| Guitar Hero: no strings attached
Christmas season, selling 290,000 copies. Now Harmonix is scrambling to complete Guitar Hero II. There are already more advance orders for the sequel than the number of sold copies of the original game. The first Guitar Hero would have sold much better, except for a shortage that made the game hard to come by during the holidays. Blame it on the guitar. Every copy of the game comes with its own axe, a game controller shaped like a rock guitar. But all the guitars are built at a single factory in China. "They haven't been able to make the plastic guitars fast enough," said Harmonix chief executive Alex Rigopulos, a musician. And of course you can't be a rock god without the ability to hurl six-string thunderbolts. The pseudo-guitar is the secret of Guitar Hero's success.
Guitar Hero Gig Bag
One issue with being a Guitar Hero zealot is that it's a secret righteousness. Who besides my girlfriend and my friends nursing hangovers will know that I, when initiating star power, can actually twirl the Guitar Hero controller around my neck just like Johnny Napalm? But more importantly: Guitar Heroes simply don't get indy street cred confining their trashing to the isolation of their own living room. We can't swagger around downtown, a guitar controller slung over our shoulder, a lit Marlboro dangling from our lower lips. Girls would take one look at that plastic guitar with the Fisher Price buttons and make a collective decision through the Feminine Hive Mind to never sleep with us again, forever. Or at least, they would have until now. But I see over at Lik Sang that they are now selling a Guitar Hero guitar case with the words Guitar Hero actually printed upon it.
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