Guitar Hero

Game music has been a passion of ours roughly since, oh, 1985, but in the past 10 years, it’s come to mean something more. Don’t get us wrong, we still love the beepatronic music of the 8- and 16-bit periods (and the wave of chiptune artists it inspired), but the past decade has also seen licensed music become a surprisingly important part of gaming. Sometimes, this just means a selection of familiar hits to accompany our music games, but every so often, a game will use licensed tracks to careful, brilliant effect – and in the process, will expose legions of gamers to music they might never have heard otherwise.

What follows are the games and franchises that have been the most influential in bringing strange and terrifying new musical styles to gamers’ ears – and in the interest of making this our most self-indulgent Top 7 since that other one, we’ve asked a handful of our editors to explain what made each one important to them personally...

By the time 2005 had rolled around, it looked like the beginning of the end for PS2. Critics started to refer to its once-impressive hardware as “aging,” and the Xbox 360 was gearing up to snatch away its crown and claim dominance over the next console generation. And because previous hardware cycles had lasted about five years, most assumed that the PS2’s days were numbered, and that the machine would be largely discarded once the PS3 finally hit.

Only now do we realize just how wrong we were to count the PS2 out so early. 10 years after its North American launch, it’s still getting games and moving units, if not exactly going strong. With the anniversary of that launch just around the corner, let’s take a look at the best of what we thought, at the time, would be the PS2’s final great year...

In just five years there have been 14 (!) console and handheld Guitar Hero games. I can't imagine a more shameless grab for cash and disregard for anything resembling brand value, but the current state of the series (including today's Warriors of Rock) doesn't diminish the fond memories most of us have for the very first entry, when all the songs were covers and Harmonix did its best to make it look, sound and feel like a real rock game. Case in point - asking several local bands to flesh out the roster with legitimate underground acts. So, for Guitar Hero's five year anniversary, I'd like to point out my favorite unsung track from the game that kicked off a billion-dollar franchise.

When it comes to heavy metal, one of the pioneering “rock gods” is Judas Priest lead singer Rob Halford. These days, he has his own clothing line and is helping new generations find music through games like Activision’s Guitar Hero and MTV Games’ Rock Band. Halford also starred in his first videogame last year, playing General Lionwhyte and The Baron in Tim Schafer’s Brutal Legend.

We can just about understand the way things used to be. When games came on cartridges, the only way you could play a sports game with the correct player names was to either type them all in yourself (which took hours), or buy the newest licensed version. But things have changed.

The advent of DLC has meant that all games could, in theory, be updated via a patch downloaded from the internet. This could either be for free (like the

A lot can happen in 10 years. And it has. As part of this week's post-mortem of the last decade in gaming, we now present for you some of the weirdest, depressing, arousing, significant, entertaining and amusing events, happenings and milestones that have occurred in the wonderful world of games during the soon-to-be-expired Noughties.

The Silent Hill series It's a safe bet that we all play games the same way: lights on, volume at a reasonable level, perhaps other stuff going on in the background as well. For most games, that's totally cool. But there are some that you have not even begun to experience. Yes, some games demand that you completely alter your surroundings and let the mood seep through your skull, soaking every cell in your body with excessive atmosphere. So, we mined our collective memories and came up with