What's good internet you are listening to a special waypoint radio and I'm your host

Rob Zachney.

So about a year ago our friend Emmanuel over at Motherboard forwarded me a pitch for an

oral history of guitar hero and while the pitch was good I admit I had my doubts because

if you read a lot of online writing the oral history format has gotten a little bit

debased.

I don't think it's necessarily overplayed but there are a lot of places putting out oral

histories that maybe were they oral histories were they really I don't know.

In my view great oral histories take you back to a place and time from the perspectives

of the people who were there and there's a lot of pretenders out there who were just

interviewing a couple folks about a topic and calling it a day and all those cut-rate oral

histories kind of made me skeptical of the entire format.

So from a lack of faith I guess I was punished last fall when our guest here Blake Hester

turned in an absolute monster of a 70 page history of the making of guitar hero one and

if you're listening to this podcast you can read the final edited version of that article

on our website this week and I highly recommend that you book an hour or so to do that because

it is tremendous it takes us back to the founding of red octane harmonics the company struggles

to find an identity for themselves at the turn of the century and then their decision

to partner up and make a game about playing guitar and you'll hear from just about everyone

who was at those companies at the time people who worked on licensing the music the store

reps who placed the first orders for this weird little game I as to say this is in my view

what an oral history should be and more so Blake did a hell of a job and it's an incredible

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