Per a late-breaking entry on Wired’s game blog, Guitar Hero: World Tour will work with the Rock Band drumset! Well, at least on the Xbox 360, anyway.

At Activision’s E3 press conference Tuesday, Guitar Hero director Brian Bright told the crowd that if they already owned guitar controllers and drum controllers from “previous games” on the Xbox 360, they’d work with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Here’s how it’ll work. Speaking with Bright after the conference, I found out that the game’s five-button drum track, shown above center, will be compressed down to four inputs if a Rock Band drum controller is inserted.

There’s also a MIDI jack on the back of the drum kit, Bright said, which will allow gamers to play Guitar Hero with any electronic drum kit by simply plugging it into the controller. You can also hook up a second drum pedal if you want to play two bass drums.

This is a surprising turn of events, as previous Guitar Hero games have gone out of their way to ensure incompatibility with Rock Band peripherals, despite Harmonix’ calls for (and implementation of) open guitar peripheral compatibility. I presume this means Guitar Hero: World Tour will also work with Rock Band guitars, too.

Still, the prospect of being able to limit yourself to just one set of fake plastic drums instead of two is big news indeed. Kudos to the Activision team for not being jerks about it this time around.