GuitarFreaks 3rdMix

GuitarFreaks is a music arcade game from Konami in which the player holds a replica electric guitar with three colored buttons on the neck and a strum bar, accompanying recordings of rock and pop songs. Notes travel down the neck on screen, and the player's task is to press the correct colored button and strum exactly as the note reaches the hit line, similar to what the Guitar Hero series would make famous a few years later, a concept GuitarFreaks directly anticipated. The cabinet also offered a choice between a guitar and a bass lane, so two players could play different parts of the same song.

The 3rdMix version brought an expanded song list and new difficulties and cemented the game's position as one of the founding series of music arcade games, including the ability for two players to play simultaneously side by side on two linked cabinets. The music library consisted of both licensed and original tracks created specifically for Konami, with an emphasis on energetic rock and easily memorable riffs that worked well as material for a short but intense round lasting just a few minutes. A performance rating at the end of each song further motivated players to come back and try for a better result.

GuitarFreaks was often operated as a linked cabinet paired with its sister game Drummania, letting two players simulate a band with guitar and drums at once and create a shared musical experience right in the arcade. Many arcades placed this pair of machines in a separate soundproofed booth, since the combined volume of both machines could disturb the surroundings. This pairing of games laid the groundwork within arcades for the entire later boom of music games with instrument controllers, and it is still remembered today as one of the key steps toward the genre's mainstream popularity, which a few years later conquered home consoles worldwide through plastic guitar and drum-kit replicas.

Why play: For fans of music games, this is one of the key steps toward the later home boom of guitar games – best played by two people together with its sister game Drummania.