Guitar Hero



Originally developed by Harmonix, who are also the creators of Frequency, Amplitude and the Karaoke Revolution series, and went on to make Rock Band, Guitar Hero has become an extremely popular example of the Rhythm Game genre that plays like Guitar Freaks, but with five buttons instead of three and commercial songs.

From Guitar Hero III to Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, it has been developed by Neversoft and published by Activision. Neversoft rebuilt their own Guitar Hero engine from scratch when Harmonix handed over the reins to work on Rock Band.

After Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (Released in late 2010), development of all games in the series (including spinoffs DJ Hero and Band Hero) were cancelled, the Hero franchise was discontinued by Activision in February 2011, and Neversoft itself was liquidated. However, in April 2011, Activision changed their tune, claiming the series was now on "hiatus" and they claim that a new game will be released in 2012.

Games in this series include:

 * Guitar Hero
 * Guitar Hero II
 * Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's
 * Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock
 * Guitar Hero: Aerosmith
 * Guitar Hero: On Tour
 * Guitar Hero On Tour: Decades
 * Guitar Hero On Tour: Modern Hits
 * Guitar Hero World Tour
 * Guitar Hero: Metallica
 * Guitar Hero: Smash Hits
 * Guitar Hero: Van Halen
 * Guitar Hero 5
 * Band Hero
 * Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock  (PlayStation 3/WII/X360 only)
 * DJ Hero

""I'm the drummer, I don't get paid to understand any of this!" "Don't let the drummer handle the money.""
 * All Your Powers Combined: In Warriors of Rock's quest mode.
 * And Your Reward Is Clothes: Guitar Hero 5's career mode (using the Xbox 360 for reference) has the following items as unlocks: Clothing for custom rockers, alternate costumes for the premade rockers, more clothing for custom rockers, one quickplay venue, more clothing for custom rockers, instrument parts, Extra options like Performance Mode, more clothing for custom rockers, Celebrity rockers, Cheats that are perfectly legitimate for unlocking stuff in career mode more clothing for custom rockers, A golden idol as a playable rocker, AT LEAST ONE avatar award (which may not be tied to career mode itself), and STILL MORE CLOTHING FOR CUSTOM ROCKERS.
 * Animesque: Appears somewhat in the CG models and played with extensively in GH III's cutscenes and beyond (Depicted largely a a mix between this and Western-style comic books; but used for Japanese related bits here and here - Both from the Co-op mode of GH III).
 * Anime Hair: Pandora's G-clef hair in GH 5.
 * Artifact Title: from World Tour onwards, what with the addition of drums and vocals.
 * Big Red Devil: Lou.
 * Bishounen / Shounen Hair: Izzy Sparks.
 * Justified, as he's meant to represent the Glam Metal genre.
 * Blatant Lies: One of Guitar Hero 3's loading messages: "I swear, officer, the dressing room TV just unbolted itself from the wall and threw itself out the window!"
 * Bonus Level of Hell: Guitar Hero 3's last venue is a nightclub in Hell.
 * Inverted in Guitar Hero World Tour, where the bonus venue is a Valkyrie barge in Asgard, and in GH5, where the bonus level is inside a psychedelic bubble in outer space.
 * Meanwhile, the bonus venue in Warriors of Rock is
 * Bonus Boss: Jordan, Through The Fire And The Flames, etc.
 * Brutal Bonus Level
 * Cash Cow Franchise: The series broke the $1 billion milestone a while back and there was much rejoicing on Activision's part. And now it's slated to die because market oversaturation is beginning to hurt sales severely. Good going, Activision.
 * Cover Version: For rights reasons, any song that says "As made famous by" at the beginning is a cover; masters are prefaced by either "As performed by" or simply "By".
 * This was dropped from World Tour on, where they started to include only the masters - If you dont count the 2 covers as DLC then there are no more covers. The only covers now are professionally performed (for example, Van Halen's cover of "Oh, Pretty Woman").
 * Curse Cut Short: Expected from a series rated T at best, but the cover version of "Killing in the Name" in GH2 shows a great example, by using "Now you're under control" to cover up the repetitions of "Fuck you" in the original song.
