Activision CEO Bobby Kotick believes AI could help make 'Guitar Hero' even greater.
The American businessman believes software such as ChatGPT will have a "profound positive impact" on game development, and he has a "vision" for a new game in the popular series, which sees players use a guitar-shaped game controller to simulate playing primarily lead, bass guitar, and rhythm guitar to popular music.
According to Kotaku, he said: “I don’t know how much people realise that a lot of modern-day AI, including ChatGPT, started with the idea of beating a game, whether it was Warcraft, or Dota, or Starcraft, or Go, or Chess.
“But what is now these large language learning model AI technologies, all started from this idea of beating a game.
“And I think one of things that I’ve experienced over the last year is that same feeling that I had when I saw that first Macintosh, about how meaningful the impact of AI would be on society, both positive and negative.
“But for what we do, I think it will have a profound positive impact on the things we’ll be able to do in game development for our players. It will enable us to do things that we haven’t been able to do for a long time.”
Kotick said of the music rhythm video game series: “If you take an example of a thing like Guitar Hero, I’ve always had this vision for what a new Guitar Hero product could be, but without having AI […] and then the processors embedded either in phones, in computers, or in game consoles, that allow you to actually have the speed of processing to enable that AI, we’ve never been in a place where AI is going to have practical reality and applicability for games until now.
“And I think when you look out over the next five or seven years, the impact in game-making is going to be extraordinary.”
'Guitar Hero Live' was the last main series game released in 2015.
The series expanded with the likes of 'DJ Hero' and 'Band Hero'.