| 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 II Update
June 16, 2006 - Party in a box. That's the simplest way to define Guitar Hero. It's one of those games that simply demand your attention. And, as it happens, everyone standing next to you, as well. Why the interest? To put it simply: because it rocks. Harmonix created a mini-miracle with Guitar Hero, much in the same way NanaOn-Sha did with PaRappa the Rapper. They may not seem that similar, but they each tied awesome tunes with highly addictive gameplay. .
Portrait fleshes out folk singer's legacy
"A lot of people know Woody Guthrie as the guy in dungarees with a guitar on his back who played three-chord songs," Peter Frumkin said. "But theres a lot more to him than that." Thats why Frumkin, a filmmaker in Cambridge, Mass., devoted the past seven years to making the PBS American Masters documentary Woody Guthrie: Aint Got No Home. The film is a painstakingly crafted portrait of the folk singers life, the roots of his music and Guthries political and artistic legacy. It was, Frumkin said, a labor of love whose seeds were planted many years ago. "When I was growing up, I listened to a lot of music by people who were influenced by Woody Guthrie," Frumkin said. "He was this sort of mythical presence in the background; you heard the name but nobody really knew that much about him. At some point, I bought an LP copy of the Library of Congress recordings, interviews he did with Alan Lomax.
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