Question Of The Week [December 10th 2025]

Q: What Game Have You Mastered?

A: Becoming a master at something, they say takes at least 1,000 hours of continuous time. I really don’t spend more time with a game after seeing its credits, however there are a few games that I come back to year after year. In those instances I would consider myself having conquered the game, and even Tetris calls me a “Tetris Master” getting passed a 100 lines on the NES original. But there might be one game that I would really consider myself having mastered… and it’s Rock Band.

Yes the 2007 classic, that Harmonix branched off from the Guitar Hero Franchise and took the concept out of the stratosphere with adding Vocals, a rhythm bass section and drums. For others, the drumming was easily the best, and I definitely got into it. I still own the ION drum rocker kit that transformed the measly toy  into a full fledged electronic drum kit. But playing guitar and performing vocals, singing my heart out, at the same time was always my jam.

I spent more time in the Rock Band games (and Guitar Hero, as I’m lumping the entire genre as one) than any other game in existence. Not only did I devour both Rock Band and Rock Band 2 while I lived in Denver all alone, spending every waking moment learning how to get good at Hard and even moving onto Expert, but once Rock Band 3 came out, I ended up setting up a makeshift stage and doing Rock Band concerts in the game store that I owned. I was absolutely obsessed with the games and I bought most of the DLC (or at least all the ones I cared about). I own a few thousand songs in DLC alone, along with each game’s import into the others.

After Rock Band 4 came and sadly went, it seemed the genre just kinda died, and it has for the most part. However, last year I ended up searching for some new way to play these games on PC, and I ended up playing through the entire series of both Rock Band and Guitar Hero via emulation. But I was blown away when I found Clone Hero, a Unity Game Engine rebuild of the Guitar Hero series, with a way to download and play all the original game’s songs. I played through them all again, and then started streaming a ton of downloaded songs from the community. I soon amassed over 10,000 songs in the game, and regularly put on a weekly rock concert on Twitch. It was a blast.

All that to say, yes, I have mastered the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. I can play and beat every song on Expert without breaking a sweat. However, the community has really done a disservice with the overcharging of songs, breaking a lot of the fun to be had, by trying to make the songs as difficult as possible. Go back and play some expert level Rock Band 2 or Guitar Hero 4 songs, and you’ll notice they aren’t that hard, but super fun to play. But if you download those same songs from the community, they are trying to replicate finger placement of a real guitar chord, and thus in that transition, they lose that fun factor. No longer is it enjoyable, you are just frantically moving your fingers more than you would on a real guitar. All for the sake of “realism” which it isn’t.

So, I would say the Rhythm Game genre, I have mastered fully to the original extent of those games, and while I’m at it, I can toot my own horn for a moment and say how much I can wail on pretty much any classic rock or 80’s song on the mic.