Seven minutes and twenty-two seconds, a tempo of two hundred beats a minute, and three thousand seven hundred and twenty-two notes on the Expert chart, all of it poured through five coloured buttons on a plastic neck: that was the arithmetic of the Guitar Hero Through the Fire and Flames chart, and for one winter it was the piece of music American teenagers failed most often, most loudly and most publicly.
Shipped by Activision on 28 October 2007 and built by Neversoft, the studio that took the series over when its creators at Harmonix left to make Rock Band, the game in the box with the wireless plastic Les Paul was Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and behind its final boss it kept a song by a band almost none of its players had ever heard.
The six musicians responsible for that song, a British group that had built its whole name on tempos other bands treated as a dare, were DragonForce. Within weeks their song was wearing the paint off green fret buttons, snapping strum bars at the hinge and cracking whammy bars clean off controllers from one coast to the other, and the most American of entertainment machines had become the unlikeliest carrier European power metal ever found.
Nobody had planned it. Nobody could have.
Guitar Hero: Through the Fire and Flames behind the final boss
The setlist in front of it was a canon of American rock radio with a few hard edges, Slayer with Raining Blood and Metallica with One both waiting in Battle for Your Soul, the career's last tier, and fifty-four of the game's seventy-three tracks were the original studio masters rather than the re-recordings the first two games had leaned on. The DragonForce song sat outside all of it. It opened only once the career was beaten on any difficulty, after a guitar duel with the devil himself, and it rolled unfailable through the end credits as a last test for anyone still holding the controller.
Placed there, the song works like the cadenza a concerto keeps back for its soloist, the passage where the orchestra falls silent and the player stands alone with the hardest bars in the score, except that this cadenza had been written by someone who wanted the soloist's fingers broken on it one bar at a time, in front of every sibling on the sofa. That was its function. The game was over, and the examination had only begun.
A cadenza written by someone who wanted the soloist's fingers broken on it, one bar at a time.
By common consent among the players who spent the following months on it, the Expert chart was the hardest thing the series had yet printed, and footage of teenagers clearing it, or failing at the same solo for the fortieth time, piled up on a YouTube barely two years old until the song had acquired a second audience that had never touched a controller at all. The game sold the song. The videos sold the legend.
Seven minutes at two hundred beats a minute
Opening Inhuman Rampage, the album Roadrunner released worldwide on 9 January 2006, the song is built like a relay of soloists rather than a verse and a chorus with a break in the middle. Herman Li and Sam Totman trade guitar solos in long legato flights, Vadim Pruzhanov answers on keyboards, and the chorus keeps returning between the flights like the refrain of a rondo, the fixed point the ear clings to while everything around it runs, and even Pruzhanov's keyboard runs were charted as guitar notes on the fret board, credited to hands that never played them.
The tempo is the first thing a plastic guitar cannot forgive. At that speed sixteenth notes arrive faster than any wrist can strum them, and the whole track sounds like a clockwork metronome wound past the last notch on its brass scale until the spring tears out through the back of the pyramid and goes on ticking on the floor. The game's answer was the hammer-on and the pull-off, notes that sound without a strum so long as the fret button goes down in time, and the Expert chart strings them into runs dozens of notes long. The fastest stretch of it, the run players call the red snake, hit nearly twenty seven notes a second.
That turned a power metal song into a conservatory velocity study, the kind Carl Czerny wrote to wear a pupil's wrists raw before the examination, printed not on staves but on a scrolling highway of coloured gems. The solos did the teaching. Lines that Li and Totman had written for two hands on six strings became finger drills for one hand on five buttons, and the tapping passages became the places where most attempts ended, sometimes in the first minute, sometimes six minutes in.
Here is the paradox. The one element of power metal the game could translate perfectly was the one element the genre had always treated as the means rather than the end: velocity. The melody, the harmony, the singer, the choir behind him, all of that went through the controller as scenery.
The DragonForce Guitar Hero wave in America
The band did not arrive in the United States from nowhere. It had toured North America in 2006 as the opening act on Ozzfest's main stage, and Inhuman Rampage was already selling steadily to the readers of the metal press. After the game the numbers moved by another order of magnitude, though the RIAA, the body that certifies American sales, did not certify the album gold for half a million copies shipped until 21 July 2017, eleven years after its release.
Set against the decade before it, the reversal is stark. Through the years of 90s power metal, American record shops mostly stocked Helloween, Blind Guardian, Stratovarius and Gamma Ray as imports, priced like foreign cheese and ordered by the handful while grunge and then nu-metal held the radio, and now a teenager could reach the whole genre from a sofa, with a search bar and a sore left hand.
The follow-up tested that audience directly. Ultra Beatdown, released worldwide on 26 August 2008, entered the Billboard 200, the American album chart, at number 18, the band's best American showing and far above the number 103 Inhuman Rampage had managed on its own release, and its opening single Heroes of Our Time runs at the same breakneck clip, as though written with the scrolling highway already in mind.
Behind the band came the rest of the genre, at least for the players who went looking. The disciples who had cleared the chart went hunting for anything else that sounded like it and found Sonata Arctica, Angra, Rhapsody of Fire and, further back, the Helloween of Keeper of the Seven Keys, the pedigree the song itself descends from. Some of them stayed. The genre had never had a recruiting office in the United States, and for two or three years it had one in every living room with a console.
What the plastic guitar did not change
What crossed the Atlantic was the genre as a music box with a single cylinder, every pin for the slow movements and the choral passages ground off the brass drum until it could play one tune only, the fastest one, at the turn of a handle. It played that tune very well. The choirs of Blind Guardian, the mid-tempo march that Sabaton and Powerwolf would ride to the top of European charts, the long suites, the late key changes: none of it was in the game, and for a generation the American catechism of power metal came down to a single article, speed.
The crossing carried an irony few of the new converts knew. The United States had possessed a power metal of its own since the early eighties, a riff-first school of Jag Panzer, Manilla Road and Vicious Rumors, darker, heavier and sparing with keyboards, and the game did nothing whatever for it. The word came home in 2007 wearing a European meaning. The American school stayed where it had always been, in the collectors' crates.
The narrowing cost the band something as well. DragonForce became, across much of the American press, the Guitar Hero band, and critics who called their solos studio trickery turned every concert that followed Ultra Beatdown into a comparison no stage could win. Speed had sold the ticket. Speed was also the only thing anyone came to check.
Nor did the game open American radio or American charts to the rest of the family. When the decade of power metal at number one arrived in the 2010s, the number ones were won in Germany and Sweden, by bands the game had never licensed, and the Billboard 200 remained a place European power metal visited rather than lived in.
Read against the overview of the genre's four decades, the Guitar Hero episode is neither the conversion its players remember nor the novelty its critics waved away. It was an onslaught on one front only, a single song carried into millions of homes inside a toy, and it left behind a generation of converts counted in bedrooms rather than in chart positions. That is not nothing. It is also not a market.
The song crossed. The genre mostly stayed home.
