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Guitar Hero World Tour
Guitar Hero World Tour
Guitar Hero World Tour

Guitar Hero to be joined by DJ Hero and Band Hero

This article is more than 14 years old
With 25m copies of Guitar Hero already sold, the games music franchise is spreading its wings to virtual nightclubs and gigs

The Guitar Hero franchise – which has sold more than 25m units around the world in just four years, and breathed new life into some bands' repertoires that had seemed dead – is to be expanded with two new titles, DJ Hero and Band Hero, which its maker hopes will build on the popularity of its predecessor.

Guitar Hero has proved spectacularly popular, allowing players to "play" songs on realistic-looking plastic guitars and drum kits in time to music tracks from real bands including Queen, AC/DC, Aerosmith and the Sex Pistols; any band whose songs are featured in a game sees a rise in sales of its songs immediately after. Aerosmith has claimed to have made more money from licensing its music to Guitar Hero than from any of the group's previous recorded albums. Available on all the principal gaming platforms – the Wii, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Macintosh – it has proved to be a family- and party-friendly game, ensuring its wider success.

In DJ Hero, players will take control of an imitation turntable in order to mix and scratch their way to victory in a virtual nightclub. Family-focused Band Hero, meanwhile, expands on the Guitar Hero's recent World Tour edition by allowing players to choose between guitar, drums and a microphone to perform their own pop renditions.

The Guitar Hero franchise, owned by Activision Blizzard, has been one of the most successful games of recent years, spawning dozens of imitators. But it has not persuaded every musician to become part of its bandwagon; Led Zeppelin, the iconic British rock group that set the standard for heavy metal in the 1970s, has refused to allow its songs to be used.

And The Beatles have signed with Rock Band, a similar but incompatible game from Harmonix, the original developers who split with Activision to make their own multi-instrument game. Harmonix hopes to reach out to new audiences by releasing a special edition later this year – featuring custom replicas of the band's famous instruments.

The news of a new Hero series came as Activision Blizzard, the megapublisher formed out of the merger of California-based Activision and the games unit of French conglomerate Vivendi, announced more than $189m (£125m) in profit for the past three months.

Bobby Kotick, Activision's chief executive, was bullish about the industry's prospects during the downturn, saying that gaming was in "the best position of any industry that is in media or leisure".

The recession has had a mixed impact on the games industry so far.

Japanese video games giant Nintendo announced record profits this week, but Activision's chief rival, Electronic Arts, said sales had declined 24% over the past year.

Meanwhile 3D Realms, the company behind the popular Duke Nukem games, announced it was closing down. The company said it had run out of money after spending 12 years trying to develop a sequel to its enormously popular game Duke Nukem – without ever producing a finished product.

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