Our Blog: Compatibility of Guitar Hero World Tour's and Rock Band's Instruments

Having written about the compatibility of music peripherals for games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero earlier , I was happy to read this today on Shacknews.com :

Developer Neversoft has confirmed that Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero World Tour will be fully compatible with Rock Band's Xbox 360 guitars, drums and microphone.

The announcement came during the Activision press conference, where Guitar Hero World Tour was demonstrated live. There is no news on whether the PS3, PS2 or Wii Rock Band instruments will function.

When asked about the issue earlier today, Rock Band developer Harmonix was unaware of the news and could offer no further details.

Given what I said in my earlier (above linked) post, I think this definitely a step in the right direction, as it benefits both the player and the game producers.  And to add to what I said earlier, if all the music peripherals were cross-compatible, that would not necessarily mean that there would have to be only one company producing them.  Different companies could offer different "kinds" of guitars or drum sets, etc.--they'd just be cross-compatible.  So again, gamers, game producers, and the manufacturers of the music peripherals all win.

The only objection I can think of to having things be cross-compatible is that it might limit the possibility of one game offering a cool feature involving some detail of the music peripheral that the other game doesn't.  For example, if a Guitar Hero game came out that called for some kind of touch sensor on the neck whereby you could mimic a glass slide, but no other game called for it, maybe then there'd be some issue with it being cross-compatible.  But I don't really see why there would have to a problem.  If the slide sensor were called for on the one game but not on the other, then it could just be a "dead" button for the game not calling for it.  So no problem after all.