So, now that we actually have something to look forward to in our President Elect, I feel that we'll see our first real nostalgia for the decade known as the 90's. I know that there's been club nites and VH1 shows centered around fond 90's remembrances. However, now that's it approaching the "20 years ago today" mark, I think there will be a more in depth look back on the gen x/grunge era. I know for me, I can finally look back fondly at plasma donations, 60's styled garage rock bands, skinhead assaults, and janitorial gigs -- Henry Rollins on the Grammys and Chumbawamba blasting from frat houses, what a decade!!!  Dovetailed at either end by a Bush as well as a hit or two in the middle by Bush (the band!). The 1990's ushered in the modern American culture wars -- the left armed with the Scum Manifesto and the right playing duck duck goose with the Book of Revelations. 

Guitar Games

The first installment in the Guitar Hero series was released in 2005. The developers at Harmonix were obviously inspired by 1998’s Konami’s GuitarFreaks, in which players also use a guitar-shaped controller with colored fret buttons on the neck and a pick lever to score points playing along to rock music. That game never took off on the level of Guitar Hero though, partly because GuitarFreaks required players to shred along to the likes of Mutsuhiko Izumi, 桜井 敏郎,  小野秀幸, 前田尚紀 and Jimmy Weckl (né ジミー・ウェックル), who composed songs especially for the game. Guitar Hero's innovation was including 47 AOR songs by the likes of the Ramones, Deep Purple, umlaut-abusers Blue Öyster Cult and Motörhead -- songs that, whatever you think of them, are seared into your brain if you've ever drank a Mountain Dew, rode in a Z-28, watched a television commercial or shopped at Amoeba. That means even if you've heard "More Than a Feeling" 603,501 times more than you ever wanted, you'll have no problem playing along.

In 2006, RedOctane (the manufacturers of the guitar controllers) was purchased by Activision and Harmonix was bought by MTV. In 2007 Harmonix released, through Electronic Arts, Rock Band -- basically an expanded version of Guitar Hero which added other instruments, another innovation inspired by Konami’s games of the previous decade which followed up GuitarFreaks with DrumFreaks and KeyboardFreaks.