The unsung story of Quest for Fame

In 1994, a game resembling Guitar Hero was ready to rock. So why wasn't it a hit?

''It could have been our product,'' says Mike Fritz, who helped develop a forerunner to Guitar Hero. (Barry Chin/Globe Staff)

Legendary blues guitarist B.B. King had a point when he sang "Never Make Your Move Too Soon." Just ask Mike Fritz, a Framingham man who helped develop a billion-dollar idea 11 years before its time.

On a trip to Natick Mall during the 2005 Christmas shopping season, Fritz saw someone wielding a plastic toy shaped like a guitar, and having a wonderful time. He was playing Guitar Hero, a new video game that let players pretend to be the lead guitarist in a rock band.

Fritz immediately recognized Guitar Hero as a great idea - that's because he once worked for a company that created a nearly identical game back in 1994.

Fritz's game, called Quest For Fame, featured Boston rock band Aerosmith, and won rave reviews from critics at major newspapers. But it earned a merely lukewarm response from video-game fans. The game was off the US market by 1998, though European and Japanese versions hung on a little longer.

By contrast, the various Guitar Hero games have sold more than 23 million copies over the past three years, generating $1.6 billion in sales. Cambridge-based Harmonix has gone on to develop a similar music game, Rock Band, which has sold more than 4 million copies since its release a year ago.

Fritz remembered thinking, "What happened to us?" as he watched the Guitar Hero demonstration in Natick that day. "I was taken aback. It was definitely bittersweet. It could have been our product, and it wasn't."

Today, Fritz, 53, performs Web page usability tests for Monster.com, the online job search site. He's also a part-time jazz pianist and documentary filmmaker. But it's unlikely ever again come as close to striking gold as he did with Quest For Fame.

Armed with a journalism degree from the University of South Carolina, Fritz worked at Boston public television station WGBH before signing on in early 1994 with Virtual Music Entertainment of Andover. The year before, Virtual Music had started working on a music game called Welcome to West Feedback, according to Bert Snow, then the company's cofounder and lead game designer.

"Aerosmith people saw it and saw its quality and signed on," said Snow, who is now vice president of de sign at Muzzy Lane Software, a maker of educational video games in Newburyport. Fritz was hired to write a script for the new game, in which an up-and-coming rock star strums his way to glory, with moral support from the members of Aerosmith.

Players plug a "virtual guitar" into the computer to make music in the game. Fritz still owns a couple; they're almost the same size as a real electric guitar and fairly heavy. Unlike the make-believe instrument in Guitar Hero, the Quest For Fame virtual guitar has strings, and there are no colorful push buttons on its neck.

A player watches a window in the computer monitor as a red line scrolls past a series of green blips, like pulses on a heart monitor. When the red line crosses a blip, the player strums the virtual guitar's strings, and the computer's speakers respond with Aerosmith hits like "Eat The Rich" or "Walk This Way." Hit the strings too early or too late, and out come discordant notes and insults from on-screen characters.

Quest For Fame was a hit with critics. "I have seen the future of interactive multimedia, and it rocks," wrote Stephen Manes in The New York Times. The game acquired a number of avid fans, like Ian Hughes, a virtual worlds evangelist for IBM Corp. in Hursley, a town south of London. "It was wonderful," said Hughes. "I liked the immersion in the music. You're in the music and feeling the music."

The game eventually sold about 120,000 units worldwide - decent, but far from spectacular. In hindsight, fans cite many reasons for the mediocre sales, including its cost. Quest For Fame's software was priced at $50, and it cost another $100 for the virtual guitar, steep for a computer game even today. Retailers had never before tried to sell a make-believe guitar along with a piece of computer software. "Nobody knew what to do with it, so it ended up getting stuck in a corner," said Snow.

Also, the game only ran on desktop computers at first, though 1997 saw a version for Sony Corp.'s original PlayStation game console. Guitar Hero and Harmonix's successor game Rock Band were created for video-game consoles such as Xbox 360 or PlayStation, which are connected to a TV, making them easier to play.

And in 1994, only a handful of songs could be included on the Quest For Fame software disk, instead of the dozens that come with today's music games. That's because there was no compression technology like MP3 to shrink the size of digital music files. Music compression also makes it easy for Guitar Hero and Rock Band fans to download new songs for use with the games, as do the high-speed Internet connections now found in millions of homes. In 1994, few gamers were using the Internet at home, and those who did relied on slow dial-up modems.

IBM Corp., which made an abortive push into computer game software in the 1990s, saw the potential in Quest For Fame. In 1995, it set up a marketing deal with Virtual Music. But to save money, the company eliminated the virtual guitar, replacing it with the "V Pick," a small device shaped like an oversize guitar pick. Gamers would play tunes by strumming the V Pick against their clothing or an object.

Snow believes it was a smart move. "Although the Virtual Pick was not as cool, it saved the company at the time by letting us create a product that the market could handle," he said.

But Fritz said the game gained much of its appeal from players' ability to strut around with a simulated guitar. "I felt like when we did this, it was the beginning of the end," said Fritz.

But Quest For Fame was moderately successful in Japan, where music-based games were more popular than in the United States. Virtual Music created a follow-up that featured Tomoyasu Hotei, a major Japanese rock star, and it also released a version for video arcades. In June 2000, Virtual Music was acquired by Japanese video-game maker Namco Ltd. for $18 million, just as high-tech and Internet stocks were beginning a dramatic collapse. For Virtual Music, the deal's timing was perfect. "It was the exact month the Internet was tanking," said Snow, "so we were happy."

At least until the release of Guitar Hero showed just how great an idea Quest For Fame had been.

Harmonix already faces a patent infringement lawsuit filed earlier this year by Japanese game maker Konami, which claims it patented similar game technology in 2002. Virtual Music also patented its virtual guitar technology. But it's markedly different from the simulated guitars used in Guitar Hero and Rock Band. And there are also big differences in the game software.

Harmonix refused requests for an interview, but Fritz dismissed the idea that the Cambridge company created a knockoff of Quest For Fame. "Whether they stole it or not, it was a good idea," said Snow. "They were at the right place at the right time, and they executed it really well."

Harmonix cofounders Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy were recently paid a $150 million bonus by parent company Viacom Inc. as a reward for the extraordinary success of their Rock Band games. And the two men are set to receive the same amount next year. It's the kind of massive payday that Fritz, Snow, and other veterans of Virtual Music might have enjoyed, if they hadn't made their move too soon.

Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.