Ghosts of E3 Past – Power Gig

For our series on promises of E3s past, I’d like to concentrate on a spectacular flop that wasn’t announced at E3, but had its fate sealed there.

At the 2010 Game Developer’s Conference, a plucky developer named Seven45 Studios unveiled what they thought would change the world of music gaming forever. Power Gig: Rise of the Six String burst on to the scene, throwing down the proverbial gauntlet at its competitors in the rhythm industry. The challenge was simple – anything they can do, we can do better. With great fanfare, Seven45 declared Power Gig the superior rhythm game thanks to its sole defining feature: a six stringed guitar controller.

What’s that, you say? Playing the game with a real guitar?  Such things had never been heard of on a console before, even though MIDI and aural guitar learning tools existed on PCs for years. Advertising for Power Gig implied that the game was like playing a real guitar. Trouble is, it was anything but.

I think that early on in development the game really wanted to be a “play a real guitar” game, but the developers either ran out of money or development resources to achieve that goal, and the developers went with what they had. While on the one hand the game was marketed as more realistic experience than Guitar Hero or Rock Band 2, it was never specifically referred to as a guitar teaching tool – this last point was deliberate, yet minimized. The devs tried to have their cake and eat it too. The level of smugness grew, too, with such bizarre PR stunts as dropping a bunch of plastic guitar controllers into a volcano from a helicopter.

Until E3 2010 rolled around, very few actual hands had gotten a hold of Power Gig to play it first hand. Up until that point, only a few demos had been given to the press, which received it with indifference until E3. The game was mostly on the sidelines, throwing potshots at its competitors and making smug statements about their awesomeness. I was heartily dismayed at the fact that big acts that I admired – respectable musicians like Eric Clapton – were lured into licensing their music for this game because it had the promise of a real guitar.

When E3 2010 rolled around, Power Gig was available for all to see, and it didn’t look good. In fact, it looked downright disgusting. The guitar was a cheap plastic and plywood job that could only be called a “real guitar” by the absolute skin of its teeth. Since Seven45 worked with notoriously low quality instrument vendor First Act instead of a real guitar company like Fender or Gibson, this much was to be expected. The gameplay was a bizarre rip of the usual gems on a highway style – except now you had six! After all, it’s one more than the others, that makes it better! The malformed power chords mode gave you very limited chords that barely matched up with the music – or many times not at all.

All of this could have been dealt with and Seven45 could have gone on with their Real Guitar™ schtick in some capacity, save for one slight problem they didn’t foresee. At E3 2010, Harmonix revealed the next big feature of the, at the time, upcoming Rock Band 3 - Pro Guitar mode. Pro Guitar mode used a real guitar (of much higher quality than the one in Power Gig) to allow you to play the actual notes of the song. With Rock Band 3′s Pro Mode, you really were playing the song – as opposed to Power Gig’s braindead string on color approach.

This announcement rendered Power Gig dead on arrival. In one fell swoop the entire business case for Power Gig vanished. Instead of investing in an alternative platform, players could stick with a market leader in Harmonix. There was no time to adjust, either, and Seven45 had to stay the course for release.

The real losers in this whole scenario were the players. Thanks to contracts, some artists that appeared in Power Gig won’t appear in other rhythm games, or soured them on the genre again. It put even more instruments and games on the shelves that didn’t sell, making it tougher for the legitimate music games to expand. This is all beside the fact that the Power Gig gameplay experience itself has few to no redeeming qualities on its own.

I experienced Power Gig only once, as a curiosity at a gaming get-together. My chum, who hosted the party, acquired a copy as a gag in a clearance sale at our local Gamestop. The reward for getting good at this game was a wonderful one – the privilege of smashing the “real” guitar controller like Pete Townshend. Alas, I did not win the contest, so I was deprived the pleasure of obliterating a guitar, but it was all the experience I needed with Power Gig. I could see a glimpse of what they wanted it to be, but they did not execute anywhere in their game development. The game played terribly, it looked awful, and the guitar didn’t even fall apart convincingly when my buddy bashed it against the wall.

Lessons can be learned from this of course – the main one being that if you’re going to go up against the juggernauts, you have to bring one hundred and ten percent. Half-baking a clone will not catapult a game ahead of the competition, no matter what your gimmick is. Bringing a genuinely new and refreshing concept will get buyers – and Seven45 could not achieve that due to either short-sightedness or lack of resources. Ironically, the best example of how to do this properly is the original Rock Band itself. The reason it worked wasn’t because Harmonix brought out another hit based on its old Guitar Hero tech. It worked because it took the rhythm genre to the next level with full-band gameplay, giving you a compelling reason to buy it. Power Gig is a cautionary tale, best heeded by all who wish to develop a concept.