‘Guitar Hero’
[PS2] [USA] [MAGAZINE, TEASER] [2005]
According to Rob Kay, the game's Lead Designer, the idea of Guitar Hero was directly inspired by Konami's Guitar Freaks arcade game, where the player used a guitar-shaped controller to interact with the game. At the time, GuitarFreaks had not seen much exposure in North America. RedOctane was making dance pads for games like Dance Dance Revolution for home consoles and also operated an online video rental service similar to Netflix. RedOctane's Kai and Charles Huang recognized the popularity of GuitarFreaks in Japan through their rental service, and planned to create guitar controllers to bring the game to North America. The Huangs raised $1.75 million for the effort, despite being turned down by some investors who "thought [the idea] was too weird". Greg Fischbach, one of the founders of Acclaim Entertainment, noted, regretfully several years later, they had passed on Guitar Hero, questioning "Who's going to buy a peripheral like that?"Â ~Wikipedia
Source: Play, June 2005 (#42) || The Internet Archive; scanned by marktrade
