With the massive nostalgia following for the Guitar Hero games since its first title in 2005, news of another entry in the franchise should be cause for celebration.
Unfortunately for publisher Activision, the latest announcement has generated backlash within the gaming space instead.
On Saturday, 1 March, Activision announced on Instagram, Guitar Hero Mobile — the first mobile title into the popular rhythm game series, as its name implies.
With only a brief caption followed by a single image of key art, it seems like Activision believed that such an announcement was one of those situations where less is more, the mere announcement of a new Guitar Hero game would be enough to get major buzz going.
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What the Call of Duty publisher likely didn’t predict, however, was that users would take more than a few seconds to look at Guitar Hero Mobile’s artwork and determine that it was certainly AI-generated.
The image has been arranged in a way that, because the “Guitar Hero Mobile” logo is top and central, many might not notice anything out of place if they were merely scrolling through their Instagram feeds — noticing the colorful rhythm game-iconic prompts to convey its similarity to the older games — and move on.
To add insult to injury, two of the scrolling note bars — in the middle and the second to the left — are mixed with totally different colors altogether.
Unsurprisingly, plenty of social media users on Instagram took more than a momentary glance at Guitar Hero Mobile and did not hesitate to express their disdain for what’s now being appropriately deemed “AI Hero”.
One gamer, ughhhbrett, said: “Thank you for reminding me I can still play Rock Band 4.”
Others like el_sopas_2005 added a more sarcastic twist with their feedback, saying: “AI s**tfestival looks amazing. Thank you, Activision”.
Plenty of additional players were simply direct with their thoughts, like sunnyday.chi. They said: “Activision not realising that one of the biggest parts of the GH charm was the freaking art? The art style from 1-4 was amazing. Please just make an actual guitar hero worthy of the name”.
Even before the flurry of backlash came in, Activision already had the issue of needing to explain exactly what the appeal of a mobile Guitar Hero game even is.
As the main appeal of the previous games was the attachable guitar-style controller to simulate the rockstar-style gameplay, assumingly removing that to be replaced with mere touchscreen prompts would make Guitar Hero Mobile just like countless mobile rhythm games already on the market.