
Activision boss Bobby Kotick said during his DICE keynote last night that he regrets not purchasing Harmonix.
“When we were buying Guitar Hero and buying RedOctane, the makers of Guitar Hero, we knew about Harmonix,” he said. “We had always known them as sort of a somewhat failed developer of music games.”
“They always had really good ideas, but nothing that was really commercially viable until Guitar Hero and at first we thought, ‘OK, it’s a good piece of software, but if we gave it to Neversoft, they’re going to knock the ball out of the park with this.”
And Neversoft did achieve great success with Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, because it was the first game ever to rake in over $1 billion.
However, Kotick did say that had Activision purchased Harmonix itself, Guitar Hero’s landscape would have been completely different from what it is today.
Meanwhile, Harmonix is working steadily on Green Day: Rock Band and another title which may or may not be Rock Band 3.
Activision, relatedly, has already announced that a new Guitar Hero game will be out before the end of the year.
Thanks for the heads up, G4!