 * But in the Smash Hits version of "Killing in the Name" The repeated line "Now your're under control" and the big "UNDER CONTROL!" (which replaces the "MOTHERFUCKER!!!" of the original) are removed. 'Course, they couldn't dub replacement lines over the masters, so yeah.
 * Did you just ROCK OUT Satan?!? -- The final stage in Guitar Hero 3.
 * Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: In a cutscene in Guitar Hero: Metallica, when confronted by Lou the Devil about not using the opening band they had a contract with, James Hetfield reveals that he had his fingers crossed while he was signing the contract.
 * Difficult but Awesome: Tapping on guitar. Basically, you take your strumming hand off of the strumbar and use it to help with fretting. It's extremely difficult, especially with plain hammer-on\pull-off notes (in which one miss means you need to strum again before the game will accept anything), but it it makes full-combing some of the hardest songs more doable, such as Through The Fire and the Flames and Surfing With the Alien. Tapping is also a real-life technique, though like everything, it's simpler here.
 * Actually, it's much easier to tap on real guitar, considering the fact you don't have to strum again if you miss a note.
 * Deal with the Devil (the plot of Guitar Hero III)
 * And Smash Hits too, to an extent.
 * Downer Ending: In GHWT, there are 5 bad endings (which are the true endings) for each finished mode. In Guitar mode: The magazine says that the Band sucks. In Bass mode, the bass character quits the band and goes solo. In Drums mode, the drums character gets shipped in a box, in a fallout nuclear bomb test and dies. In Vocals mode, The vocals character also dies from a statue-related disaster. And finally, at the end of the ending cutscene in Band mode, the evil guy (Who was only in one ending, featuring him, in full exposure) laughs evilly as if the game was mocking you!
 * I don't remember Matty (the drummer character of GHWT) dying in the Drums ending. For what I remember, after the bomb goes off, he's sitting there, all burned, and doing a horns-up with a smile in his face that seems to say "hell yeah!!!"
 * Also, the vocalist doesn't die when the statue falls. He's shown alive and well, shrugs, and sneaks away.
 * There are other interpretations of the endings. For instance, the bassist (who happened to be Shirley Crowley in GHWT) was frustrated at being overshadowed by the other band members as seen at the bassist career's intro video, so her going solo and releasing a successful album could count as a good ending for her. But then again, the evil guy (Lou) seems to have had a hand in it, so it could also be a case of making a Deal with the Devil.
 * Downloadable Content: Quite a bit of it, though nowhere near its main rival, for each main game of the series starting with the 360 port of Guitar Hero II (meaning not band-specific titles). For the most part, DLC is exclusive to the game for which it was purchased, but the Metallica album "Death Magnetic" for GH3 could be played in World Tour, and GH5, Band Hero, and Warriors of Rock support nearly all of WT's DLC with application of a patch.
 * Which, annoyingly, breaks the DLC index for World Tour, but... not really a problem, except for that obnoxious message GHWT gives in quickplay about it.
 * Dueling Games: with Rock Band.
 * With the death of the GH series, Rock Band appears to be the victor.
 * Dumb and Drummer: Several of the Loading Screen quotes from Guitar Hero 3.


 * Dummied Out: "Trippolette" and "Graveyard Shift" in the original game; "Trippolette" was notably That One Song.
 * Early Installment Weirdness: Guitar Hero 1 With Nigh on impossible Hammer ons/Pull offs, only one multiplayer mode, and every cover version of a song in the main setlist it's most likely that the Dev team brought in the toughest for first.
 * Ear Worm: I dare you to find less than five earworms on ANY Guitar Hero title. Especially applies to songs you had never even heard of before.
 * Easier Than Easy: The Beginner difficulty introduced with World Tour. It allows you to essentially play through the entire game by just strumming the guitar without needing to press any fret, or play the drums by hitting any pad in time. On the other hand...
 * Harder Than Hard: The Expert+ (drums only) introduced in Metallica to support double kick pedals to support double kick bass drums like the ones Lars Ulrich usually has.
 * In Warriors Of Rock however, it includes Ghost Notes in select songs.
 * Easy Mode Mockery: Until the third game, you can't unlock anything by playing Easy Mode, and are repeatedly (condescendingly) told you should play harder difficulties. Also to boot, the final tier in II is unavailable if you play Career Mode on Easy. Oh, and you can't play any of the encores either.
