#394: Reunion tour

I did not watch Geoff Keighley’s Gamescom show. I have, after all, been hurt before. Besides, the kids have been at their grandparents’ this week, so I was never going to give up a long evening on the sofa with Mrs HP for whatever banal dreck Keighley had in store. I had a quick glance at the wondrous subscriber-exclusive Hit Points Discord about ten minutes into the show, saw one comment about the length of Keighley’s trousers and another that read “Hoyoverse is making a Soulslike?!” and thought, gosh, there’s the bingo card filled out already. The following morning I scanned This Week In Videogames’ excellent show round-up, watched the handful of trailers that caught my eye, and got on with my day. It took about 20 minutes. You mean I could have been doing this this whole time? Lesson, admittedly belatedly, learned.

While it hardly screams ‘future of interactive entertainment’, the game I was most interested in was Stage Tour, an attempted resurrection of the plastic-instrument music game — referred to by its cognoscenti as ‘five-fret’; good genre name for once, well done — by RedOctane, itself a phoenix-like revival of the synonymous Guitar Hero studio shuttered by parent company Activision in 2010. It is, to all intents and purposes, a new Rock Band for current consoles and PC, with guitars, vocals and drums, all playable solo or in local or cross-platform co-op, across a licensed setlist of more than 90 songs. While there’s support, to varying platform-specific degrees, for legacy Guitar Hero and Rock Band gear, RedOctane is serving up a variety of peripheral bundles, from a simple game-and-guitar combo at £140/$150 to the Pro Band Kit bundle, which for £430/$470 gets you a guitar, microphone, and an expanded drumkit with cymbals and a double kick-pedal. Pricey, eh? Everything is these days of course, but still. Seems a bit... ambitious. That’s precisely what makes it so interesting to me.

It helps that it’s a subject that’s been close to my heart of late. A few months ago my youngest proudly announced on the walk home from school that he was starting a band with his friends. One was to play, and already had access to, the guitar; another had chosen, and also already had access to, the keyboard. My kid, all of eight, and the sort of person who goes through phases of fixating on something to the point of obsession, before realising at some point it’s harder than it looks, dropping it like a stone and moving on to the next shiny thing — this is not a criticism; we can smell our own — had agreed to play the drums. Not the keyboard, obviously, because we’ve got one of those up in the loft somewhere, acquired when the children were tiny and the grandparents were still on that early revenge-mission kick, steadily introducing things that made loud, discordant, deeply annoying noises to Hit Points Towers because it was our turn now and we deserved it. (Again, no shade, I fully intend to do the same when the time comes. I already have the beginnings of a list). Not guitar, which would be even easier; there are four in the house, including one I bought specifically for the kids to learn on that sits, dusty and unloved, in the corner of the lounge. No. The drums. The largest, noisiest, and most expensive of the lot. Like any good father, I immediately started work on an escape plan.

Inspiration came mercifully quickly. As paid subscribers know all too well from the many bits of nonsense I have written behind the paywall of late, this summer we've been all about retro games chez Hit Points. In addition to indulging my personal nostalgia, I planned it as a sort of crash course in videogame history for the kids; to help them understand not just what games were like back then, but what the hardware looked like, how it felt to thunk a cartridge into a slot, and all that. I figured I could slot Rock Band into this whole experience pretty neatly. We’d get some wholesome family fun out of it, and I’d be able to give the youngest a feel of the drums — and likely put him off the whole idea — for a fraction of the cost. Right? A fraction? Surely? I braved the wastes of Gumtree, eBay and Facebook Marketplace to find out.

Ha! Never mind. It turns out that plastic instruments have maintained their value annoyingly well — and in many cases have appreciated significantly, providing they’re in good nick and have all the wireless dongles and stuff. I learn quickly that the best prices are to be found on Wii. This, I figure, is partly due to the game still being pretty popular among the homebrew-inclined on Xbox 360 and PS3, and partly due to the Wii demographic being slightly fuller of non-capital-G-gamer types who bought this stuff years ago, played with it twice, then put it under the stairs and forgot about it until the other day, when they were going through some stuff and found it and just want it out of their house now, thank you very much. (Shout out to the Gumtree guy in the next town over, who sold me a Wii Guitar Hero Les Paul, two Remotes and a pair of nunchucks for £30. He could have got at least double that on eBay, but he seemed delighted to be rid of them — as was I to take them off his hands.)

