Guitar Rising - Development

Development

Rocksmith has its origins in a project called Guitar Rising. Guitar Rising was developed by Game Tank, a small startup business, and was showcased at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. The game, at that time, was more of a technology demonstration, to display the ability of proprietary hardware - a USB cable that plugged into the audio-out jack of nearly any electric guitar - to determine what notes and chords the player was performing, instead of the typical note-matching gameplay of games like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. The demonstration at GDC featured gameplay elements that would be taken into Rocksmith; the interface would show notes colored by string and numbered by fret, and that as the player progressed in the song, the difficulty or note-density would change to reflect how well the player was doing, as to avoid frustrating the player with too-difficult charts. Jake Parks of Game Tank had stated at the time that they were looking to release the game in late 2008, anticipating a soundtrack of about thirty songs depending on licensing. Later, the title was pushed to a 2009 release.

About the same time, Ubisoft's president of North American operations, Laurent Detoc, challenged its San Francisco development team to develop their own game, as until this time, the studio only had supported external developers. The music game field was of interest; as stated by Detoc, "I just could not believe the amount of waste that had gone in people spending so much time with plastic guitars". The studio was able to acquire Game Tank and the Guitar Rising technology, bringing aboard Parks and his lead designer Nick Bonardi as Ubisoft employees. The Ubisoft studio team of about 60 were led by Paul Cross and Nao Higo, and set about to transform the Guitar Rising into a retail product over a period of about two years. Developer Jason Schroeder referred to the state of Guitar Rising as a "PC tech demo of note recognition" and set about redesigning the HUD so that non-guitarists could understand the game better. It had been laid-out as a horizontal scrolling tablature, but this was found to be too difficult for non-guitarists to work with, and as the game was meant for anyone to be able to play, a vertical scrolling note chart was created instead.