 * Challenges on Guitar Hero 5 cannot be attempted on Beginner, and some are only possible at Expert (and Expert+ for drums) however there are some exceptions.
 * Epic Rocking: Warriors of Rock has Rush's 20 and a half minute long epic "2112." however the individual tracks are pretty short in length.
 * Executive Meddling: Minor example: While Guitar Hero: Metallica was in production, Lars Ulrich originally wanted Slayer's "Angel of Death" in the game, but the development team, deeming the lyrics too offensive, forced Lars to change his choice to "War Ensemble" instead. Justified, as the song is about the experiments of Josef Mengele.
 * To clarify: it's not that the development team didn't like Slayer's song or anything, it's that they would have had to censor it so heavily they might as well have had an instrumental.
 * If they had, it might have come out something like GH5's version of Iron Maiden's "2 Minutes to Midnight." No cuss words in the song, but apparently the anti-war message was just too vivid and the result is a lot of censorship, ironic given Maiden's view on those issues. The bigger problem with censoring this song, though, were the implications of children abuse (like when the chorus says "to kill the unborn in the womb", the "to kill" is omitted), so it came off whitewashed and with a rather broken message.
 * The very first game had Spanish Castle magic By Jimi Hendrix, but the lyrics were removed because Hendrex's estate did not want an impersonator.
 * Fake Band: Guitar Hero 2 contains songs by Spinal Tap and Dethklok... and Strong Bad. Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's has one by Limozeen.
 * Dethklok has returned a couple of times since, being DLC for GH5 and represented in Warriors of Rock's track list.
 * Fan Service: Casey Lynch is a firm believer in equal-opportunity shirtless shredding.
 * Not to mention Johnny's sudden gaining of six-pack abs in Warriors of Rock.
 * Fake Difficulty: plenty of it. Boss fights in particular combine the horrible concept of Mario Kart style battles with rhythm games. In Guitar Hero III, this can lead to an insane scenario where even if you're really good, the final boss on Hard and Expert difficulty is pretty much impossible to beat consistently without just the right combination of attacks thrown at you. That is, if you can survive and counter his first assault.
 * Guitar Hero 3 and World Tour are very bad at this, due to the spectacular overcharting of many songs, which still manage to miss a great many notes that the original guitarists play. This led to many players abandoning the series for spiritual successor Rock Band (easier in some regards, but also far more accurate), and many a flame war was brought against players for the only apparent reason to want more out of gameplay than "challenge".
 * Of course, it seems that many players actually want the "challenge" of Fake Difficulty -- the first couple of dozen responses to the announcement of the tracklist for Guitar Hero: World Tour was "where's the new Jordan or TTFAF? we want teh hardzorz nao!" (For the record, expect lots of It's Easy, So It Sucks flame wars; the only song very difficult to pass is Satch Boogie, and it's a one-trick pony. It's also in a bonus set of songs that are easier than the game's final set!)
 * I can confirm that it is a lot easier to play Los Lobos' version of La Bamba in real guitar than in GHWT...
 * And despite a handful of candidates for extremely hard songs, there are people saying the entirety of GH5's setlist will be FC'd on Guitar, Bass, and Vocals in under three days, 13-minute-songs be damned.
 * Guitar Hero 5 has this with 3 of the NINE stars possible in each gig on Career mode (five for doing well enough in a song, plus one for FC'ing it, plus one for each of the three challenge tiers accomplished), as they usually have you doing things like alt-strumming a song that's not suitable for it, abusing the whammy bar (which might as well land you with a score below what you wanted -- you know, it ain't easy strumming while you keep your hand in the strum bar), and tapping all the slider/tap notes. And that's just for guitar. Oh, and if you're not on Expert (or Expert+ on select drum challenges), you may find star #9 is impossible due to not having enough notes.
 * To be fair, tapping ain't that hard. It's just a matter of pressing the buttons without strumming, so you may even use both hands to do so. Try this on the final solo in "American Girl". However, the cutoffs used in the relevant challenges assume you're on Expert.
 * Guitar Hero: Metallica does this by only including one guitar track, even though the band uses two guitarists. The lead track alternates between James and Kirk, depending who is playing something interesting (read: difficult) during that part of the song. So you don't get any of the rest that they would.
