…From Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero is a lot of things. Sometimes it’s the most entertaining game you’ve ever seen. Other times, it’s boring as hell. Often, it can be a good way to pass the time. It can also be more stressful than your final exam, but above all else, Guitar Hero is the number one talent I accidentally stumbled upon.

I think it may be time to hang up my plastic guitar.

It was my sister’s birthday, about 4 years ago. One of her presents from my family was the game Guitar Hero 2. I had seen this game before, most recently at the hotel my high school basketball team was staying in during the state tournament. I watched some guys play it, and I was in awe with how good they were. I easily could have joined in, but I chose not to for fear of being embarrassed over how bad I might be. Oh, what an ironic thought.

My sister seemed genuinely interested in the game, but she didn’t play it very often. That’s when I took over. I started on easy, and I realized within a few songs that it was much simpler than I anticipated. I moved on to medium, and had the entire game finished in a week.

Graduating to hard was… well, hard. If you had witnessed me trying to pass hard, you would have seen me cursing out the orange button (the second button your pinkie had to cover) as I would either forget to shift my hand across the fret buttons or I would shift and then forget to shift back. Eventually, I learned that all 5 buttons would have to be covered by at least two fingers: green red yellow blue, or red yellow blue orange to my index, middle, ring, and pinkie.

I’ve been asked several times how I became so good at the game. Honestly, I don’t know. The best explanations I came up with is that I always knew where my fingers were, and I was always looking ahead. For example…

…if this is the TV screen while playing, my eyes were focused on the white line I’ve drawn. I don’t know why I started doing that, but it seemingly allowed me to know what was coming before I had to react. I tried playing while looking at the bottom of the track, but I noticed that my eyes would still drift upwards while I played.

Three weeks after starting hard, I was on expert. I was still a little shaky (passing Megadeth’s “Hangar 18” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” were tough), but I felt that I was doing fairly well. It was around this time I learned of a Guitar Hero tournament being held by a local gaming store. First prize was a PS3, and since entering the contest was free, I decided to compete.

Well, I quickly learned that I was overmatched. I faced off in the first round against a guy about my age that looked like he was one of the Insane Clown Posse Juggalos. I don’t remember the first song, all I know is that he beat me handily. The second song was “Raw Dog” by The Last Vegas, and I while I didn’t know the scores, I still remember the percentage of notes hit. He had 95%, I was at 83%.

I wouldn’t say the tournament motivated me to get better, but I continued playing whenever I could. When I got to college, all my neighbors noticed how often I played the game and I quickly earned a casual nickname of “The Guitar Hero Guy,” which was cemented when I won the Guitar Hero tournament for freshman during J-Term. Considering that I showed up with a chair so I could play and sit at the same time, yeah, I guess I can see how I was a bit of a mini-legend.

The game had always been stressful. Occasionally, my neighbors would peer into my room as they heard me cursing out the game whenever I failed a song I was close to beating. At the end of my freshman year, I included this in my inaugural “Things I’ve Learned From My Freshman Year At Gustavus” post:

Guitar Hero has stressed me out more than finals.

It was true. Even getting a D- in organic chemistry was less stressful than DragonForce’s “Through The Fire And Flames.” Some people might still be in disbelief about that, but I never really was concerned about tests, but I digress.

Guitar Hero and I became a bit of a joke between my friends. Not in the sense that they took pity on me, but rather that they felt it was the only thing I did in my free time. Oddly enough, as this sentiment continued, I started playing less and less. One was that as I moved up through college, my free time started dwindling. This was a result from tougher classes and an increased focus on baseball (see my other blog).

During the summer between sophomore and junior year, I alleviated my boredom by returning to the older games I had stopped playing long ago. I set new scoring records, perfected a few more songs, and pushed some 3 and 4 star songs up to 4s and 5s. Then, I hit a wall.

When I have something I really enjoy, I always want to get better. Well, with Guitar Hero, I finally reached a point where I couldn’t get any better. Some songs were just too difficult to improve (or impossible to beat a second time, in the case of Buckethead’s “Jordan”). Others were just boring to play ever since the beginning. Throw in the fact that my guitars stopped working on me, and I just wasn’t having fun anymore.

My confirmation was this past semester. I brought my favorite Guitar Hero games with me, and yet I – the person my friends claimed did nothing but play in my spare time – played only twice. Also, with a lack of desire to receive Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock for Christmas, it became clear that I didn’t care anymore.

I’m ok with my decision. If I miss it, I’ll still play the games I can find. I won a J-Term tournament, a Blaine Blazin’ 4th tournament, and a weekly Applebee’s tournament. I’ve patched together a whammy bar with a rubber band, effectively ending its warranty. I broke about 3 guitars total (electrical problems, not from me unleashing blind rage on them). I also passed every single song on expert between Guitar Hero 1 to Guitar Hero 5.

I really don’t know how to conclude this post, but maybe it’s just meant to fade away the same way that my interest in Guitar Hero has done. Therefore, I suppose the best way to end is with the one song I always wished was on the game (simply for the 2 min. guitar solo at the end), but probably never will. Lyrics are fairly appropriate, anyway.