Besides, Wii suited me rather well. I hadn’t gone into the roof looking for the 360 or PS3 because, in this brain of mine, they are not retro consoles. The Wii, despite being a a contemporary of them, is. Do not ask me to explain this, because I cannot. It just makes sense to me.

Anyway! Fast forward a couple of weeks, to when I have become so fed up of being ghosted by that guy an hour away with some drums going cheap that I buy a full Rock Band: The Beatles set, boxed with all the dongles and in reasonable condition, on eBay for an amount of money I would prefer not to disclose. We set it up and the family has a whale of a time, though as expected the youngest quickly realises that drumming is an awful faff and loses interest; to my surprise he swiftly restyles himself as a singer. (I do not know precisely when he learned the lyrics, and mastered the flow, to No Sleep Til Brooklyn, but he absolutely nails it first time. Very proud.)

Unfortunately this setup is rather limited, since we can only play along to songs the kids know, and while I have obviously done my best to pass down my taste in music, this is a long project and is still a work in progress. Even after doing Naughty Internet Things to acquire a few more favourites from the Rock Band DLC archive, our setlist is small. I know from a friend that Rock Band ‘customs’ — songs charted by hobbyists, that you copy to the console in such a way as to trick the game into thinking are official DLC — have been a thing for years. And I know from my own dabbling a couple of years ago that Clone Hero, a free, if rather spartan PC game released by a solo developer in 2022, makes playing customs much more straightforward.

I look into it a bit, and realise to my delight that, aside from the old Guitar Hero model that requires me to install some free software, all my Wii instruments are plug-and-play on PC (the others require modern adapters cooked up by the five-fret community). It then transpires that active development on Clone Hero stopped a while ago after its developer sadly fell ill, and that the community’s attention has since switched to YARG (short, disappointingly, for Yet Another Rhythm Game), an open-source project in active development that aims a good deal higher, with Rock Band-style concert backgrounds and, critically given the youngest’s realigned interests, support for vocals. I then discover RhythmVerse, a one-stop-shop for free custom charts that has almost 100,000 songs in its catalogue, made by more than 9,000 creators. Before long I am fully set up, with a custom setlist of almost 500 songs, a decent percentage of which the kids know and love. A thoroughly excellent afternoon of YARG follows. That night, while the house sleeps, I pour a generous whisky, slip on some headphones, and play my favourite Pavement album from front to back. It is the best 40 minutes of the summer.

All of which makes Stage Tour very interesting, I think. To most of us the plastic instrument died in the early 2010s, when a heavily oversaturated genre had lost its appeal, sales had tanked, studios got closed or reassigned, and countless sets of mouldering guitars and drums went off to landfill. This style of game burned bright, but brief, and so you might see Stage Tour as a very expensive gamble: one that bets that nostalgia for the era is so potent that people will be prepared to cough up almost $500 to experience it. But consider all of the above. There is already an audience for this stuff: an audience that cranks out custom song charts by the thousands, that makes websites to host them and free games to play them in; that makes adapters and software tools to give old instruments compatibility with modern hardware, that writes guides and maintains sprawling wikis to lure curious newcomers over the fence to their wonderful kingdom.

The problem for Stage Tour, of course, is that these people would appear to already have everything they need. But those old guitars and drums can only take so much punishment, and their dwindling supply and annoyingly persistent cost make getting hold of spares more difficult by the day; there is a natural appeal, therefore, in a new line of sturdy, box-fresh instruments. Stage Tour does some pretty groovy new stuff, such as Judgement mode, which scores the accuracy of your play in the manner of a traditional rhythm game. And you should never underestimate the power of current-gen production values, and particularly of a console release, where cross-platform play will mean getting the band back together will never have been so straightforward.

Will it work? God knows. Am I interested? No thanks, I’ve just bought all this Rock Band stuff and am not, despite my best efforts, made of money. But I will be watching on with interest, cheering on from backstage, hoping this most distinctive and rewarding of genres has another shot at the big time.

There you go! Sorry, went on a bit there, lots to say. If you've enjoyed today's edition, might I interest you in a paid subscription? You get more newsletters, access to the Discord, and your choice of a high five or hug if we ever meet in person. Click that button above, if you like; if you're not into the whole subscription thing, there's a tip jar below, too. Forward this email to a pal maybe! Every little helps.

MORE! is still on holiday, and will return in a couple of weeks once the kids are back in school. Have a great weekend!