Activision’s Guitar Hero and MTV/Harmonix’ Rock Band have a new challenger waiting in the wings that plans to offer a free online game similar to Guitar Hero built on a social network that will allow people to compete against each other online.
Sound familiar? The online Scrabble game Scrabulous ate Hasbro’s lunch in much the same way.
On the JamLegend site, registered players will be able to compete for free in a Guitar Hero-style game using either their computer keyboard or an optional guitar-shaped controller. The site should provide fertile ground for competition between friends and strangers alike by ranking players and allowing them to issue challenges to each other. JamLegend is still in private beta, but co-founder Arjun Lall confirmed that the site’s free beta will launch "in a few weeks." (After an afternoon spent meeting with investors, he also told us that other instruments besides the guitar are also in the works.)
Activision already offers a Guitar Hero III online mini-game that plays pretty much the same way JamLegend does, with the 1-5 keys on a keyboard acting like the buttons on the guitar controller, but Activision’s version lacks JamLegend‘s social component. You can try it out here (to strum, tap the Enter key):
However, unlike the official mini-game above, JamLegend‘s versionwill letseveral people play the same song at the same time. A graph just to the rightof the main window shows each player’s score, so youcan see how everyone is doing with aquick glance.
JamLegend Trailer from JamLegend on Vimeo.
Another thing JamLegend has that Guitar Hero and Rock Band lack isthe opportunity for relatively unknown bands to upload their songsintothe game. With artists competing for our attention as never before, inputting a song into the game will provide a novel way to attract fanswhile letting existing ones experience the band’s songs in a new way.
As you can tell from the video above, JamLegend includes tallies points and includesstreaks and multipliers, just like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, albeit witha massively multiplayer social network integrated into the game. People love Guitar Hero almost as much as they love beating the stuffing out of each other in hyper-competitive online games, so this looks like it could be huge — assuming their servers can handle all the traffic and lawyers from Activision and/or MTV stay out of their hair.
Judging by the number of comments on our earlier postabout another non-multiplayer knock-off of Guitar Hero, people are desperate for a free, web-based version of Guitar Hero, and JamLegend looks to be a good one.
Screenshot courtesy of JamLegend
