Activision Likely to Unveil New Guitar Hero at Fictional Rock Festival
Activision is apparently gearing up to rock your face off once again, as press outlets around the world have started receiving passes to a fictional music festival called SoundDial. It seems the rumored Guitar Hero revival may have some substance after all.
Polygon revealed the peculiar press pass earlier today, saying that this faux music festival is headed by bands such as Broken Tide, Blackout Conspiracy, and the Portland Cloud Orchestra (which are all fictitious unless they're really indie). The report also says that no specific date or time was included with the pass, but other sources are reporting a date of April 14 was attached to their invitations.
Activision has yet to shed any light on this or any other information about the new Guitar Hero, but there's been plenty of hints that the publisher is once again pursuing the music genre in a big way. Many online resumes for actors and dancers mention working for a company called SoundDial, a few of them even mentioning the relation to the new Guitar Hero game. Adding credence to these entries is that most of the actors involved are from London, as the new Guitar Hero is rumored to be in development at Freestyle Games, located about an hour and a half out of the city.
It's not shocking that Activision would give Guitar Hero another go, especially now that Rock Band is on its way back too, but what's more intriguing here is the nature of this fictional press pass. Could this festival allude to a story-driver Guitar Hero game, where the player creates a band and has to compete against big ticket names like the ones we see on the pass? We won't know until at least April 14, but for now we are certainly curious. We just hope that announcing both new Rock Band and Guitar Hero titles so close to one another doesn't lead to the music game saturation that lead to both series' declines a few years ago.