Will Guitar Hero Live bring music games back into the living room?

If you’ve been a gamer for at least 10 years, the chances are, your under-stairs cupboard is a shantytown of plastic guitars, dusty half-size drum kits and unsolvable tangles of wire.

Once upon a time, Guitar Hero and its many copycats ruled gaming, playing to arena-sized crowds of excited fans – but then they exited the business with unusual haste. The genre, in which players strap on plastic guitars and strum along in time with an eclectic soundtrack, was so dominant it even lured in The Beatles, that notoriously vigilant guarder of legacy. But it came at a cost. Viacom spent $20m (£12.7m) on advertising alone for the Beatles: Rock Band, a figure that illustrates both the belief in the genre at the time, and the depth of its subsequent fall. By 2010, wearied players had hung up their instruments en mass, and the flood of music games slowed to a drip.

Six years on and Guitar Hero, the game that took the genre mainstream, is set for a comeback in the form of Guitar Hero Live, designed by British developer FreeStyle Games (creator of the superb DJ Hero series). The theory is unchanged: notes move towards you down a stave and, when they pass an on-screen marker, you must hold down the corresponding button on your toy guitar (which now has a six-button configuration: three buttons toward the top of the guitar neck, and three toward the bottom, in parallel) and strum. Correctly match the timing and the guitar note will play out. Miss and there’ll be an awkward splang in the soundtrack. You’re scored on your timing, and, unbroken strings of correct notes will earn you multipliers that contribute to a high score.

But while the action remains untouched, the aesthetic has been overhauled. Gone are the gangly 3D characters that posed and grimaced on stage behind the musical stave in the late 2000s. They’ve been replaced by filmed footage of adoring crowds and other band members, with whom you pretend to perform as you play through the soundtrack. There are no virtual characters or stages to be seen anywhere in the game.

Perhaps the most interesting element of nouveau Guitar Hero is not the switch from 3D models to filmed actors, but rather Guitar Hero TV, an always-on music television-style channel that enables you to play along via a slew of music videos, both vintage and contemporary. The results are visually closer to SingStar, Sony’s elegant karaoke series, with clean lines and an uncluttered heads-up display (HUD). Put the guitar down at any point, and the screen will clear, so you can watch the music video uninterrupted. Play along and you can alter the song’s difficulty on the fly. In contrast to earlier titles in the series, the game won’t kick you out if you miss to many notes.

The channels (of which there will be two at launch, themed around different musical styles) run to a programming schedule, just like MTV of yesteryear – although, if you have a particular song you’re into, you can play it immediately by spending a ‘play’ token, which are earned through playing the game. You can change channels at any time mid-song (there is an all new GHTV button on the new guitar peripheral itself) and at launch there will hundreds of tracks, all available for free, ready to look at and play whenever you want. If you want to own a particular song forever and not use play tokens, you can buy it for a small real money fee, or you can buy a “party pass” which unlocks every song in the game for an evening – ideal for when you have friends over and want to play together.

As well as classic and contemporary music videos, GHTV will offer so-called premium shows, based on live recordings (in the demo, Activision showed off a live DVD, which could be watched and played along with, by the Black Veil Brides). These shows can be purchased for play or you can complete challenges to earn the right to play. The game might require you to score three stars or more on a trio of tracks in order to unlock the premium show – although, if you go the challenge route, you’ll have to attempt three new challenges to play if for a second time, and so on. The premium shows offer premium rewards, such as themed fretboards – theres a steampunk version, decorated with spinning cogs and whizzing sound effects – or an upturned skateboard deck.

Activision plans to add swathes of new songs to GHTV during the year, a generous model that seeks to solve one of the issues that arguably led to the genre’s downfall: the need for players to constantly add buy new add-on packs in order to expand their song library. It’s also an inventive way to bring the art of the music visual back into the living room – a video game to save the radio star.