Gamelab’s Naomi Clark examines the curious puzzle of guitar incompatibility between Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

At Gamelab we've been gearing up for our holiday party next week. One of the highlights will be a Rock Band tournament! We've got six bands signed up so far, and it promises to be an exciting musical showdown. To get our bands up to a full complement of four, Catherine and I went shopping the other day and bought a Gibson X-plorer guitar controller for our Xbox 360; Rock Band only comes with one guitar (a plastic version of a Fender Stratocaster) and there's no way to buy that guitar by itself. So if you want to have a bassist AND a guitarist in your band, you've got to find a second guitar somewhere.

Luckily for Xbox 360 owners like me (and Gamelab), the guitar controllers made for the Guitar Hero series work perfectly well with Rock Band too. The Gibson X-Plorer we bought was originally sold as part of Guitar Hero II, for instance. Weirdly, you can't go the other way; if you try to use the Rock Band guitar with a Guitar Hero game, it just won't work when you try to play a song. Nobody's quite sure why this is, and representatives of the companies behind both games have made vague statements about how they're devoted to open standards, and a lot of gamers got kind of annoyed. For instance, I still haven't been able to play the cooperative mode of Guitar Hero III with my roommate, because we only have one guitar that works with the game. (But now I can borrow Gamelab's X-plorer, muahahaha!)

However, it looks like it's a good thing we didn't buy the game for the PS3, because PS3 gamers haven’t been able to get their Guitar Hero guitars to work with Rock Band at all… and it looks like they’re not going to be allowed to, either. We don’t even have a PS3 at Gamelab, which is ironic considering we have one of most consoles that have ever been made. The PS3 is very expensive and there haven't been any games on it that any of us want to play. Plus now it looks like Sony has actually buckled to pressure from Activision, the publishers of Guitar Hero, to block a software patch for another company's game! This is a rather unprecedented and interesting moment in game history.

It sounds like what happened was this: Harmonix, the developers of Rock Band, discovered that their game wasn't working with Guitar Hero controllers on the PS3. Harmonix has said they want people to be able to play with any controllers they want to, and they prepared and announced a patch that would have made Rock Band work with third-party guitar controllers on the PS3. Of course, the PS3 patch has to be distributed by Sony through their network. At this point, apparently Activision objected, and now Sony is not going to release the patch… even though it’s for a Harmonix game, not an Activision game.

In case you’re unaware of the history here, Harmonix is a veteran developer of music games that created the first two Guitar Hero titles before parting ways with their publishing partners, Red Octane and Activision. The latest sequel, Guitar Hero III, was developed by another company, Neversoft. This kind of thing happens all the time in gaming; our own game Diner Dash has had several sequels developed by other companies. Harmonix went on to make Rock Band with the help of MTV, and it’s a new game that combines elements of Guitar Hero and their other games, like Karaoke Revolution. This holiday season, the two branches of guitar-laden music games are going head-to-head.

On other blogs like 1UP, a lot of the comments have focused on what a bad deal this is for gamers. If people buying these games are forced to buy extra guitars for both, it's a waste of money, not to mention space if you live in a small New York apartment like I do. Harmonix's stated philosophy of open standards and interoperability makes sense for that reason alone. But for me, the even more ridiculous news is that somehow a big game publisher has kept a totally different game company from patching their own software!

A lot of the gamers out there are blaming Activision and calling them jerks, but let's assume for a second that it somehow makes business sense for them to keep their guitars from working with other games. The bigger problem here is that Sony bowed to pressure from one company to stop the patching of another company's game. Since Sony controls the network, they have an obligation to play fair when allowing developers to fix and upgrade software for consumers' benefit, and I'm glad that Harmonix and MTV Games have called them out on it.

This is one of the problems with consoles. They're nice and standardized, offering a convenient and consistent platform for both gamers and developers. They sit in your living room and allow for more social play. But they're also centrally controlled. Harmonix has no way of getting this patch out to PS3 gamers without going through Sony. Gamelab, on the other hand, mostly (but not exclusively) develops for PCs and Macs. Even if one of the publishers or developers we work with decided they didn't want to distribute a patch to our software, we could just put it here on gamelab.com and anyone who wanted it could get it.

We should all hope that either Activision or Sony sees that what they're doing is bad for their customers, bad for the industry, and bad for their business. Why wouldn't you want your guitar to work with other games? It gives your guitar better value. I can only guess that the answer is that Activision and Red Octane are scared of Rock Band and are willing to do whatever they can to keep it from being played. That's just not playing fair. Add it to the fact that the Activision/Red Octane/Neversoft consortium decided to turn the female Guitar Hero characters into eye-candy sexpots and added sexy dancing girls, and I have to say I really prefer Rock Band's extremely flexible character creator and wardrobe tools.

(Fair disclosure: Gamelab worked with VH1 Games to create and publish our own rhythm-action game, Downbeat, as well as Arcadia REMIX.)

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By Naomi Clark, Content & Community manager.