thanks to market saturation, the sun would set on the world of instrument-based games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. While we were sad to see the biggest hitter in music video games slowly fade away, it’s also set the stage for a character-driven music comeback.
