For a certain generation of readers, understanding the cultural impact of Guitar Hero is not a difficult task: it triggered a cultural explosion that made guitar music cool again and birthed a new generation of electric guitar heroes, with Herman Li and DragonForce leading the charge.
Li, who has just completed his surprise pivot from Ibanez to PRS with a wildly different signature guitar, recently reflected on the life-changing madness the video game’s popularity helped grant not just for him, but for a whole legion of players.
DragonForce had been around for sometime when Guitar Hero sought to include the high-octane shred fest that is Through the Fire and Flames into its game. Before Guitar Hero flipped the guitar world upside down, the band had released three albums, toured with Iron Maiden, played at Ozzfest, and sold out a run of US shows.
Yet, as successful as they were in the eyes of some, others met them with belittling grins.
“I mean, they were long songs with a million guitar solos,” Li says of their earliest material in a new interview with Andertons. “People used to laugh at us back then, they'd say, ‘Why are you playing guitar solos? No one listens to this stuff. This is so lame.’ So we thought, ‘Let's do more of it, let's go even faster.’ We made it more over the top.
“So we evolved with the third album [2005's Inhuman Rampage]. We were part of a movement that made guitar cool again. Grunge and nu-metal had wiped out all these amazing guitar players.”
Indeed, Dave Mustaine has famously criticized nu-metal bands, saying they don't do guitar solos because they can't, but Lee Anderton has an interesting alternate take. The rise of those movements, he says, came in the wake of decades of technical pyrotechnics, tapping, and sweep picking. There needed to be a cultural reset.
“The grunge thing happened just as it had become a real problem for people learning to play the guitar,” Anderton observes. “They realized it would take years and years to be as good as Mark Knopfler or Steve Vai. Then Kurt Cobain, Noel Gallagher, and the nu-metal guys came, and people could do that in weeks. All of a sudden, guitar sales went [through the roof].”
The changing of the guard to a more simplistic art form was inevitable – as Wolfgang Van Halen says, his dad “kind of” ruined '80s guitar music as a legion of copyists came out of the woodwork. But it was also inevitable that the pendulum would swing back the other way, and Guitar Hero was a real driver for that.
“When they [Neversoft] contacted me, I already knew about the game, I'd played it myself,” Li says of Guitar Hero III. “These moments in time: Guitar Hero helped guitar, for sure. I've met a lot of musicians who have told me that they got into guitar because of Guitar Hero and DragonForce.
“And looking back, the grunge era was great because it shows that the guitar is a tool to express your artistic side. It's not about how fast you can shred. It wasn't, ‘You have to be at this level or not play at all.’ The guitar can be enjoyed in so many ways.”
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