It began with a dog and an onion.
Sure, NanaOn-Sha’s PaRappa the Rapper wasn’t the first video game to demand players sync button presses to a basic beat via on-screen prompts. For instance, the early Bandai dance mat peripheral-based game Aerobics Studio – a primitive NES precursor to the likes of Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution – was first released in Japan in 1987 and handily pre-dates PaRappa. It wasn’t the first to intrinsically weave music into the core of the game itself, either, as anyone who had the misfortune of, say, waking up during 1992 and unwrapping a copy of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: Make My Video can probably attest.
But Aerobics Studio is overtly an exercise game set to some bleeps and bloops, and the Make My Video trio of FMV games (INXS, Kris Kross, and Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, all released in 1992) are famously regarded as some of the worst ever inflicted upon humanity.
If you’re really looking for the flame that truly lit the rhythm game fuse – a genre that would later go on to become one of the most lucrative in the industry throughout the mid- to late 2000s – look no further than this love-struck, two-dimensional dog and his onion-headed karate mentor.
[widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=the-best-ps4-games-summer-2020-update&captions=true"]
Kick! Punch! It’s All in the Mind
Development for PaRappa the Rapper began in 1994, just after the original PlayStation was announced. It was launched in Japan in 1996 and a worldwide release followed in 1997. Created by Japanese music producer Masaya Matsuura and American graphic artist Rodney Greenblat, PaRappa the Rapper was a game like no other that had come before it.
It was so unique, in fact, that Matsuura himself wasn’t even sure it was a game – and, according to him, neither were some of the folks at Sony when it came time to promote and publish it. With the initial production run for PaRappa the Rapper in the tens of thousands, Matsuura hadn’t anticipated it being particularly successful.
PaRappa the Rapper’s quirky charm and catchy songs caught on, however, and after a slow start it became one of Japan’s best-selling games of 1997. It was awarded Platinum status – the designation Sony historically bestowed upon games selling over one million copies – in 1998. Matsuura, Greenblat, and the NanaOn-Sha crew had crafted something that successfully struck a chord with gamers, establishing the bones of the structure of most modern rhythm games in the process – that is, tapping indicated buttons in time with music. A simple formula, no doubt, but an accessible and addictive one. It worked.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2016/12/03/5-minutes-of-parappa-the-rapper-remastered-gameplay"]
NanaOn-Sha followed the success of PaRappa the Rapper with UmJammer Lammy in 1999 (a spin-off that traded raps for rock riffs) and Vib Ribbon in 2000 (a rhythm-based musical platformer with simple vector graphics and the ability to generate levels from your own CDs). However, by the time PaRappa the Rapper 2 emerged on PS2 in 2001, a rhythm revolution was well underway.
[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=By%20the%20time%20PaRappa%20the%20Rapper%202%20emerged%20on%20PS2%20in%202001%2C%20a%20rhythm%20revolution%20was%20well%20underway"]Rhythm games focusing on dancing had begun to combine the concepts pioneered by Aerobics Studio with PaRappa’s clear and elegant interface, and Sega’s Samba de Amigo – which debuted in arcades in late 1999 and appeared on Dreamcast in 2000 – required players to shake a pair of maracas in time with the music. However, it was Konami – which sauntered to the stage in the late ’90s with its DJ-themed rhythm game Beatmania – that would take things up a notch.
Konami quickly shadowed Beatmania with a pair of guitar and drum equivalents: GuitarFreaks and DrumMania. These peripheral-based Japanese arcade cabinets have been rocking Japanese arcades for the past two decades, and Konami has released new editions of the series every year since 1999. GuitarFreaks and DrumMania ultimately didn’t make much of a global dent as home console ports, but their instrument-shaped controllers and vertically-scrolling on-screen button commands would be the blueprint for the next big thing in music games, unequivocally paving the way for the plastic instrument tsunami soon to follow.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2017/05/04/how-parappa-the-rapper-inspired-the-creation-of-guitar-hero-rock-band-unfiltered"]
Danger Is Go
The stratospheric rise of rhythm gaming in the mid-2000s would ultimately come courtesy of a little-known Boston, Massachusetts-based company called Harmonix. However, while the studio’s success would ultimately come from building upon the foundation formed by Konami’s peripheral-based arcade cabinets, it didn’t come instantly.
