DRAGONFORCE GUITAR HERO VS REAL GUITAR

Dragonforce talks about their Guitar Hero popularity and compares the game to real guitar playing.

Dragonforce’s song “Through The Fire And Flames” is the most popular song on Guitar Hero 3, and fans actually asked for it by name. While the band has been referred to as video game rock due to its technical complexity, the band doesn’t want to be seen as a band tied to a game.

We caught up with guitarist Herman Li at the Mayhem Festival recently and he talked about their relationship with the game.

“Guitar Hero 3. I guess people ask me about Guitar Hero every day. There’s no way I can escape it. The good thing is that we do have the most popular song on Guitar Hero 3. You know the funny thing is that we never asked them to put the song in. They actually came to us from the requests. They’d been asking around for Dragonforce. That’s a cool thing, and no one expected that to take off anyway. We’re not even in the songlist. To get Dragonforce you have to finish the game first. But I think it’s good, Guitar Hero 3, in the way it can promote rock music without all the image, the look, where they’re from… The image stuff is all gone. It’s all about the music that’s pushed across to the audience first.”

He was asked if Guitar Hero is helping the popularity of guitar oriented rock.

“I think in a certain degree, yeah. Some people only want to play video games, and that’s what they want to do. Some people look at it as a game. You should never look at Guitar Hero 3 as, ‘I can play this many songs, and you can only play three songs on the guitar. I’m better than you on the guitar,’ or something. Video games is like a fantasy thing. It makes things hard to do, realize that you can do it. Like, these like, On The Call Of Duty and all these games are fantasy. To be a soldier you have to go through call of training and the same thing to play the guitar on ‘Through The Fire And Flames’ or ‘Cliffs of Dover,’ the Eric Johnson song, it’s going to take serious practice on the instrument for many, many years, you know.”

Fans can look forward to being treated to new Dragonforce songs, which may appear on later versions of the game due to the just-released album Ultra Beatdown, in stores now.