Starting in the mid-2000's, few video game series received as much praise and attention from the mainstream public as peripheral-based rhythm games like Rock Band. But while those games have faded in popularity over time, a dedicated community of gamers have managed to keep their hobby alive and thriving by creating a game of their own known as Clone Hero.
Clone Hero, is a free, independently developed PC game that has been the home of ex-Guitar Hero nerds who have felt the need to shred since 2017. From the time of its release to today, the Clone Hero community has grown massively, with its own Wiki, Subreddit and a Discord server that has over 124 thousand . All of this is ed by a collection of popular content creators and a development team that continues to update and improve the software for the benefit of the community.
Put simply, Clone Hero is an open-source Guitar Hero game built by the fans, for the fans. On top of simply playing songs in the GH format, it has all of the series’ standard quality of life features, such as practice mode and the ability to control note speed. Players can use a keyboard or any of the leftover, PC-compatible guitar controllers they have laying around. Likewise, nearly the entire discography of songs from the official GH and RB games are available for , and players are able to create custom music-charts as a way to make any song they want playable. Players share their custom charts online, making a wide variety of songs that were unavailable on any official rhythm game completely playable for the entire community. It has become an incredibly unique example of a gaming community that has managed to survive well past the lifespan of the games they played while continuing to grow and evolve solely through the efforts of independent creators.
How Clone Hero Started
According to the official Clone Hero Wiki, the game is the brainchild of head developer Srylian, who has been creating independent Guitar Hero-alikes by himself since 2012. Between then and Clone Hero’s release in 2017, Srylian created several other rhythm games of a similar nature on different engines, but none of them were developed to the point of being complete projects in the same way that Clone Hero was. Fast forward to less than a year after Srylian released Clone Hero to the public, and the game has managed to build up its own community that includes its own creators, influencers, and an active fanbase.
Clone Hero itself is a well developed project. But, it likely wouldn’t have attained its current level of popularity without a few key factors. The most obvious of these is that Guitar Hero and Rock Band were both fairly well-ed series at the time. Harmonix still provides active for Rock Band 4, and it's not uncommon to see cabinets for Guitar Hero 3 in arcades. Usually they are a bit more expensive to play and have no shortage of eager players waiting in line, but it proves that the games themselves are still enjoyed by many. However, the majority of the community lives and breathes in Clone Hero, and it’s the people who create more content surrounding the game that have helped lift it up the most.
Clone Hero’s Influencers
At the peak of Guitar Hero’s heyday, the ability to test and improve one's skill in these games was attractive. Worldwide Guitar Hero tournaments were not unheard of, and even casual players pushed themselves to test the limits of their faux-shredding abilities. Naysayers would often write the game off as an imitation of the real thing, not worthy of any serious attention. But, the players who dedicated themselves built up some serious skill that many can’t help but appreciate.
Many of these skilled players, whether they chose to compete during in tournaments or not, went on to become streamers in platforms like Twitch and YouTube in the following years. Currently, there are a handful of them who regularly stream and record themselves playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band games on such sites. Popular streamers such as Acai have over 200 thousand followers on Twitch, and even more on YouTube, with 1.12 million subscribers. Though he is one of the community’s more popular figures, he is by no means an oddity. Many of these players have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of followers. While titles like Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 are still often streamed on their channels, the bulk of their content is Clone Hero gameplay, and for good reason.
Clone Hero’s Community Content
It should be made clear that of all things, Clone Hero did not resurrect the Guitar Hero community. In fact, dedicated fans never quite abandoned the series for good, playing and replaying their favorite entries in the series for years. They also managed to accomplish much of what Clone Hero made convenient by modding titles like Guitar Hero 3 with other songs. However, this process required much more effort from players compared to Clone Hero’s simple and detect system.
It wasn’t until Clone Hero became a mainstay of the community that the process was truly refined, and that opened the way for a much more creative community. Since players can create and share their own custom charts with each other, their newfound creative freedom has resulted in charts unlike any other. The Clone Hero community has gone so far as to create music specifically for its players, with charts difficult enough to challenge the most hardened shredders, and custom videos that play in the background of the normally blank void behind the note chart. There is quality content, such as the SOULLESS series, which can only be experienced by Clone Hero players.
What’s special about all of this is that the Clone Hero community is almost entirely self-made. They may not have been the source of the original creative spark behind peripheral-based rhythm games, but their platform, its creators, and community are all entirely self-sufficient. They aren’t surviving on a modded version of a game that has long-since been abandoned by its original developers. They created their own game, went on to create fan-made content specifically for that game, and became incredibly successful based solely on that alone. Few other communities in video games can claim that kind of independence, and it’s what makes Clone Hero one of the most interesting and important cases of an independent community thriving off of the fruits of its own labor.