Established in 1995, Harmonix has spent the last two-and-a-half decades devising ways to allow non-musicians to experience the joy of creating music. Harmonix’s first product was a joystick-based “music improvisation system” for PC called The Axe that reportedly sold only around 300 copies, but the studio’s failure with this project led them to look towards the Japanese karaoke market. When this didn’t work out either, however, Harmonix pivoted instead to examining the ideas established by Japanese studios with the likes of PaRappa the Rapper and Beatmania and finding ways of bringing this brand of music gameplay to the West.
2001’s Frequency and its 2003 sequel Amplitude, both for PS2, were Harmonix’s first real attempts at riffing on the burgeoning rhythm genre. By blasting gems as they scrolled down the screen, players could activate the separate instrument tracks of a song. The gameplay was similar to Konami’s brand of rhythm action but they didn’t utilise bespoke controllers – players used Sony’s standard DualShock2. Neither game was a massive commercial hit, although each secured a keen cult following and plenty of critical acclaim. Crucially, however, they made Harmonix the most visible developer of music games in the West.
First, Harmonix caught Konami’s eye; the studio became the initial developer of Konami’s Karaoke Revolution series. Karaoke Revolution arrived in North America in late 2003, a few months before Sony’s own singing sensation SingStar hit various PAL territories in mid-2004. The first-party muscle of Sony would ultimately see SingStar become the preeminent karaoke game series – especially in Europe and Oceania; the series was a monster hit shifting dozens of different editions in various languages and moving mountains of microphones into PlayStation 2 households.
However, Harmonix’s work on Karaoke Revolution had already attracted the attention of California-based games and gaming accessory business RedOctane, a California-based games business that was already producing third-party accessories, like dance mats, for existing music games. It was to be this partnership that would crank the music game business up to 11.
More Than a Feeling
The proposal from RedOctane was simple: If RedOctane built a guitar controller, Harmonix would build a guitar game. No-one knew if bringing a GuitarFreaks-style game West was going to work but, nevertheless, it was the kind of game Harmonix had been champing at the bit to make – and the opportunity had arrived.
The original Guitar Hero arrived in November 2005 to immediate acclaim and strong sales. Featuring 30 tracks covering 50 years of rock (plus a handful of bonus songs, primarily from indie bands that Harmonix developers were either part of, or knew), Guitar Hero was a runaway success. It blazed the trail for a brand-new era of what was to become a billion-dollar business. Striking while the iron was steaming hot, Guitar Hero II followed the very next year. With even more songs than the original (plus bass and rhythm parts, to encourage purchases of a second guitar peripheral), the wildly-popular Guitar Hero II eclipsed the acclaim of the original and went on to become one of the highest-rated games on PS2.
[ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2016/07/28/history-of-awesome-guitar-hero"]
In barely a year Guitar Hero had become a cultural phenomenon, though Activision had already seen the profit potential; it acquired RedOctane and the Guitar Hero brand (but not Harmonix) in the lead-up to Guitar Hero II’s release, in June 2006. A few months later media juggernaut Viacom scooped up Harmonix and placed it under its MTV wing. With RedOctane and Harmonix now under separate ownership, the rapidly-assembled follow-up to Guitar Hero II (Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, released in mid-2007 and just eight months after Guitar Hero II) would be Harmonix’s last Guitar Hero game.
Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock followed quickly in late 2007 and, despite the diminishing gap between instalments, the series showed no sign of slowing down just yet. Assembled by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater veterans Neversoft, Guitar Hero III maintained the basic formula but was stuffed with over 70 songs (most of them master tracks performed by the actual bands, rather than covers), online multiplayer, and even appearances from rock legends like Slash and Tom Morello.