First Heidi Klum, and now a guy riding a bike to the beat of a Guitar Hero song: Viral YouTube videos celebrating Activision’s guitar videogames seem to be all the rage these days.
The "director’s cut" of the TV spot for Guitar Hero World Tour, which shows the totally stacked German supermodel rocking out in a bra and panties and a whole lotta hair, has racked up nearly 2 million views since it was posted on YouTube two weeks ago.
Now a new video celebrating the game has turned up on YouTube, this one apparently posted by a fan. There’s no T&A in this one, but judging from the user comments, viewers are finding it pretty cool all the same.
"Bike Hero," the three-and-a-half-minute clip, shows the game from the point of view of a kid who’s playing it, but instead of using one of the game’s controllers, he’s riding a bike that has a controller built into its handlebars.
The route he’s traveling — down bike paths, across a highway, through a parking lot, over a bridge — is paved with colored notes, as they would appear onscreen, of The Living End’s 1999 punk anthem "Prisoner of Society," one of the game’s featured tracks. The video appears to have been shot from a videocam mounted on the guy’s forehead. What you see is a music video in the guise of a new game category: first-person rocker.
The Guitar Hero homage was posted Tuesday afternoon by "madflux," whose profile identifies him as a burger-flipper at McDonald’s named Kevin. No word yet on how the clip was made, but at the beginning of the video he holds up a sheet of paper that says, "Difficulty: Hard." That would appear to be an understatement, given that no handlebar controller for the game is known to exist.
Only thing is, for an allegedly fan-created video, "Bike Hero" looks a bit too perfect. It’s the only video that madflux has posted so far to YouTube, and at least one viewer voiced suspicions that the apparent fan flick might be a plant: "What’s it like to work for Activision?" jibed one commenter using the handle OnlyRev0lutions on madflux’s profile page.
Guitar Hero is one of Activision Blizzard’s biggest franchises, with 24 million units shipped to date. The latest entry, released Oct. 26, sold 534,000 units in the week after its release, according to the NPD Group. That’s down considerably from the 1.4 million that Guitar Hero III sold in its first week a year earlier.
But it’s not out of line with game sales in general — according to NPD, revenues for the industry were up only 18 percent in the third quarter of 2008, compared to a 73 percent increase in the same period the year before.
"Bike Hero" [YouTube]
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