Several veteran developers who worked on the original Guitar Hero games have founded a new studio, RedOctane, and are working on a rhythm game inspired by their past work as well as what the community has created in the decades since plastic guitars ruled video games. The new game is expected to be announced later this year.
On August 6, RedOctane Games announced its existence with a flashy trailer and some press releases. If the name RedOctane sounds familiar, that’s because it was also the name of the studio that co-developed and produced the original Guitar Hero games back in 2005. RedOctane worked with Harmonix on the first few Guitar Hero games, before Activision bought the studio in 2006 and Harmonix split off and created Rock Band. The original RedOctane, founded in 1999 by brothers Kai and Charles Huang, continued to work on Guitar Hero alongside Neversoft until Activision shut the studio down in 2010 as rhythm games oversaturated the market and consumers stopped buying all those plastic instruments. But now, 15 years later, RedOctane has returned, and wants to bring back and evolve rhythm games.
“Rhythm games are about more than just gameplay, they’re about feel, flow, and connection to the music and to each other,” said Simon Ebejer, RedOctane’s head of studio. “RedOctane Games is our way of giving back to a genre that means so much to us, while pushing it forward in new and exciting directions.”
Ebejer was the production director on several Guitar Hero games and is part of a team composed of other RedOctane and Guitar Hero veterans, as well as younger developers who have worked on fan projects like YARG, a popular free Rock Band PC clone. A press release also confirmed that the original RedOctane founders, Charles and Kai Huang, will join a special advisory board for the company. This new version of RedOctane is part of Embracer Group’s massive portfolio of studios and resides within the company’s “Freemode” division alongside Middle-Earth Enterprises.
RedOctane says it’s working on several new “innovative rhythm-based experiences” and will announce a new game that has recently entered full production later this year. Previously, the members of this new studio helped create a high-end plastic guitar for games like Fortnite Festival. This was the first step toward a new game, which will contain guitars–as confirmed by an Embracer exec in an interview with GamesBeat–but it won’t just be Guitar Hero.
“This game won’t be Guitar Hero, DJ Hero, Guitar Freaks or Rock Band,” explained RedOctane in a lengthy press release about the studio’s origins. “This is something new. A rhythm game built with love, by people who care, with the community at its core in this fast-changing modern world we live in. We firmly believe the expert here is the community and a new generation of development talent, the folks that have kept the lights on these last few years.”
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