 * Subverted in a few spots, even though it might initally seem otherwise, in Van Halen. Rock Band 2 vets will have to strum a lot more notes outside of the solos in Painkiller, but that's accurate given how it's actually played -- the notes are on different strings. Glaringly obvious later on at the end of the first solo when the chart follows the OTHER guitarist, who has sustain notes for all but two measures, before giving out the probably undercharted HOPO run at the end of the solo.
 * The James/Kirk alternation is subverted with the downloadable Suicide & Redemption, where rather than consolidating the guitar parts they released two versions, one with all James' parts, the other with all Kirk's. This does lean towards one song for the price of two though.
 * Fan Nickname: The unnamed bassist in III seen during single player mode. He wears a Zildjian shirt (which had no logo in his previous appearances in the two first games), jeans, and has a face completely covered by long, shaggy hair, a thick mustache and massive beard. And thus, "Hairpile" was born!
 * Franchise Killer: Though its not one specific game responsible, the absolutely ridiculous number of released titles since Activision took over on the franchise in 2006 (13 new titles in the years between 2007 and 2010) have been pretty much confirmed to be the cause of the killing of at least the franchise, if the not the the whole band game genre.
 * Game Breaking Bugs: Hardware edition again: Remember the early Rock Band drums, specifically the drum pedal? That was easily fixable without voiding any warranty. The red pad on the World Tour drums, on the other hand, stems from a loose wire inside the drum, and fixing it yourself violates the warranty on it.
 * And in Guitar Hero 5, the Expert/Plus glitch that crops up on Expert wherever doublebass is charted on Expert+. In these sections, every other bass kick is treated as a "null note", which means pressing the foot pedal down where the null note is counts as a miss, making fast bass patterns damn-near-impossible on Expert. This results in some people clearing Expert+ before clearing Expert.
 * Band Hero (and Warriors of Rock too), despite its subject matter, actually fixes this bug. Yet, Neversoft refused to patch it on 5.
 * "The Catalyst" is impossible to FC on Medium Guitar because a tap chord is charted, and is unhittable with any methods, even though the next chord is the same, and is charted as a HO/PO chord. (Great job, Beenox)
 * Around 5:09. Another example is in "All Nightmare Long" on Hard in GH3. (A ghost note here). This is fixed when imported into World Tour and beyond.
 * Genki Girl: Midori just can't keep still. And her Girlish Pigtails that swing around as a result make her even more eye catching.
 * This troper finds such genkiness especially charming when Midori is assigned as a drummer, as seen in Guitar Hero: Van Halen, particularly in fast paced or drum heavy songs. See an example of her doing so here.
 * And despite the drastic makeover that rendered her beyond recognition, she's a lot genkier in Band Hero.
 * Genre Blindness: Since the games decided to add the song's genre to their general info and sorting options in 5, the creative team has done it on a hit-and-miss bases. For example: 3 Doors Down's "Kryptonite" is categorized as Southern Rock (which it's not by a longshot; it's alternative/pop-rock), Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" is placed under the Blues Rock header (it's actually folk), and Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc." is said to be Hip Hop (it's indie/electronica).
 * Some of these were fixed in Warriors Of Rock. However, Fall Out Boy's "Sugar, We're Going Down" (originally Pop Punk) is now listed as Prog Rock, of all genres.
 * Goth: Pandora, described in the first game as "the dark princess of rock."
 * Grand Finale: Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock... For now.
 * Greatest Hits Game: Smash Hits. It was even considered to be named "Greatest Hits" when it was a beta.
 * It is called "Greatest Hits" in Europe.
 * The Grim Ripper: Featured as an unlockable character until World Tour.
 * Humongous Mecha: The Beast in Warriors of Rock in a way.
 * I Don't Know Mortal Kombat: In short, you are not guaranteed victory in this game just because you know how to play a real guitar. It helps to have a limber pinky, but that's pretty much it.
 * VH-1's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs proved this spectacularly with the "Celebrity Rock Band Challenge" segments, which featured real professional musicians sucking hardcore at Rock Band (which technically works just the same as GH). The most likely reason for this? Musicians usually aren't gamers, and rhythm games require strong hand-eye coordination--of the type you can only develop by being obsessed with video games.
