During PAX West 2024, Xbox boss Phil Spencer hosted a ‘Story Time’ chat about the gaming industry, discussing many different aspects of the business – including some of Xbox’s history. In that chat, Phil was asked about some of the biggest games that Microsoft ‘missed out’ on signing up, and the boss mentioned two popular Activision series that went on to live for years to come.
When they were being conceptualised by their individual dev teams, Xbox was pitched to publish both Destiny and Guitar Hero. At the time, Destiny dev Bungie had only just split with Microsoft, so that one perhaps makes more sense – but the boss goes into a bit more detail on the team skipping over Guitar Hero.
Here’s a clip of that GH chat:
Yep, Phil & co. just didn’t believe that a game where people would “plug plastic guitars into consoles” was ever going to work – so Xbox skipped on working with Guitar Hero. In the end, the team went to Activision and created a massive franchise – with the original GH developer then making Rock band afterwards as well.
We can imagine these sorts of hits and misses are pretty commonplace in the industry, but it’s always interesting to see someone like Phil discuss them so openly. In the past, Xbox has also talked about missing out on Genshin Impact along with other major games that went on to be successful elsewhere.