Everyone's a Hero - Part One

When we do a band - like we're about to do on December 22 in the US and early in 2010 in Europe - with Val Halen... Eddie Van Halen can certainly be considered the greatest living American guitarist, and arguably one of the greatest of all time. That makes a great deal of sense to make a game around. We're really excited about that, as are the fans of Van Halen, as are the fans of Guitar Hero. Metallica and Aerosmith were also incredibly successful.

But for us our signature release during this Holiday season are Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero - which is more current music, 65 songs from 61 artists, more focused on all of the instruments and singing - we think that will continue to evolve the market place to add more women, and of course singing is very popular here in Europe. Strikingly it's less so in the US, it's more popular with women than with men, but with the technology we have in the game we think it'll be more inviting to everybody.

And then DJ Hero - 93 songs, 100 mixes that no one's ever mixed before, with some of the most popular music in the world connecting the legends of rock, pop, tech, dance and rap. All of that is in one game, and we're introducing the turntable as the iconic instrument of this game, where you get to scratch, you get to fade, and feel the power of a DJ in the same way that Guitar Hero helps you feel like you're a rock star.

We're really happy with the line-up that we have, we think we can expand the market place with new genres of music, new capabilities, new innovations - it's what leaders should do.

I see it as great value for money, period. The game's not even out and the reviews are beginning to pour in - it's the highest-rated set of reviews we've ever had. As a game for the money, outstanding value, and we're really happy to deliver that to the fans.

But our complete expectation is that this is going to be one of our tent pole franchises - we already have a 2010 slate that assumes success of this product.

Pre-orders are a very interesting thing - they make a great deal of sense to me when people think there's scarcity of a game, and when people think they must play it on the first day. Things like Call of Duty make a great deal of sense for that.

But strikingly to me, pre-order sales of Guitar Hero continue to do extraordinarily well - you're seeing DJ Hero in particular... we were very loud in June when we announced that Jay-Z and Eminem were having a relationship with the game itself - they spiked up very high - and then we've sort of been under the radar because we've been launching Guitar Hero 5.

But as major mainstream press is now writing this as one of the top five games you have to have for the Holiday Season, the reviews are beginning to come out... I think we saw a huge pre-sales spike of DJ Hero last week, and as we build to the launch you're going to see that rise to a nice high number just like Guitar Hero did. We're really excited about that.