Disney Look to Become Guitar Heroes With "Ultimate Band"

Disney will attempt to enter the Guitar Hero/Rock Band arena with Ultimate Band, a new video game for Nintendo's Wii and DS systems. Unlike Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the Disney Interactive Studios-produced Ultimate Band will not require the purchase of fake instruments, instead relying on normal controllers to simulate jamming. Players will also be able to create their own tunes by "laying down tracks for each instrument and applying creative mixing effects." Clearly, Disney has been inspired by the rousing success of music-based games (the Guitar Hero franchise has grossed over $1 billion by itself) and have already dabbled in them (they had recent hits with High School Musical-based singing games). No release date has been set for Ultimate Band, nor have any in-game songs been announced.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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