From its launch in 2005 to its eventual decline within the mid-2010s, Guitar Hero was in service of celebrating bangers. Even in any case these years, it’s onerous not to consider Guitar Hero when listening to songs like Dwelling Color’s “Cult of Persona,” Ozzy Osbourne’s “Bark on the Moon,” or Coronary heart’s “Barracuda.” Although the early editions featured covers of those widespread songs moderately than the originals, they honored the spirit of taking part in an actual rock gig whereas giving us a number of songs new and outdated to obsess over.
However as rock music remodeled all through the late 2000s, so did the leisure panorama. By the flip of the last decade, the market was extremely oversaturated with video games much like Guitar Hero; the 2010 recreation Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock fell far beneath expectations, and concurrently, the rise of the iPhone, the elevated emphasis on on-line gaming, and the lingering results of the monetary disaster put the franchise on maintain. They’d launch their last recreation, Guitar Hero Stay, in 2015, and by 2018, they’d shut down their servers for good.
As we’ve seen within the leisure realm through the years, although, previously-successful endeavors like Guitar Hero are sometimes on the desk for revivals and remakes. Video games with related mechanics — like Beat Saber or the extra on-the-nose Clone Hero — are nonetheless revered, however within the final 10 years, no online game firm has actually tried to stage a Guitar Hero comeback. Dare we are saying the time is correct for Guitar Hero 6?
Let’s faux there’s a brand new recreation on the way in which, with a model new number of songs to select from. In fact, we’d choose the usual guitar anthems of yore — authentic Guitar Hero favorites like Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” Foghat’s “Sluggish Journey,” or Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out.” However a variety of nice music has come out since Guitar Hero shut down their servers in 2018. Knotty post-punk had a thriving second, Olivia Rodrigo emerged as the latest pop-rock hero, and ’90s and 2000s stalwarts like Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, and Jack White have continued serving up guitar-forward ragers.
So, we’ve assembled a listing of 20 tracks that we expect can be stable, satisfying editions to Guitar Hero in the event that they made a brand new model of the sport in 2025. We’ve organized them much like the construction of outdated — 4 songs for every tier of rockstar success, full with an encore on the finish of every spherical. There are numerous songs to select from, and if we had been making the sport ourselves, we’d be very tempted to place DragonForce’s “By way of the Fireplace and the Flames” on the finish once more, only for outdated instances’ sake. Fairly just a few of those picks aren’t precisely family-friendly both — however hey, slightly little bit of censoring can go a good distance.
Learn on for our roundup of 20 songs we’d placed on Guitar Hero in the event that they revived the sport in 2025.
— Paolo Ragusa
Stay Music Editor
