Ted Lange (Guitar Hero)

[DudeAsInCool]

David Marchese at Salon's (now defunct) Audiofile, interviews the man at Guitar Hero who chooses the songs for the popular video game:

How do you determine which songs are right for Guitar Hero?

We come up with a gigantic master list of over a hundred songs. Then we grade every song to make sure it has a guitar solo and enough different sections and changes to be fun to play. We also take popularity into consideration; you can't put an unknown song title on the back of the box. But you'd be surprised how many songs have a 30-second gap where there's no guitar. There are tons of songs that will just never work. "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a song that gets a lot of requests from fans but it isn't right for Guitar Hero -- the verse is basically just two notes, it would be boring to play along with. And when we were picking music for the '80s game, it was surprising how many songs there are where you're listening and then there's a sax solo and the guitar completely drops out. But once we start listening for those kinds of things, we can narrow the songs down pretty quickly. Then we give our list to the licensing team and they start working their contacts in the music industry. Only about half the songs on our list come back approved.

Read More