One of my biggest hobbies in high school was playing Guitar Hero with my friends. We were all in the same room. Each of us was playing a different instrument. It really made you feel like you were part of an actual band. Almost 20 years later, I still haven’t played another game that gave me the same feeling.
That doesn’t feel right. We have VR technology now. There should be a much better version of that experience by now. There is a game called Beat Saber. I don’t play it much because I don’t really understand the point of it. Is it an exercise game? Maybe. But it’s definitely not a music game for me. I don’t get anything close to the feeling I had with Guitar Hero. I want to feel like I’m actually part of a band.
I always fantasized about a VR music game where you could join famous historical concerts with your friends and experience them together. For example, Fortnite’s Daft Punk concert was amazing. I joined it with friends. We turned off the lights and watched the whole thing together. It was a great experience. But it still didn’t give you that feeling of actually being there in VR.
Then I started thinking about something else. Why just watch the concert? Why can’t you be the one on stage like in Guitar Hero?
I don’t know why no company has made something like this before. Maybe the copyright and licensing fees would be too expensive. Maybe there simply aren’t enough VR players to make it financially viable. Or maybe nobody has thought about it before.
So I developed a prototype myself just for my own entertainment.
I created Concert Hero game and added The Offspring and Rage Against the Machine’s Woodstock ’99 concerts. I also added Queen’s Live Aid performance at Wembley.
Technical Details
The hardware capacity of my old Oculus Quest 2 wasn’t great. Therefore, I built the game with Unity and run it on my Windows PC. I stream it to the headset using the Virtual Desktop app.
I separated the vocals and instrumentals from the songs using LALAL AI. The instrumental track always plays. The vocal track stops if you lower your controller. This means you are no longer singing into the microphone.
Some songs also require specific actions to continue. For example, there is the song “Freedom” in the sample video. When a certain part of the song comes up, you need to raise your controller and lower it again to resume the song. You can jump while doing it or just do it while standing. Each song needs to be configured individually for moments like this.
The rest is mostly generic coding and 3D design. It’s not rocket science. I really hope someone makes a proper game like this one day.