RedOctane Games is bringing music games back
New studios happen all the time, sometimes they are one person efforts and sometimes they are founded by former developers from another studio. Then there are the occasional revivals of old names, sometimes with a few former staff back on board and that is what RedOctane Games is.
If you are old like myself, then you probably remember the release of Guitar Hero in 2005 and then Guitar Hero II a year later, it was a paradigm shift for the video game industry. It was also the reason why countless gamers had plastic guitars around their homes, but I digress. For the original Guitar Hero games, there were two halves to it, you had Harmonix develop the software and RedOctane do the hardware, but in 2006 the two were bought out by different companies, and while RedOctane kept making guitars for the Guitar Hero series, Harmonix would go on to create Rock Band. The former would keep doing their thing until 2010 when Activision shut them down.
Fast forward to today and RedOctane Games, a new studio who are dedicated to making new music based games again, with some of the founding members being former RedOctane themselves. One thing I want to point out, the new studio is called RedOctane Games, the original was just RedOctane, a small difference to be sure, but an important one.
“Rhythm games are about more than just gameplay they’re about feel, flow, and connection to the music and to each other. 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.”
The RedOctane Games team includes creators and developers who helped create and scale Guitar Hero and DJ Hero nearly two decades ago, as well as proven emerging development talent and community leaders from across today’s rhythm gaming space. The studio is being built with the community from the ground up, ensuring that players are part of the creative journey from day one.
In addition, it has been announced that brothers Charles and Kai Huang will join a special advisory board for the company. Charles and Kai were the original founders of the Guitar Hero franchise back in 2005, having partnered with Harmonix Music Systems to launch the ground-breaking title that helped define a generation of rhythm gaming. Their involvement brings deep heritage and insight to the studio’s future direction.
The news comes as the CRKD Guitars are hitting stores, like JB HiFi. The CRKD team is actually former RedOctane developers as well, so its a two worlds colliding scenario there, but in a good way.
There is no word on what their first game is called, or when it might release, of course given the studios ambition and staff histories, we know it will be music based. They do have a great little blog post, that dives into the various parts that all lined up for the studios creation. For now though, we are just going to need to wait.
