The age of the plastic guitars is over, thanks to the death of the fad-like Guitar Hero and Rock Band games. Now it’s time for the age of real guitars in video games.
Nao Higo and Nick Bonardi of Ubisoft’s Rocksmith 2014 team.
That’s the premise behind Rocksmith 2014, the second version of the guitar-learning game from Ubisoft. The French video game publisher launched its original Rocksmith in 2011 as a kind of experiment which allowed players to hook up their own guitars to their video game consoles.
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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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