Guitar Hero
In April 2015, Activision announced a new entry in the series, titled "Guitar Hero Live". The title was developed by Activision's internal studio FreeStyleGames, who previously had worked on the "DJ Hero" spinoff titles. FreeStyleGames were given free rein to reboot the "Guitar Hero" series for next-generation consoles. One of their first innovations was to drop the standard five-button guitar controller, ultimately designing a six-button guitar controller, with two rows of three buttons each, allowing them to mimic actual guitar fingering. "Guitar Hero Live" was released with both a career and an online mode. The career mode used full-motion video taken from the perspective of a lead guitarist underneath the note highway, to create an immersive experience to the player. The online mode, called "GHTV", discarded the previous downloadable content approach and used a music video channel approach to stream playable songs to players, adding new songs to the catalog on a weekly basis. The game was released in October 2015.
Guitar Hero: Metallica
A demo version of the game was released on Xbox Live on March 20, 2009, with four playable songs: Metallica's "Sad but True" and "Seek & Destroy", Alice in Chains' "No Excuses" and Queen's "Stone Cold Crazy". All four instruments are playable. There is no Expert+ for the drums in the demo. Metallica made an appearance at the 2009 SXSW Music Festival held a week before the game's release for a "not-so-secret" performance, with demonstration stations set up to allow attendees to play the game. The game was the primary sponsor for Aric Almirola's Number 8 car in the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Goody's Fast Relief 500 run during the weekend of the game's release. Two television commercials, in the same style as those for "Guitar Hero World Tour" that parody the scene from "Risky Business" where Tom Cruise dances in his underwear during Bob Seger's song "Old Time Rock and Roll", were prepared for the game and were directed by Brett Ratner. The ads, which first aired during the 2009 NCAA Basketball Tournament, features NCAA coaches Bob Knight, Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, and Rick Pitino along with the current members of Metallica.