Ubisoft launched its Rocksmith guitar-learning game in 2011, just as the faux guitar video game craze started by Guitar Hero seemed be at its end.
Rocksmith 2014 uses real guitars.
But Rocksmith, which combined a Guitar Hero-style video game with a real guitar, sold more than 1.5 million units. That was enough to justify the sequel, Rocksmith 2014, which debuts on Oct. 22. Ubisoft’s San Francisco studio has refashioned the game to make it much easier to learn how to play a real guitar, said Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft North America, in an interview with GamesBeat.
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Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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