Inside Music Games

Then in 1996, a Japanese pop star turned game designer changed everything with PaRappa the Rapper - a hit PlayStation game about a cartoon dog who wants to be a rapper and gets help from a sweaty onion and a Rastafarian frog. Within a year Konami had added to the momentum of PaRappa with the arcade game Beatmania, the first of its Bemani line of music titles.

Equipped with a fake DJ deck for a controller Beatmania challenged players to hit the buttons at the right moment to keep the music playing and established the template for the rhythm action sub-genre.

Together PaRappa and Beatmania opened the floodgates for music games in Japan. As well as copycat releases there were also more daring experiments in music gaming such as Rez and Vib-Ribbon. But it was the innovations of Konami's Bemani games that really advanced the genre, introducing the dance mat with Dance Dance Revolution in 1998, handing us guitar controllers in 1999 with Guitar Freaks and turning karaoke into a video game with Karaoke Revolution in 2003.

Karaoke Revolution was also the breakthrough moment for Harmonix, a struggling games studio from Massachusetts. "The company had been making interactive music toys like The Axe, a PC joystick expression tool," says LoPiccolo. "After playing PaRappa and other early Japanese music games it was clear to us that bringing musical experiences to a mass audience was best accomplished through the medium of video games."

Harmonix's first two games, 2001's Frequency and 2003's Amplitude, were critical hits but commercial flops. But then the company figured out that oddball and abstract music games were alienating potential customers and came up with 2005's Guitar Hero with its plastic guitars and 'be a rock god' appeal, which propelled music gaming into the mainstream. "This was a huge leap for music games: an experience with music people knew and mechanics that didn't need a lot of explanation to understand," says LoPiccolo.

For the rest of the decade, plastic instruments were all the rage. After working on the first two Guitar Hero games, Harmonix went on to create the rival series Rock Band that added drums, bass, keyboards and vocals to the mix. By 2008 the popularity of fake instrument games had grown so much that Activision started talking about charging music labels to have their games included in Guitar Hero rather than paying a licence fee for them. But then the bubble burst.

State of play

The fall of the plastic instrument music game was spectacular. In 2009, the fifth edition of Guitar Hero sold 499,000 copies in its first month, but 2010's Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock sold less than 100,000. DJ Hero 2 did even worse and Rock Band 3 also experienced slower sales. But while analysts and industry watchers rushed to pronounce the genre dead, two more recent trends were suggesting that music games were far from deceased.

The first trend was the shift from retail to online that began in 2007 when Guitar Hero, Rock Band and SingStar moved onto the current generation of consoles. "The genre shifted away from regular disc releases," says LoPiccolo, pointing to how Rock Band has clocked up more than 100 million song downloads through its store. Sony's SingStar, meanwhile, offers not just new songs through its SingStore but My SingStar Online - a YouTube-style service where players can share videos of themselves playing the game.

"It was great to see how inclusive it is," says Chris Bruce, senior producer at SingStar creators Sony London Studio. "You see little kids playing right through to entire families and then grans and granddads. Some people want to put on the greatest performances, some people want to dress up in crazy wigs and whatever else they have lying around. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all, which is testimony to the longevity of music games."

The arrival of motion controllers has also revived dancing games. The sub-genre had stagnated thanks to the limits of dance mats, but in 2009 Ubisoft tried something different with Just Dance: a dance game that ignored the feet and focused on the movement of the Wiimote. Now Just Dance is the foremost series in the music genre, clocking up millions of sales and encouraging a new wave of motion-controlled dancing games.

"It's a natural progression from music games where you used to detect movement via your feet on a mat to being able to detect motion with your hands and further with Kinect," says Harman of Wired Productions, which is working on We Dance – a dancing game that combines mat and motion control.

It is developments such as these that suggest music games are far from dead. "Music is a powerful and universal experience for people of all backgrounds," says LoPiccolo. "There is an innate desire to connect more deeply to what you're listening to, whether it's tapping along on a steering wheel, playing a game or dancing and singing along to the radio."