There was a beautiful moment in the late 2000s and early 2010s when so many video games came with a big plastic accessory that took up a lot of storage space.
There was the Tony Hawk Ride skateboard (the game was a flop, but the skateboard controller was fun), the Baby Sitting Mama baby (you inserted the Wii Remote up its bum and then cared for it like a baby), the Rez vibrator, and so many different plastic guns. But the pinnacle of the plastic peripheral genre was the guitar.
People will be arguing for generations about whether the Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar was better, but the feeling of booting up a game with friends at a party was unparalleled. That’s why it’s so exciting that plastic guitars are making a comeback and the latest guitar controller to hit the market is the CRKD x Gibson Les Paul.
CRKD x Gibson guitar – quick links
The return to rhythm gaming
The return of the guitar controller was inspired by the 2023 release of Fortnite Festival, a mode made by Harmonix, the studio behind Rock Band. It is essentially Rock Band, but with more online strangers and significantly more expensive downloadable content. However, the rhythm gaming community never went away, it just became less mainstream during the long gap between (good) rhythm games.
Matthew Fregnan (aka fregrb) is one of the best rhythm game players in the world, with plastic guitar prowess frequently putting him at the top of leaderboards. According to him, the community had previously been kept alive by modders and people putting their old guitars up on eBay.
‘When I got started with my content stuff I didn’t realise how many people were still into these games,’ he says. ‘The modding community has worked tirelessly to get controllers working. There are millions of these guitars around, and many are still good.’
As for why these games remained popular, Fregnan said the answer is simple: ‘It’s music. Everyone knows music. It’s a universal language.’
Reinventing the originals
What made the CRKD x Gibson Les Paul so anticipated wasn’t just that it’s a guitar controller (the PDP Riffmaster was released in 2024 and is excellent). It was also the people who made it.
Lee Guinchard is the CEO of Embracer Freemode, the parent company of CRKD. He was also the head of the studio at Red Octane, the developers behind Guitar Hero, and VP of Hardware at Activision, which owned Red Octane. He was instrumental in not just the design of the CRKD x Gibson Les Paul, but of the instruments it’s trying to emulate.
‘The Crkd guitar goes back a couple of years,’ Guinchard says. ‘We were thinking of how we could we relook at this genre, from a game and plastic guitar perspective. We started playing with it, but we kept getting distracted with other things.
‘Then we realised there was still quite a big active community around Clone Hero and those other games, and Fortnite Festival came along. We hadn’t quite worked out how to make a game, but then one of my engineers said “let’s just make a guitar, let’s just do one”. So we developed it in the evenings and on weekends in the background to start with.’
Improving the design
One of the bonuses of going back to make a new version of a product you once pioneered is that you can fix some of the problems you faced due to time or situational restraints. One of the things Guinchard wanted to fix was the fret switches, following the lead of modders, and switching from just silicone frets to mechanical keys, like keyboards.
A big thing was also being able to have better quality control, and also finding ways around old production problems that lead to strum bar failure. ‘Back in the Guitar Hero days we were making millions of guitars in any one year,’ Guinchard explains.
‘Trying to get that consistent is really tough, especially when you have people slamming the hell out of these strum bars. One of the first products we launched was called a Nitro Deck, which had Hall effect sticks which don’t really break down through mechanical wear because they’re magnetic. So we started to test out Hall effect strum bars so we wouldn’t have that problem.’
Fregnan says that they nailed it. ‘You can see all the lessons they’ve learnt. If you look at the black tribal guitar which has the classic clicky strum bar, it feels exactly the same as the old ones. It’s got the same sort of buttons, even down to the way the plastic feels. It really feels like the next generation version of the guitar. The only thing it’s missing is a remastered version of Guitar Hero 3.’
However, CRKD didn’t just go off Guitar Hero feedback but also spoke to the current rhythm gaming community about the features they were most looking for. Fregnan was a part of that process.
According to Fregnan, the most important feature is the neck. ‘It’s really cool that they’re interchangeable. It’s a callback to the old days of when you could pull the guitar apart and travel with it easily. But then that opens the door for new, interchangeable necks.’
At release, the CRKD x Gibson Les Paul’s one flaw was that it wasn’t plug and play with Fortnite Festival on the PlayStation PS5 like the PDP Riffmaster is. There was a multiplatform guitar for PC, Nintendo Switch, PS3 and PS5 with Key Jammer mode, and then an Xbox version, but no PS5 version.
According to Guinchard, this is due to licensing. ‘Because CRKD is relatively new, despite us all being around the industry for a long time, it’s a bit tougher. We already had an agreement in place with Xbox to do other stuff so it was easier, but Sony just takes a lot longer.’
However, despite no native PS5 support on that original model, there is a built-in workaround – you just have to trick the PS5 into thinking the guitar is a keyboard by putting it in Key Jammer mode, adjust the key bindings in Fortnite Festival settings, and then bingo. (This workaround was originally conceived by modders attempting to make old controllers work with PS5, and it mostly works extremely well, even if it is somewhat fiddly.)
However, for those wanting something more plug and play for PS5, this week CRKD is releasing a Gibson SG Black 20th Anniversary Edition Guitar Controller for PS5, which will address all the PS5 compatibility issues and be pretty.
Climbing back to expert level
Of course, if you still have old guitars in the cupboard that you’re fond of, like those wooden Logitech Xbox 360 guitars, the modding community likely has a solution. Fregnan spoke of cheap modding kits that could do the same job as the the Rock Band 4 Legacy Game Controller Adapter (which often sells for upwards of $1000). For those who want something that just works out of the box, though, the CRKD Gibson Les Paul makes the world of rhythm gaming on plastic guitars accessible again.
The only thing the CRKD x Gibson Les Paul can’t bring back is your increased free time and the quick reaction speeds of your youth.
If you want to get good these days, Fregnan kindly revealed the one simple trick. ‘When you’re starting out, you just have to keep at it. Your fingers will adjust and your muscle memory will get there. The main trick is to rest your index finger on the red button and move that over to the green, rather than resting on the green and then having to shift your pinky finger back and forth between blue and orange,’ he explains.
‘But if you just played a couple of hours every day for three to four months, you could easily get up to expert level.’
