Not buying Harmonix is a regret, says Kotick

Speaking during his DICE keynote last night, Activision boss Bobby Kotick said that not buying Harmonix was a big mistake.

"When we were buying Guitar Hero and buying RedOctane, the makers of Guitar Hero, we knew about Harmonix," he said. "We had always known them as sort of a somewhat failed developer of music games.

"They always had really good ideas, but nothing that was really commercially viable until Guitar Hero and at first we thought, 'OK, it's a good piece of software, but if we gave it to Neversoft, they're going to knock the ball out of the park with this."

Neversoft did eventually develop the Guitar Hero series from Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock against the release of Rock Band in 2007. GH3 went on to become the first game ever to become a $1 billion selling game.

But despite that, Kotick reckons that if the company had bought the Boston-based developer, the landscape of Guitar Hero "would have been rewritten."

As it is, however, Harmonix working away on Green Day: Rock Band and another title which may, or may not be, Rock Band 3.

Meanwhile Activision's already announced it's bringing a new Guitar Hero out by the end of the calendar year.

Thanks, G4.