 * Many have testified that having actual guitar experience will make you worse at the game than a complete novice. Unsurprising, since the controls work like a completely different instrument... namely a keyboard.
 * Even though the skills required for the game and the actual instrument are direct analogues of each other, there are still some benefits in having experience playing an instrument beforehand. Being trained in an instrument means you have a better ear for music, which makes it easier to keep rhythm while playing a song, as well as having the hand coordination and finger strength necessary to make the jump to Hard and Expert difficulty, when you have to learn how to transition between the orange button and back.
 * Instrumentals: "Spanish Castle Magic" became one in the original Guitar Hero, because Hendrix's estate didn't want someone impersonating him.
 * There's also a few songs that are instrumentals without Executive Meddling, like Frankenstein in GH1, Jessica, Gemini, Jordan and YYZ in GH2, Cliffs of Dover in III, Satch Boogie in GHWT, Orion in GH:M, and Younk Funk and Scatterbrain in GH5 (though strangely enough, for the cases from GHWT on, the vocalist is still on stage, while he was not in previous games).
 * Subverted with Memetic Mutation and Lampshade Hanging when Satch Boogie is played as a full band. Proof can be found here.
 * In Guitar hero Van Halen Cathedral, and Spanish Fly has only a guitar part, but Eruption actually has a drum and a bass part, however the majority of the notes is in the guitar part.
 * Warriors of Rock Has "2112 Part 3: Discovery" and it only has a Guitar and Vocals part, My advice is to not play it in quest mode on drums, however if you play the 2112 medley in quest mode on bass the game will switch you from the Bass Track to the Guitar Track for that song.
 * If that's not enough There's also "Speeding (Vault edition)" by Steve Vai, and "Black Widow of la Porte" by John 5 featuring Jim Root.
 * Actually, every single on-disc Guitar Hero game has at least one instrumental on it, either by executive Meddling (Spanish Castle Magic) or because there is no Vocal track.
 * Jiggle Physics: Judy Nails in Guitar Hero III is very bouncy.
 * Johnny McCoolname: Johnny Napalm.
 * Large Ham: Gene Simmons as the Demigod of Rock in Warriors of Rock.
 * Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The person hired to brainwash the crowd in the Band intro (Wich doubles as the game intro) is Kenny G.
 * One of the unlockable characters in Warriors of Rock is
 * Licensed Game: The ones with a band on the title.
 * Lighter and Softer: Band Hero, which, unlike the rock-heavy, T-rated Guitar Hero games, is rated E10+ and is filled with pop music, being intended as a more "family-friendly" version of the game.
 * Though you can get fairly non-family-friendly DLC.
 * Not to mention it can import songs from GH5, Smash Hits, and World Tour.
 * Kinda gives Band Hero the concept of Rock Band.
 * Granted, since the DLC From Guitar Hero 5 (Yes, Most DLC From World Tour counts) is shared with Band Hero.
 * Good thing it's not like Lego Rock Band, although Band Hero and Lego Rock Band were released on the same day.
 * No wonder why Midori was excluded from the character list in the fifth game.
 * Loads and Loads of Loading: Not sure about the other versions, but the PlayStation 2 Band Hero can easily take up to ten seconds between screens. Creating a custom rocker? Be prepared for at least ten minutes, 90% of which will be waiting for screens to load.
 * This troper can personally confirm that GH: World Tour and especially GH5 for the PlayStation 2 are fraught with long loading times, up to about 3 minutes in the case of GH5. On the plus side, on GH5, if you play a setlist on Quickplay, only the first song has the abnormally long load time, and loading the rest of the songs will be more reasonable.
 * A Load of Bull: One of the unlockable characters in Warriors of Rock is a Minotaur.
 * Male Gaze: Just play Knights of Cydonia with Judy Nails.
 * Marathon Boss: "Do You Feel Like We Do (Live)" on Guitar Hero 5 and "2112" on Warriors of Rock (though only if all seven songs are played one after the other, such as in the campaign).
 * Warriors of Rock has another in the form of the final battle, but rather than a single track broken up into several parts, it's a trinity of Megadeth tracks (three Megadeth Tracks). Doesn't make it any less epic, though.
 * Likewise "2112" is broken down into its seven parts, so it's not as much of a marathon as DYFLWD (or "Free Bird" back in GH 2). Granted since these seven individual tracks are pretty short in length.
