The Best Buy/Guitar Hero incident

Okay, so a few of you have emailed me regarding the Best Buy/Guitar Hero Incident I keep referring to. For the sake of full disclosure, let me tell you about what happened, and why it made me listen to some hair bands and buy a bass guitar recently.

Back in high school and college, I was into that "scene." In college, I played in a few bands, nothing serious or profitable, just did it to have fun and relieve stress. Especially during midterms and finals week, but I digress. Back then, I was pretty handy with a guitar & bass guitar, and while I wasn't Kirk Hammett-good (guy from Metallica) or Slash-good (guy from Guns N' Roses), I still could play well enough to keep the band and our audience happy.

But upon graduation from college and entry into the full-time passion of running my own entertainment company, I no longer had time to practice playing, and so that part of me fell by the wayside.

Fast forward to sometime in January 2007. I'm in Best Buy looking for an MP3 player adapter, and I come across a display of Guitar Hero II. One of the songs in the game is Sweet Child of Mine by Guns N' Roses. In college, I could play that opening lick and the guitar solo pretty well. So I figured that playing it again on a toy guitar shouldn't be that much different, right?

Wrong.

All the fingerings I was used to pressing on a standard guitar did not apply on the GH2 toy guitar. Needless to say, I ended up with a pretty bad score, not to mention feeling a little embarrassed. What made it worse was, right after me, these two college students walked up, picked up the guitars, chose the same song, and ripped right through it--with the difficulty set on expert and hitting every single note.

I knew I hadn't been playing in eight years, but I didn't think I was this bad. So a few days later while visiting my parents, I pulled out an old guitar that I still keep there, tried the same lick...and realized I still had some of it on a real guitar. A little rusty (ok, A LOT rusty), but still had potential.

So that's the Best Buy/Guitar Hero Incident story. It's a good thing that the game was Guitar Hero. Can you imagine if it was some game like Drum Hero? My housemates would totally be unhappy if I brought home a drumkit...but I digress.

Have a great weekend, and I'll see you at the expo!

Fondly,
Marino
Ninja Entertainment