New Guitar Hero and Skylanders games already discussed by Xbox

Guitar Hero Live — Could Guitar Hero be back from the grave? (pic: Activision)

The boss of Xbox and the current head of Activision Blizzard have already talked about bringing back two of the publisher’s biggest games.

It may be the biggest news story in gaming since… forever, but there’s still virtually no detail about what Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard is going to mean in practical terms or even if it’ll happen at all.

Many have assumed that it will lead to Activision making more than just Call Of Duty in the future, and while officially Microsoft has said nothing about that sort of thing current Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick has.

He claims that he’s discussed reviving both the Guitar Hero and Skylanders franchises with Xbox boss Phil Spencer, as well as adding new social features to Candy Crush.

Although Kotick is not necessarily the most reliable narrator, he claims, while talking to website VentureBeat, that he’s wanted to revive both franchises for a while now but was prevented from doing so because they both involve complex peripherals.

Manufacturing the famous plastic guitars is made difficult by the chip shortages affecting all electronic devices during the pandemic, while the same is true of the toys-to-life figures for Skylanders.

Kotick seems to think that Microsoft would have the resources to overcome the issues and that he’s got ‘a really cool vision’ for what the next Guitar Hero could be.

One of the biggest franchises around during the late 2000s, Guitar Hero suffered from gross oversaturation, especially once all the most famous rock songs had been covered.

Activision did make a brief attempt to revive the brand with Guitar Hero Live in 2015 but it was not a success and there hasn’t been a new game since.

Guitar Hero inspired a fad for plastic peripherals, many of them published by Activision themselves and including the surprisingly good Skylanders franchise.

Whatever you think of the toys-to-life angle the games were generally very good: a sort of kid friendly mix of 3D platformer and Diablo style actioner, that was alternately developed by Toys for Bob and Vicarious Visions.

Toys for Bob made Crash Bandicoot 4, but Vicarious Visions were recently made a subsidiary of Blizzard and reduced to working as a support studio for Diablo.

It might be hoped that they could return to making their own games under Microsoft and you’d think they or Toys for Bob would be the perfect team to work on a new Banjo-Kazooie, if Rare don’t want to do it.

Kotick implies that a new Skylanders would still use the toys-to-life gimmick and describes the early death of the franchise, which at one point was just as profitable as Call Of Duty, as one of the ‘great disappointments of my career’ – blaming its demise on a flood of cheap imitators.

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In terms of Candy Crush, Kotick says he’s long wanted to turn it into a more social experience, with voice and video over IP, but claims that he never had the resources when Activision Blizzard was independent.

Given his infamous reputation many have spoken of their uneasiness at seeing Kotick praised by Microsoft, even if they’re only doing that to please investors.

Kotick will oversee the transition of Activision Blizzard to a Microsoft subsidiary, but it’s widely assumed that he’ll leave the company as soon as the acquisition is formally completed – a process that could take the best part of two years.