 * Metalhead: The character of Axel Steel is a stereotypical metalhead. Casey Lynch also appears to be an example of a female metalhead.
 * Then there's the character called "Metalhead" if you want to be literal.
 * Mission Pack Sequel (Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80's -- Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Metallica, and Van Halen are a little more involved, but not much)
 * Which would be not to mention the DS Guitar Hero On Tour series, which is entirely comprised of Mission Pack Sequels, with the first "On Tour" game being a random collection of just under 30 songs from a variety of eras and styles, "Decades" being the same, but with the songs separated by era (and "00's" and "Modern" being two separate tiers for no apparent reason other than there were too many 2000's songs to fit in one tier), and the upcoming "Modern Hits" being a collection of just under 30 songs, all of which are from the past decade or so.
 * Multi Platform (since Guitar Hero 2, except for Rocks the 80s)
 * Averted with the On Tour subseries, exclusive to the Nintendo DS.
 * Nobody Loves the Bassist: Played for Laughs in GH2 and 3 with loading messages such as "You need a mini-fridge in your practice space. It's more important than a bassist" and "You seem to have a problem with your bass amp. I can hear it!". Deconstructed in World Tour where, sick of being overshadowed by her bandmates, bassist Shirley Crowley signs a Deal with the Devil and ends up with more success than the others. Averted from Metallica onwards.
 * Not Quite Dead: Matty Canz in the Drum Career outro, and Ricki Lee in the Vocal Career outro In Guitar Hero World Tour, considering that they are both Born Lucky.
 * Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: You can have this as a band in Guitar Hero 5. There's a Pirate costume, a Ninja outfit (the latter for men only), Kurt Cobain or Johnny Cash can be your undead revenant, and Shirley Manson is a Terminator. Sweeeeeet.
 * Taken to near extremes with Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, where the first four recruited characters get transformed into all sorts of abominations: Echo Tesla becomes Robot, Johnny Napalm becomes Nightcrawler, Judy Nails becomes a she-devil (complete with hooves replacing her feet), and Austin Tejas becomes a headless, um, whatever, then they get lumped together as a band in the 2112 mission.
 * Then there's the next stage of the Quest Mode: upon transformation Lars Umlaut becomes a Pig Man, Pandora becomes a Dark Elf, Casey Lynch becomes a Snake Woman, and Axel Steel becomes a Mummy! After all that, all eight of them combine their powers to battle a Humongous Mecha.
 * And if you feel like it, you can have a band with a robot, a minotaur, and Arthas Menethil in it!
 * Nintendo Hard: Lou in Guitar Hero 3. No attacks at all during the first third of the song, so there's a 1-2 minute delay on every attempt before the actual battling begins. Then Lou obtains an attack before you can pick up one. On Hard and Expert, almost all the attack phrases are at least somewhat difficult to hit. Not to mention fast solos that are hard enough just to stay alive on normally, let alone when Lou throws an attack at you. Then finally a choke-able "finish him" part -- especially if your rock meter was red when Lou failed.
 * On Expert, That One Attack from Lou that can make you fail from a fully green rock meter is Double Notes. Take a very fast solo. Then turn them all into chords! That's what happens.
 * Then there's the original guitar hero game...
 * Noodle Incident: Judy Nails earned her nickname when she was seven, in what her bio describes as "a nail gun incident."
 * No Celebrities Were Harmed (Not always obvious, but many characters are based on real rock stars. Xavier Stone is an interesting case: as he was based on Jimi Hendrix, he was absent in World Tour, which featured Hendrix himself, among other licensed real-life stars.)
 * Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo: If a Numbered Sequels can even be considered an oddly named one as well, then Guitar Hero 5 fits the bill for being sandwiched between World Tour and Warriors of Rock, which Stopped Numbering Sequels.
 * Old Save Bonus: Guitar Hero 5 and Band Hero can be augmented with songs (not all, just a few) from World Tour, Smash Hits, and Metallica, supposing the player uses a one-time code from said games' manuals and pays a fee (heavy, considering the small percentage of songs exported) for the cost of relicensing the songs. Neversoft has stated more songs will become added this way as they work out the licensing.
 * GH5 and Band Hero are also confirmed to be cross-compatible; a player can export a majority of songs from one game into the other.
 * Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock can import all the exportable songs from all of the above, and thus can end up with a HUGE library of songs (as many as 500).
 * The Power of Rock: More or less the game's entire premise, but particularly Star Power. It is said it will be cranked Up to Eleven with Warriors of Rock -- starting with the title.
 * Promoted Fanboy: After Activision bought the series and it lost Harmonix, Neversoft stepped up to the plate as developer, saying they played it on breaks while making Tony Hawk games.
 * Many custom note chart authors from the Guitar Hero fan community were also picked up by Neversoft to write charts for their game. Of course, these were the sort of players who were already very, very good at the game and wanted to write harder charts to challenge themselves, which carried over directly to Guitar Hero 3...
 * Rank Inflation: Staring from the first four games, your score is represented on a five-star scale, though the lowest you can get is 3 as performance any worse would result in being booed offstage. From the 5th game and onwards, netting you the 6th star if you FC the song. Reaching the goals for the bonus challenges in said game nets you up to 3 more stars for each song. And in the 6th game, with abilities like increasing your multiplier or saving your streak, you can obtain up to 40 stars in a single song.
 * Said 40 stars (or rather, learning how to earn 40 stars in every on-disc song in quest mode (Except the 7 2112 songs)) are necessary for the 100% Completion.
 * Even for the earlier games, the Score Hero website, having worked out the math used to determine star ratings in the game, extends this logic to create 6, 7, 8 and 9 star ratings. No song is 9-starrable at the moment, but 8 stars are possible on quite a few.
 * Double bass can swell the scores because there's simply so many more notes under the star power; the exported version of Overkill has an Expert+ FC which, if Score Hero ever updates to track the extended ratings post-GHA, will be good for 9.4 stars.
 * Rhythm Game (if we have to explain this one...)
 * Risky Business Dance: The recent ad campaign.
 * Rock Me, Asmodeus (the last boss of Guitar Hero III)
 * Sequel Difficulty Drop: Enforced from World Tour onwards, since Neversoft wanted the franchise to be more accessible.
 * Serial Escalation: Many examples, from the addition of extra instruments to the increased difficulty of the songs, but the best example is this: In Warriors of Rock, the cap for the amount of stars you can get in a song has increased from five to FORTY.
 * Only in Quest mode though, and only after clearing it once.
 * Shout-Out (Complete "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" at the Battle of the Bands/Rat Celler gig on Guitar Hero II (Any one of the two consoles) and your drummer explodes.)
 * There's also the Rat Cellar stage in the second game, based on the former Rathskellar club (famous in the 70's and 80's for punk shows) in Boston. Harmonix even snuck in a poster with the old Rathskellar logo on it in the background.
 * The only spoken line the third cutscene in Guitar hero 3 is a reference to the repeated line in "Two Princes", "Just go ahead now"
 * And you can download "Old Time Rock And Roll" for GHWT and beyond. It comes with some customised animations for the lead singer. Fun fact is, this very song was used for one of the GHWT TV ads, but did not come packaged with the game. Well the singer's entrance is exclusively packaged for Guitar Hero World Tour, But aside from that...
 * For this troper, in Warriors of Rock
 * And there's newcomer Austin Tejas too, for that matter.
 * Though his name is a reference to Austin, Texas.
 * Or more probably a Pun on "ostentatious", i.e. OTT.
 * And then there's
 * "The Priests are in another temple!" Section of 2112 Part 2.
 * I can't believe Shirley Crowley (one of the main characters of the storyline of World Tour, as well as being the female voice in the Tutorial sections of most of the games), wasn't mentioned yet. Just look at her name and see how many references you can think of from it.
 * Happens quite a lot in this series, actually. The Xbox version of Guitar Hero 2 had an achievement called The Joan and Lita Award for an 100-note streak in co-op mode.
 * Spontaneous Human Combustion: Happens to your band's drummer at the end of "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight" in Guitar Hero II, See Also: Shout-Out.
 * The Stinger: Guitar Hero 3 lets you play the Bonus Boss song Through the Fire and Flames during the end credits, but there's no energy meter and thus no risk of failure. This is because even those good enough to beat the whole game on Expert have no guarantee of even getting through the opening of that song without significant practice.
