Raw Thrills VP Andrew Eloff has talked about how a deal between Activision and Konami came about to produce an arcade Guitar Hero, despite being rivals.
When Eloff was asked by Konami to undertake the project he said it ”shocked the hell out of me.” Despite declining arcade numbers the Guitar Hero unit is doing ”very, very, very well.”
”Basically, Konami approached us with the deal,” said Eloff. ”It shocked the hell out of me. I was thrilled. The thing with Guitar Hero that’s so frightening is there’s so much licensing associated with it.”
”We’re not set up to do all that. When Konami came to us, asking us if we wanted to develop Guitar Hero, we felt like this was a perfect symbiotic relationship.”
Konami develops and publishes the rival franchise Rock Revolution, but despite this the two publishers struck a partnership to bring Guitar Hero to arcades. A lot was to do with Acti wanting to avoid legal troubles and patent issues.
”It’s kind of one of the weirder things in the world, right? It’s Konami and Activision and Raw Thrills all working together. Konami has all this experience with doing coin-op games and Activision has the number one domestic music game. So, I think it’s kind of a match made in heaven,” continued Eloff.
The arcade game is based off of Guitar Hero 3 as during development World Tour was still being worked on itself and would have slowed the project down. The units can also download new tracks at the discretion of their owners to keep up-to-date.
As for how well the units are doing? ”We have more pre-orders on this game than ever, than we’ve ever seen - ever,” Eloff said. ”It’s amazing. It’s doing very, very, very well.”
Source: 1UP
