The big news from E3 was the prevalance of games that attempt to actually teach guitar, rather than mimicing it in classic five button Guitar Hero style.

My pals at RockBandAide and PlasticAxe had outstanding roundups of their recent hands-on time with a bunch of these new real(ish) guitar controllers at E3:

• The Real (and Real-ish) Guitars of E3
• Hands-On Impressions of New REAL Guitar Peripherals at E3

But before you click through, let’s take a trip back in time … way back, to 1994. When Windows 95 was the latest OS sensation, the Sony Playstation was a hot new console, and the Nintendo 64 was still just a rumor.

The 1994 PC game Quest for Fame was the first (that I know of, anyway) game that attempted to use a full-size guitar peripheral.

The Unsung Story of Quest for Fame documents the game’s brief and somewhat sad history.

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.”

If you’re wondering how the game works, I found a video of the game in action via the old British TV show Bad Influence — the Quest for Fame demo starts at 8:20 or so.

Quest for Fame certainly predicted the eventual appearance of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith 10 years later.

Here’s hoping the current crop of virtual guitars …

• Peavey HeroMaker
• Power Gig: Rise of the Six String controller
• Rock Band 3′s Squier Stratocaster and Fender Mustang Pro
• the You Rock Guitar

… fare a bit better than Quest for Fame’s virtual axe did.

Sure, you can kill zombies with your keyboard, but did you know you can kill zombies with your Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar, too? Behold Rock of the Dead!!

There are mindless beasts that take basic three- or four-strum combos to take out, but then there are ones that’ll lob projectiles at you – these knives/bombs only take a couple of fret flicks to get rid of, but unless you take down the guy that’s throwing them out at you, you’ll just be endlessly downing those objects. When the screen fills with a half-dozen beasts at once, you have the ability to discriminate and target specific ones by “typing” out the combo of the one you want – the game’s smart enough to know which beast you’re “aiming” at because it locks in on the enemy as you’re pushing out its fret button code.

Periodically you’ll have to take down larger enemies in rhythm fashion: this is basic Guitar Hero/Rock Band gameplay as the notes must be played to the beat of the background music to take down the threat.

The game has extra geek cred because it features voicework by Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day, too. If you don’t know who those people are, I forgive you.

Unfortunately this game is Wii-only, which means I won’t be able to play it — but it sounds awesome, and I totally support destroying zombies with the power of fake plastic rock!

updated: yay! Rock of the Dead will be available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 this October!

Here’s some recent footage of the game in action courtesy of our friends at RockBandAide:

Imagine the joy of finding a copy of The Beatles: Rock Band or Guitar Hero 5 under your Christmas tree this year. Now imagine what you’d feel like if, instead, you unwrapped a copy of an ultra-chintzy, bottom dollar Guitar Hero knockoff. Behold.

Guitar Superstar

(picture courtesy of the always-excellent Rock Band Aide)

Featuring, according to the box, 12 “hit” songs:

• Santana – “Stormy”
• Motorhead – “Fight”
• Fall Out Boy – “Dance, Dance”
• Alice Cooper – “Billion Dollar Babies”
• System Of A Down – “Forest”
• The Vines – “Get Free”
• Aerosmith – “I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing”

There must be multiple versions of this thing, because this one features the song Granite Man. Not Iron Man, mind you, but … Granite Man.

Oh, but wait, there’s more!

Shredmaster Jr.

This one has a similar tracklist, but a totally different gameplay UI.

• Smoke on the Water
• I Love Rock and Roll
• Iron Man
• You Give Love a Bad Name
• Billion Dollar Babies
• Hotel California
• Paradise City
• Smells Like Teen Spirit
• Paranoid
• Master of Puppets

I’m not sure which one is worse. I don’t think there can be a winner when both are so bad. This is gameplay that would have been barely acceptable in the 8-bit NES era, and “songs” that are painful, barely recognizable MIDI deconstructions of the originals.

There’s even a drum superstar, though it’s so profoundly bad I couldn’t find any details on it, or videos of it in action.

Any kids who got these crappy knockoffs for Christmas instead of the real thing, you have my condolences. I’m sorry your parents don’t love you!

With less of a bang than a whimper, tomorrow is the release date for Guitar Hero: Van Halen.

I’ve had this game since the first days it was available as a Guitar Hero 5 pre-order bonus. Although I am kinda-sorta a Van Halen fan, have to admit that it was a bit of a letdown. In all honesty, I had more fun playing Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. There’s something about the Van Halen catalog that just isn’t … deep. It’s just sort of basic rock music. Outside of the Eddie guitar virtuoso wankery (aka Eruption) and the top 5 Van Halen hits you’re probably thinking of, there is no “there” there.

It’s also a shame that this disc doesn’t import at all into Guitar Hero 5, like World Tour, Smash Hits and Band Hero do. Well, partially, anyway.

Guitar Hero: Van Halen is probably worth getting if you’re a massive fan of the band, though it is nowhere near the intimate fan-centric portrait of a band like Guitar Hero: Metallica, much less The Beatles: Rock Band. If you are a genre enthusiast like myself, I can recommend picking it up once it drops to discounted levels. It’s mostly Van Halen, but there are a handful of other interesting songs on there as well — check out the song list and see if anything appeals to you. I expect it to tumble in price quite rapidly.

Even if you have no interest in the game proper, there is a little bonus for all fake plastic rockers — an official Eddie Van Halen “frankenstrat” faceplate!

The frankenstrat is Eddie’s famous guitar, a combination Gibson / Fender with a very distinctive paintjob.

I’m pretty sure the frankenstrat is probably the single most copied faceplate design in the history of fake plastic rock. So having it as an official faceplate design is a good thing. The faceplate is available as a promo bonus from some sites, or also sold directly for $10.

And here’s my own bonus to you — a video from the Legion of Rock Stars covering Van Halen’s Jump.

They’ve done a ton of these covers, which are available here. Bring your earplugs, and a sense of humor …

In all the excitement over Lego Rock Band, I almost forgot about Band Hero, which is also launching soon.

The full 65 song list was recently unveiled along with the fantastic news that all but four of the songs will be exportable to Guitar Hero 5! (Oddly, you can also go in the reverse direction, importing 69 Guitar Hero 5 songs into Band Hero.) It’s hardly the access to the nearly 1,000 song Rock Band 2 DLC library that Lego Rock Band offers, but it’s a start.

Now that’s the kind of importing we wanted! Oh, and on the incredibly rare chance any Activision excutives happen to be reading this blog, I’m still waiting for fuller Smash Hits and World Tour importing in Guitar Hero 5.

Click through to see YouTube videos of any song, if you’re not familiar with it.

While I’m much more partial to the Lego Rock band setlist, I can’t deny that Band Hero has a whopping 20 more tracks, and there are some definite gems in there. It also uses the Guitar Hero 5 engine, which is a massive improvement over the Guitar Hero 4 (World Tour) engine, even the tweaked versions of it that appeared in Smash Hits and Metallica. Playing Guitar Hero 5 does not make me want to cut myself with my plastic instruments in quite the way that Guitar Hero World Tour did, so that’s … a plus.

Band Hero is scheduled for release November 3rd, which just so happens to be the date Amazon is telling me I’ll get Lego Rock Band as well. Coincidence? :)