A few months ago, a video popped up on my Twitter timeline, starring one of the most hard-hitting nightmare rotations I’ve ever seen: Mr. Incredible, Marlin from Finding Nemoand Spy and Pyro’s team strength 2 performing “Carry On Wayward Son”. Of course, this motley crew of cartoon characters couldn’t meet in person; this was a mod Guitar Hero level.

The clip sent me down a wormhole of Guitar Hero mods, in search of the most cursed groupings imaginable: Kiryu’s Yakuza singing “YMCA”, Wallace and Gromit playing Steely Dan with Eli Vance of Half life, Walter White and Saul Goodman performing “Free Bird.” Have you ever wanted to see CJ since gta Or does Peter Griffin do System of a Down karaoke, or an oversized version of Thomas the Tank Engine’s “Crazy Train”? Well, now you can, even if he never wanted to.

When I first dove into the Guitar Hero mod community, I assumed it was a leftover relic from an earlier internet era. Guitar Hero It’s always held a lot of nostalgia for me as someone who came of age during its heyday. Although streaming developed throughout the 2000s, it had yet to completely reshape the music industry: YouTube and Guitar Hero both were first released in 2005, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rhythm gaming boom fizzled out as Spotify rose to dominance. In that pre-streaming era, Guitar Hero it worked like more than a game; it became a platform for music discovery and a vital gateway to my own taste as a burgeoning music lover.

The branding and aesthetic could have emphasized hard rock, but Guitar Hero and Rock band both were more musically diverse than is believed; 2008 World Tour, for example, featured everything from Sublime to Willie Nelson to Linkin Park. The range of licensed music and casual gameplay style made it the Harmonix and Neversoft games are a unique social experience, and one that is especially suited to playing under the influence or in a party setting.

I played Guitar Hero before smoking pot, but years later, he would feel the nostalgic pull of the series and re-experience them as a full-time stoner. There’s the obvious pleasure of listening to music while stoned, but even on a design level, Guitar Hero uniquely suited to the aimless pleasures of a lazy Sunday afternoon. There is no rush to finish the game, there is no story or cutscenes to pay attention to; I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been distracted after finishing a song, my dull mind wandering as the surprisingly soothing crowd applause plays on a loop.

the strange world of Guitar Hero modifications

Fifteen years after its release, Guitar Hero: World Tour has made an unexpected comeback, thanks to a passionate collective of modders and rhythm game devotees. To my surprise, all the almost thousand original creations of the Guitar Hero: World Tour Section from NexusMods have been uploaded within the last two years – the oldest mods available, including Leon Kennedy and Master Chief, were released in August 2021. These nightmarish hard-hitting rotations exist because of the fans. Guitar Hero: World Tour – Definitive Edition mod, released in December 2021, that transforms the 2008 game in an ultra customizable multiplayer experience.

Even after the Guitar Hero series faded from the mainstream, the game modding community was kept alive by players like ExileLordwho graduated to creating custom songs for guitar hero 3 to hack the game itself. Compared to the cartoonish absurdity of the GHWT Definitive Edition mod, ExileLord’s GH3+ project it’s more about playing with the original engine than adding new content to the game—his most popular youtube video explore an error in guitar hero 3 that lets you play a song for hours on end. While previous modders mainly worked with guitar hero 3the Definitive Edition team focused on World Tour partly due to the expanded features of the game itself.

“In terms of Guitar Hero franchise releases on PC, guitar hero 3 it’s much more primitive,” says Dodylectable, a core member of the Definitive Edition modding team, explaining why the group chose to work with the 2008 game. “There was a massive leap from 3 to World Tour with new features like Create-A-Rocker and Music Studio, which allows for more of the fun character stuff we have in our mod compared to GH3+.” World Tour it had already upped the ante on interactivity and customization, which the Definitive Edition group just took to the next level. To play even higher notes (sorry), modder Zedek the plague doctorhe reverse-engineered the game and began sharing his creations with a growing group of rhythm game modders.

I always wanted to change Guitar Hero games because I thought they deserved custom characters, instruments, and locations, rather than just custom songs or texture mods,” says Dodylectable. “Zedek told me how he could make custom character ports and then showed me what he had in store for the Definitive Edition mod, which includes different GUIs and instruments. I was really impressed and when he asked me to help further develop the mod, I didn’t hesitate to join”.

The project started mainly with migrating or recreating character skins from other games – Dodylectable’s first mod and the first publicly available ghwt mod, it was a tribute to Garrettthe protagonist of the Thief Stealth game series. Due to its age, there is a limit to what modders can get out of Guitar Heroas Dodylectable explains: “Guitar Hero comes out of a heavily modified Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground engine, which is reasonably restrictive compared to current engines like Unreal. One of my favorite characters I’ve done is Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village, who was a great pain in bearing. It crashed my game 20+ times during debugging, but it raised the bar for people to go and create high quality model ports.”

But it is partly the challenge that attracts Guitar Hero modders, along with the novelty and meme potential of putting your favorites into the world of a beloved game, of course. “Porting characters from other games is quite easy, but recreating real people takes more effort,” says Dodylectable. “My favorite in that department is actually one that I designed of my real life self, which comes with the update. I’m proud of it because he took me out of my comfort zone and allowed me to do a lot of things I never imagined doing, like sculpting, texturing, and creating models from scratch.” Guitar Hero was already an ideal game for stoners, but the World Tour mod has taken it to the next level: watching modified videos of Mark Zuckerberg jamming with anime girls is like the virtual equivalent of walking into one of those dispensaries with rick and morty and sponge Bob stenciled cartoons on all the walls.

He ghwt The entire Definitive Edition team learned about the inner workings of the game by teaching each other, and the collective is constantly updating their mod and developing new features. His current projects include porting locations and level design from spin-offs such as Guitar Hero: Van Halen and metallic in World Tour to offer even more customization and creative potential. The group has left the door of Discord open to any other Guitar Hero enthusiasts who want to play with the game. Its community has grown explosively since the mod’s release, partly due to the goodwill of its creators. shared his toolbox and how active they are in keeping the project alive.

The final problem of a game like Guitar Hero it’s that you can never really capture the feeling of creating music. Sure, you might be able to play it, and the peripheral might be shaped like a guitar, but at the end of the day, it’s basically just a copy of someone else’s work. In its own way, the World Tour modding community captures the feeling of improvising with other musicians, in a way Guitar Hero and Rock band I could only emulate: Like a band in a garage, they’re a group of like-minded artists working together to invent something unpredictable and new. In the purest stoner style, Guitar Hero it was meant to be enjoyed collectively, with the controller passing by like a rotating joint, and the game’s modding community has kept that flame alive.