ZAKK WYLDE 'Asked' To Be Involved In GUITAR HERO Game

December 15, 2005

MTV.com has published an in-depth article about "Guitar Hero", a rock and roll PlayStation 2 game that is controlled with a two-foot-long plastic guitar, which has become one of the surprise hits of the busy holiday gaming season. Developed this year by Harmonix and published by a scrappy California outfit called RedOctane, gaming insiders say it's one of the hardest games to find in stores; on the web site for GameStop, the leading American game-store chain, "Guitar Hero" is currently sold out.

A Zakk Wylde song was included two weeks before the game's completion when the guitarist found out about the project and asked to be involved. Wylde's track turned out to be the only one of the game's 31 licensed songs that's not a cover version (the original recordings would likely be prohibitively expensive to use even if a license could be obtained). The need to use covers led to another challenge for the purists working on the game: figuring out how to make the new versions sound like the real things. John Tam, the game's producer at RedOctane, said the sound producers went to great lengths to make the recordings accurate. When they read that the fluctuations in Ozzy Osbourne's voice on BLACK SABBATH's "Iron Man" were created by having the singer perform from the other side of a spinning metal fan, they tracked down the same model fan through Craig's List and re-created the vocal effect.

Read the entire article at MTV.com.

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