Guitar Hero
Following a five-year hiatus, as described below, Activision announced "Guitar Hero Live" for release in late 2015 on most seventh-generation and eighth-generation consoles. "Live" was developed to rebuild the game from the ground up, and while the gameplay remains similar to the earlier titles, focusing primarily on the lead guitar, it uses a 3-button guitar controller with each button having "up" and "down" positions, making for more complex tabulators. The game using live footage of a rock concert, taken from the perspective of the lead guitarist, as to provide a more immersive experience.
Guitar Hero
"Guitar Hero" was created from a partnership between RedOctane, then their own company that produced specialized video game controllers, and Harmonix, a music video game development company who had previously produced "Frequency", "Amplitude" and "Karaoke Revolution". RedOctane was seeking to bring in a "Guitar Freaks"-like game, highly popular in Japan at the time, into Western markets, and approached Harmonix about helping them to develop a music game involving a guitar controller. Both companies agreed to it, and went on to produce "Guitar Hero" in 2005. The title was highly successful, leading to the development of its successful sequel "Guitar Hero II" in 2006. While the original controllers for the first "Guitar Hero" game were designed by Ryan Lesser, Rob Kay, Greg LoPiccolo and Alex Rigopulous of Harmonix and built by the Honeybee Corporation of China, subsequent iterations and future controllers were developed inhouse at RedOctane, with development led primarily by Jack McCauley.