An Exclusive Interview With Metallica's Lars Ulrich

In regards to "Guitar Hero: Metallica"

For those of you who don't keep up with GameInformer magazine, I thought I'd share this particular article that caught my attention. Please forgive any typos as my lighting kinda sucks atm.

Quote :

When did you become aware of Guitar Hero?
My kids had Guitar Hero II over at their mom's house. All of a sudden, they started asking me about Glen Danzig, of all people. True story... out of nowhere it was like "Glen Danzig! Glen Danzig! Mother!"* I traced it down, because at my house we didn't have any video games allowed. I'd heard about the Guitar Hero thing, but it was still not really the phenomenon it is now. I realized quickly that this was a very cool way for them to be introduced to music. So when Guitar Hero III came out I broke my own rule and I asked our friends at Activision if it was possible to get one of these since there was a Metallica song on there. They sent me one, and we haven't looked back since. It's a cool thing on two fronts, as something to share as a family and it also became a great vehicle to introduce them to a bunch of music.

*Coincidentally, this reminds me of someone...

Quote :

Talking with the Neversoft guys, it sounded like you had a real partnership with them in working on the game.
It started with making the decision, just a little while before the Aerosmith game was done. Obviously, we'd heard about that and we were pretty keen on being a part of the first wave of this stuff. They came up to San Francisco around March and we met with a couple of the guys. We talked for a while and we realized that these were guys that we could work with. They were music fans that grew up on the same music that we grew up on and had the same kind of passion. They were just like kids, they weren't like all these suit guys and high-brow business people and all that crap. It made us fall in love with the idea even more, because it seemed like we were all on the same page instead of it being us versus them that we ran into in our early years in business.

How did you find the experience of doing motion capture?
I tell you - 27 years into this, and to be able to have new experiences is a luxury. I never had any mo-cap suit on before. Once I learned to move my elbows around and restrict myself with the tightness of the whole thing, it was fun. We hit the ground running. It wasn't a lot of trial and error or sitting around... The mo-cap is fun. You feel a little silly sometimes when you are sitting playing your own songs and miming along to the recorded version from 1985. We had to sit there and re-learn drum fills from 1985 and re-learn ad-libs or guitar solos.

Obviously, the soundtrack is the most important part of a Guitar Hero game. How did you come up with a tracklist you were satisfied with?
Tp me, it wasn't radically different than putting a set list together. We want to represent all the different things we've done. I knew that we had to pick songs from throughout our career, not just focus on the records in the '80s. It had to be evenly balanced between the hits and songs that are more geared toward the Guitar Hero challenge. That's what we called the "Dragonforce element," where people feel like - from a video game point of view - they are really being challenged by doing something that's completely next-level. That's all well and good when you put it on a piece of paper. Then, you sit there a month later and you realize you have no idea where half these f------ master tapes are. {Laughs} That threw a bit of a wrench into things. There were a few things that had gone astray over the years, but we put our detective hats on and through some miracle we actually found all the original master tapes. As far as all the guests slots, that was easy - that's your dream come true, sitting down and packing all the bands you love and you want to share with your fans.

Were there any bands for you personally that you really wanted in there?
I'm super psyched that we got Slayer in there. Slayer's got to be a part of any heavy metal video game. There had been some issues with their lyrics. That gets into a whole slew of stuff like, "Microsoft won't do it if this lyrical content is in there." There's all this bulls--- you have to deal with, but we stood up for Slayer, and we finally got Slayer cleared like a week ago. The only band that's missing that I really wanted was Iron Maiden, because they are one of my favorite all-time bands. It didn't happen for reasons I don't even know. Other than that, I think we're pretty well represented.

The game is different from "Guitar Hero: Aerosmith", which was done with a chronological, documentary story mode. Why did you want to go with another route?
The chronological Metallica story doesn't feel fresh. For the endless VH1 "Behind the Music" episodes, it's a story that's been told a million times. We're just sick of it. I don't mean that in a bad way. The objective was to come up with something that was fresh and had a new slant on it. We came up with putting on a competition within the game itself to find a band to come and open for us. We don't want Metallica to be perceived as something that's always relying on our past. It's keeping one foot in relevance. {Laughs} We're proud of where we are today and the fact that we survived and the fact that we're still kicking as much a$$.