 * Aerosmith has Kings and Queens, and World Tour has Dream Theater's Pull Me Under. Neither is as hard as Through The Fire and the Flames (though the solo to Pull Me Under is pretty ridiculous), but they are played over the credits in the same un-failable conditions.
 * In Metallica, this extra song (The Thing That Should Not Be) is playable in a "final" venue of sorts, and doesn't appear automatically when just beating the final standard setlist song. GH5 goes back to the previous style with an unfailable 21st Century Schizoid Man. Not present whatsoever in Guitar Hero Van Halen, though.
 * And again, in Band Hero, with Don McLean's American Pie.
 * The Tetris Effect: "Skittles". Officially called "gems".
 * Theme Music Power-Up
 * Title Drop: The bonus track in the first game is "Guitar Hero" by Monkey Steals The Peach.
 * The achievement in the second and third games is named after the game as well.
 * Unlockable Content
 * Urban Legend of Zelda: Rumors persisted for a while that the Rolling Stones' live DLC was recorded at their infamous Altamont, CA concert, with "Under My Thumb" being the song where Meredith Hunter was killed. It's actually from Get Yer Ya-yas Out, their live DVD which was recorded at Madison Square Garden earlier in 1969.
 * Updated Rerelease: Guitar Hero II had an updated version for the Xbox360 released a bit after the original PS2 version. It added a few new songs, rearranged the difficulty tiers, and had a new, fancy X-Plorer controller.
 * Up to Eleven: The volume controls in the first two games literally do go up to eleven. In the neversoft intro for the third one, it might say 11 but the sticky note says twelve.
 * Lampshaded by Guitar Hero III's loading message "It can always be much louder."
 * The band multiplier for Guitar Hero 5, for a full band, caps out at 11. 4x for full-band streaking, 4x for full band star power deployment, and an additional 3x for everyone hitting a band moment. This is also the only way you can meet the diamond challenge cutoff on the last challenge in the game.
 * Virtual Paper Doll: World Tour allows you to customize your characters' clothing.
 * Not to mention their face, in excruciating detail. And their body type, in much less detail.
 * Smash Hits and Band Hero allowed for this too (even giving you Midori's Twin Tails hair as an option for custom females) as well as GH 5 and Van Halen. All four games also allowed for customizing the clothing of built-in and unlockable characters, though with more flexibility in Smash Hits and Van Halen (not possible however for the licenced characters like the Van Halen band members in Van Halen [the only options available for them are two different looks from different eras], and Taylor Swift, Adam Levine, and the members of No Doubt in Band Hero, who could not be customized at all).
 * What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: The Star Power moves a thousand times over. Rarely do any of the characters keep their hands on the guitar when they use them. This was fixed in Guitar Hero III, where Star Power animations are somewhat toned down, and the characters in fact keep playing properly (with visual effects instead of wilder antics). Which, whilst it's less distracting, is also much less awesome. Also, from then on, the only other indication that you are on Star Power, aside from the highway turning electric blue, is more vibration from the crowd, aside from a few lightning flying here and there.
 * Back for the DS version -- almost every character throws their guitar around, except Johnny Napalm who jumps around. On a similar note, many display psychic powers when finishing a song. E.g. Pandora spins her guitar on her hand, then walks away, leaving it hanging there.
 * And then there's the infamous five note chord in Smash Hits, used for a thunderstrike at the very end of "Raining Blood". Furthermore, it gives Star Power despite ending the song, just for the sake of having lightning (though you can trigger Star Power, assuming you already had at least 25% of the SP gauge filled beforehand, and that this final chord is a sustained note).
 * Wolverine Publicity: Probably what killed the series.
 * Yuppie Couple: Freezepop has managed to become a musical example. One Freezepop song showed up in almost every Guitar Hero game developed by Harmonix since one; this particular trope followed over to Rock Band when Harmonix switched to that series. (And then back again for the DS version... although the fact that the song was called I Am Not Your Game Boy means that it at least made sense for it to be there.) This owes largely to the fact that one of the members of Freezepop is a Harmonix employee.
 * Zettai Ryouiki: Midori rocks this look. Same with Judy Nails, at least in Warriors of Rock.
 * Zettai Ryouiki: Midori rocks this look. Same with Judy Nails, at least in Warriors of Rock.