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: On Tour series
"Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits" was announced on March 5, 2009, and released on June 9, 2009. Reflecting its title, "Modern Hits" incorporates songs published within the last five years of its release, and the developers had to balance what songs were included in order to make a setlist with a wide appeal. The engine of the game has no major changes, but Vicarious Visions stated that it has continued to work on strum detection on the DS touchpad to meet a wide range of playstyles. The interface, however, has been revised over the previous two "On Tour" titles to feature a more modernized look (particularly in-game on the touch screen side). The game includes a new single player career progression using "Fan Requests" to create a new non-linear progression through the songs in the games. These were added to help move away from gameplay that was "just going, playing a venue, and then moving on to the next one" and instead to "open the world up". The developers also noted that the Fan Requests helped to tap into the way that players had previously played games in the series, setting their own personal goals for certain songs. Audio designer Jason Willey created the game's theme song (titled "S.U.P.R.A.H.U.M.A.N.") through his two-man band, Protoshredanoid, to capture the Modern Hits theme of the game, and after demonstrating a sampling of the song to the rest of the team, were asked to create the whole song. The theme song was released as a free download for "Guitar Hero World Tour" the week before the game's release.