here's a thing that happened that i think was cool:
in 2015, years after the financial death of Guitar Hero, activision puts out Guitar Hero Live, one last attempt to make the franchise profitable. it featured a new 6 buttons across 2 "strings" layout that i actually thought was really fun, and a bizarre format where you can usually only play whatever song is "streaming" on the game's server at that time, across a few different channels. it was also a bit of a commercial failure, and the weird streaming freemium format probably didn't help lol
so we're talking about a kind of small pond of players here, and specifically we're going to talk about the wii u playerbase, a small fraction of that small pond. on the wii u, leaderboards for most of the songs in the game were dominated by one specific person.
a few months after release, GH: Live got a 1v1 pvp mode, and anyone who ran into that player would meet a guaranteed defeat. and what they saw on that defeat screen was all the pinkest, most heart filled, girliest girl power designs the game offered as player customization options.
this kind of edgy, Activision-made plastic guitar game, was completely dominated by someone expressing themself as cutesy and girly and sweet! i just think that's pretty cool. though of course, i'm biased, because that player was me. >:3
