In 2005, Guitar Hero was launched – the game which involves using a guitar shaped controller to simulate playing real thing, in time to rhythms of various difficulties. By June 2009, combined sales of the Guitar Hero games have totalled in excess of 32 million copies, making it the Best-selling guitar-based instrument videogame series out there.
The game has gone on to break various different records including the First BAFTA award for a rhythm videogame when it picked up a BAFTA game award for the “Best Soundtrack”. It was the first rhythm game to win the award.
Since its creation, gamers have continually tried to set and break records playing Guitar Hero, and the scores just keep getting higher and higher.
A 25 year-old Annie “Ecstacy” Leung made gaming history on 30 September 2010 when she set a new record for the Highest score on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (Neversoft, 2007) by a female gamer. She racked up an incredible score of 789,349 while playing the practically-impossible “Through the Fire and Flames” on the expert setting. She has held on to this record, unbeaten for five years.
Annie, who was born in California, USA, has played videogames since she was a child, but got seriously into gaming in 2004 when she became hooked on the game Unreal Tournament (Epic, 1999).
Annie then moved on to the Guitar Hero series, in part because she loves the music, and has set herself a mission to get more women involved in competitive gaming. She said, “I’ve had to put a lot of hard work into proving that I’m just as good as anybody out there. Ultimately I want to be known as a great gamer, not just a great female gamer.”
Annie’s male rival is Danny Johnson (USA), who holds the record for the Highest score on Guitar Hero III (single track) since he achieved a breath-taking score of 985,206 at a Book Expo in America in New York on 30 May 2009, playing the same track as Annie.
The fifth game in the series was released in 2009, and only a year later Danny Johnson along with Scott Johnson (USA) managed to set another record for the Highest drum and guitar co-op score on Guitar Hero 5 (Activision, 2009), with a total of 4,442,161 points playing the song “Do you feel like we do?” with an amazing 99% note streak at 2,696.
But Annie says she plans to break more records, so watch out Danny…
Following her record achievement, Annie spoke about getting into Guinness World Records 2011: Gamers Edition, saying that it was the “ultimate achievement”.
Although the popularity of Guitar Hero began to decline after 2009 with no new games being released, in April 2015 Guitar Hero Live was released which potentially opens up a multitude of new records to be set and broken.
