Update 6pm GMT:Turns out, this is not the only AI-fuelled ad that Activision is running on social media right now. As reported by80 Level, there are also ads for Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot games - but none of them are real. They lead you to a survey, to see if you would like them to be real.
Original story follows.
Summary
Over the weekend, Activision casually announcedGuitar Hero Mobile, but this innocuous reveal on Instagram wasn’t met with fanfare. Instead, many were disappointed to find that the key art was clearly made with generative AI.
There are a few giveaways. The band is made up of four guitarists, whose arms blend into their instruments; the prompt bar has two blue paths; the buttons are nondescript blobs; the speakers look liquefied: and the drums in the background… well, just look at them. They’re a mess of sticks and floating cymbals.
As reported byInsider Gaming, Activision almost immediately hid the post after a torrent of angry fans labelled the game as “AI slop”, but you may still view the announcement — and all the angry comments —via this linkor through the embed below.
This Is The First Guitar Hero Game In Ten Years
What’s especially disappointing about this announcement is that it marks the return of Guitar Hero after ten years. What should have been an ostentatious reveal, riding the excitement of fans who spent the last decade begging Activision for a sequel — something thatFortniteeven capitalised on with its new Festival mode — was instead a lackluster Instagram post taken down after just 342 likes.
But the writing has been on the walls for some time now. Guitar Hero Live ended the series on a whimper, as poor sales led Activision to sell developer FreeStyleGames to Ubisoft, closing the book on its iconic rhythm franchise after a hugely successful ten-year run that saw 25 million copies sold. However, former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick stated several times over the last two years thathe wanted to bring the series back, though not in the way many had hoped - he wanted to use AI to dig up Guitar Hero’s grave.
Ubisoft closed down FreeStyleGames in January.
“We haven’t made a Guitar Hero in a long time and I think with AI and some of the new technologies that we could employ, we could create a really compelling new Guitar Hero,“he said in 2023. “A big part of what I’ve seen in Microsoft is research. They do development in areas that are extraordinary. And so being able to tap into their AI and machine learning capability, the data analytics, new ways of thinking about graphics - I just see unlimited potential for what we do.”
We don’t know much about the mobile game yet, but the fact that its key art clearly uses generative AI doesn’t inspire much confidence. Whether the game itself leans as heavily into the systems that Kotick mentioned, we’ll just have to wait and see, but it’s hardly a solid first impression. Nonetheless, Guitar Hero Mobile launches later this year.
