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Kotick regrets not courting Harmonix

Won't play games in case he's hooked.

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Image credit: Eurogamer

Activision boss Bobby Kotick told the DICE Summit yesterday that he regrets not paying more attention to Harmonix during the RedOctane acquisition that brought Guitar Hero under the publisher's control.

"We had always known them as sort of somewhat a failed developer of music games. They always had really great ideas but nothing that was really commercially viable until Guitar Hero," Kotick told the DICE Summit.

Kotick believed that if Activision gave Guitar Hero to Neversoft, "they'd knock the ball out of the park with this", and didn't bother to meet with Harmonix and explore other options.

"And, of course, if we had gone up, I think the world of Guitar Hero would have been rewritten. It would be a lot different today. And it would probably be a profitable opportunity for both of us and an opportunity where you'd have even more innovation in the category," he said.

Kotick also said that he personally doesn't play videogames because he knows he'd be hooked. "The nature of my personality is such that if I were to play Modern Warfare 2 I wouldn't be able to stop, and it would be at the expense of my regular responsibilities," he explained.

The speech, which Eurogamer's Rupert Loman, at DICE, described as "very humble and engaging", also saw Kotick clarifying his infamous comment that he wanted to "take all the fun out of making videogames".

"It was mainly because I wanted to come across in a humorous way that we were responsible [people]... that it wasn't a Wild West," he explained.

For more coverage of the DICE Summit, head over to our trade-focused sister site GamesIndustry.biz.

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