| Five W
He won't start his second year of college for more than a month, but Grant Leslie is getting a jump on things: He's returning to Warrensburg this week to find a part-time job, hoping to beat the crowd. Leslie, 19, is studying elementary education at Central Missouri State University. He has experience teaching third-graders at Bible school. "That's the age right before they become ornery, when they're still cute," he says. He has been active in church, especially through music. He plays piano and keyboards with an adult praise band on Sundays, and he leads music and plays guitar for the youth group. He also plays piano for weddings and funerals. He works as a tour guide at the Jesse James Farm and Museum in Kearney. He grew up in Holt and graduated from Kearney High.
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.
Joystiq interviews Rob Kay of Harmonix
In our second interview from the Develop Conference in Brighton this week, Jen and I sat down with Rob Kay of Harmonix. Rob was project lead on the cult classic Guitar Hero, a game which is part of a new wave of hyper accessible games that is all about catching the mindset of the mainstream, as well as addicting millions of hardcore gamers. We talked with Rob about song licensing, Konami's recent "Guitar Revolution" trademark and the possibility of a Trombone Hero.You talked about clones of Guitar Hero in your seminar. Specifically you talked about how other companies are being inspired by the premise of games like Guitar Hero. I don't know if you heard about Konami trademarking a Guitar Revolution game?Yeah, I read that on the internet. To give Konami props, they started this whole instrument simulation in games thing when they did games like GuitarFreaks which they released in Japan.
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