Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
Every video game fan who survived the decade from 2005 to 2015 must, eventually, make an account of themselves before the faux-music gods, and answer the questions that haunt their plastic-stained souls. How many fake guitars suffered at your hands, pilgrim? How many knock-off DJ kits or bass guitars were schlepped, with increasing resentment, from move to move, until that one change of address when they just… weren’t? Parents: Do you know where your plastic drumkits are?
My own butcher’s bill of dead video game music controllers—kicked off, like so many, by the 2005 arrival of Harmonix’s Guitar Hero—is fairly bloody. Two plastic lead guitars, a bass, the standard Rock Band drumkit, and, to my enduring shame, four full sets of bongo drums from Nintendo’s fun-but-simplistic GameCube title Donkey Konga. (The belief that I was going to regularly accomplish, with four bongos, anything I wasn’t going to manage with three, can only feel like an extreme edge of the hubris of youth.) Most of these Large Lumps made the various transitions with me throughout my 20s, usually moving back and forth between Chicago and my hometown, until a trans-country move circa 2013 made bringing them with me both an impossibility and a mild embarrassment. I’m reasonably sure they served as fine spiderweb supports in a room in my parents’ house for a few years, before eventually being dumped onto the trashpile of history. (Also: The trashpile of trash.)
And yet, looking back at those halcyon days of 2005—when any college freshman could instantly summon a crew of fair-weather friends by plugging Guitar Hero into the dorm TV and laying down a few pseudo-licks of “More Than A Feeling”— it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the decade-long dominance of the plastic orchestra. And maybe even a genuine sense of loss: Guitar Hero‘s cultural dominance—which ran for almost exactly a decade before getting a stake driven through its hard-rocking heart by the bizarre Guitar Hero Live in 2015—represented both an alternative form of ways for players to control their games, but also for how you could get someone to simply try them. Coinciding with the rise of the naturally intuitive Wii, Guitar Hero represented a form of gaming where you could just hand someone a controller, explain maybe three buttons, and then watch them start having fun in seconds, regardless of prior experience. And those plastic controllers were the key: Rather than anonymous, serviceable pucks designed for optimal button delivery, they were weighty, real-feeling, and only made you look kind of like a complete dingus while they were strapped to your chest. Squint your eyes a little, crank the difficulty settings and the speakers to the right level, and you could, just barely, trick your brain into thinking you were genuinely rocking out. It was a magic trick—and, like most magic tricks, one that lost some of its shine the more times you saw it repeated.
It’s all ridiculously unfashionable now, of course. Hardware junkies have moved on to clumsy virtual reality rigs, and any “alternative control scheme” for a video game is now going to almost inevitably involve just screwing around on your phone. (God bless Nintendo, eternally out of step with the times, for launching its motion camera-controlled Mario Party Jamboree Switch 2 update into such an environment just a few weeks back.) The idea of physically manipulating a non-controller object in order to make something happen on the screen has largely been excised from the home, relegated instead to the realm of America’s few remaining arcades. (And even then, they’ve usually been repurposed in service of faux-gambling ticket games. If you’re very lucky, you might find the occasional copy of 2009’s Guitar Hero Arcade kicking around, hopefully placed there by an operator who knows how to keep it properly maintained.) The idea that “gaming” could mean standing up in your living room, rocking out while your best friends backed you up on drums, or belted out the vocals of “Wave Of Mutilation,” has genuinely died; it’s an experience you just can’t have anymore, tossed away like so many dead plastic bongo drums. You can call the whole thing a fad, if you like: It followed the market trends of one, from novelty to oversaturation to eventual decline. But while it was riding high, there was nothing quite like it—and, quite possibly, never will be again.
